Linux Journal is a Slopfarm, It's Experimenting With LLM 'Authors'
Is Slashdot next? Slopfarms like Brian Fagioli's were often fed by Slashdot.
This is what they have to offer these days:
"George Whittaker is the editor of Linux Journal, and also a regular contributor," says his profile. Does he contribute much except bits and pieces of LLM slop and slop images though? We wrote about this recently [1, 2] and gave concrete examples.
Consider the latest article by Whittaker. It contains very familiar LLM "footprints", e.g.
When you encounter this kind of structure and formatting you can even guess which LLM generated it.
Whittaker likely edited the output a bit (and had prompted for it), but slop is still slop and if the starting point is a bunch of mindless slop, then no amount of editing can ameliorate the dangers.
Looking at the front page right now, all the latest "articles" are by Whittaker and all are slop images contained as feature images as well:
Until not too long ago they had some decent HowTos. Now they "experiment" with something else.
This is doomed to fail. Since the company behind the current Slashdot controls it this also bodes poorly for Slashdot, which does reputation laundering for Bill Epsteingate. █