Techrights Investigation: Estimating the Point in Time LinuxIac Turned Into LLM Slop (Part of the Time)
Bobby Borisov got lazy
LinuxIac as a Web site was quite active this year, but who or what 'wrote' the articles?
This is a perfectly fair question to ask.
I decided to set aside an hour and research this matter. I didn't take screenshots, but I did check many pages and assessed them manually, too.
When it comes to LLM slop, we already see/saw a mix (hybrid) at the start of the year [1, 2], whereas a year earlier it looked legitimate and involved hands-on work (with screenshots taken by the site itself), e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. That suggests that slopping is a new development at the site or it vastly increased lately.
More recently, some classic examples of low-quality slop (e.g. [1, 2]) aroused our suspicion [1, 2] and upon closer scrutiny it certainly seems like things got a lot worse in recent months.
It's hard to say what % of the articles are fake, as opposed to what % of a given article (or an average) is slop. Either way, any slop is too much slop and it has gotten to the point of being unbearable.
No doubt Bobby Borisov is a technical person and no doubt he can write articles! But the fact that he seeks or leverages "shortcuts" by cheating with stochastic parrots is a sign of defeat, even dishonesty. Some honest writers in the sphere of GNU/Linux have long complained that he copied their topics; maybe it was more than just topics that he copied; maybe he used plagiarism bots to rewrite their original work. █