Slopwatch: On "the Apology Industry", Chatbots (Punchbag for Customers), and Fake Articles About "Linux"
Some hours ago Andy published a good article, an article well worth reading, about "the apology industry" and how companies try to 'offload' betrayed/disappointed/abused customers onto bots (chatbots), not only because it's seen as "cheaper" (losing clients is not cheap) but it also leads to helplessness, frustration, fatigue etc. Which is apparently what some businesses want.
Quoting Andy:
Apologising now accounts for the majority of all human labour. And if that's not true - because I simply just made it up - then I'm really sorry. And that makes it okay. Right?
Whatever sector of the remains of Western industry you work in, chances are you spend a lot of your day saying sorry.
You're sorry that you failed to deliver the goods and services you're responsible for. Whether that's the cancellation of software, trains, buses, appointments, medical procedures, meals, education, parcel deliveries… In Britain I feel we are all now caught-up in a perpetual "culture of disappointment". Since the pandemic we have normalised failure.
Now, there's some very obvious bias here. Competence is invisible whereas failure stands out. We forget that over ninety percent of things work well, and go smoothly, because ten percent failure overshadows that. Ten percent is actually an intolerable threshold for failure in many areas of modernity. Imagine if on one in ten trips your car broke down, if one in every ten surgical procedures resulted in death, or if one in every ten court cases produced a miscarriage of justice.
Slopwatch typically deals with "Linux" getting clobbered by chatbots, or the pool of news about Linux being depleted by chatbots. Here's what Andy wrote:
Where does that leave us in IT and computing? According to Axios the apology backlash has already started. "People are simply tired" of "rapid pace of the news cycle".It struck me in late 2019 before the pandemic started and news reporting priorities changed, that cybersecurity news went quiet. Regular data breaches had reached a daily level. It was no longer news. The main outlets stopped reporting. From an uninformed standpoint it looked like cybercrime rapidly fell. I think what was happening was actually fatigue and the first signs of an overdue adjustment.
Andy focused on security but also mentioned Linux. He said: "Most licences for Linux and BSD comprehensively disclaim any liability and license software "as is", without warranty of any kind, explicit or implied… or similar wording."
It's a good article but a long one (so get a cuppa before reading it; maybe order one with the cube).
What he said about how "news reporting priorities changed" rings a bell; "The main outlets stopped reporting," he said.
Watch this slopfarm boosted by Google News today:
If you search Google News for "Linux" today, this is what you will get. A lot of their 'articles' are just Phoronix articles rewritten by LLMs, then complemented with slop images and a token fake author name.
Another slopfarm boosted by Google News today:
It's 100% fake. Apparently the Web is becoming a pile of junk. Even the Scam Altman false prophet (sued for incest and paedophilia, apparently, by his own sister) recognises that chatbots like ChatGPT do a lot of harm to the Web. To quote: "it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now."
Zuckerberg and MElon openly encourage this now. They don't even hide this desire.
Spam is becoming 'normalised'; they just call the spam "intelligence" or "superintelligence". █