The Register MS is Apparently Trying to Cover Up Spam and LLM Slopping Activities (Staff Using LLMs to Make Articles)
First, in a nutshell below.
Months ago:
What happened? Let's examine that sole article:
As we pointed out before, it's not only sponsored spam, it's very clearly made by LLMs (to some extent):
The structure and the buzzwords are almost a "dead giveaway".
Not in Google:
Not indexed, just mentioned by accounts of this former eWEEK writer:
Look at page source:
Remember it used to appear under his profile, which is now empty. Look under the carpet?
Does the Americans-led publisher The Register MS (formerly The Register UK) have another secret? Is it trying to cover up a blunder?
Has it attempted to hide its (mis)use of LLM slop?
If so, let's consider what we observe in terms that everyone can understand, not just techies or Web geeks.
Some months ago we saw LLM slop in The Register UK.
We called them out on it.
Some months have passed.
Now, as in today, I was unable to find the examples in question. I did, however, vaguely remember one author's name (Preimesberger). Preimesberger has long been publishing on the Web, several decades in fact.
For some odd reason I could not find an author page for him in The Register MS.
I had to turn to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, wherein I found The Register MS page of Preimesberger with the "offending" so-called 'article'.
For some reason that 'article' too was nearly impossible to find.
Upon closer inspection, they used a directive to tell search engines and indexers to "skip" it.
Why would a publisher want invisible pages?
Does this publisher treat all "sponsored" (spam) pages like this?
No, definitely not.
Take for instance its latest "Sponsored Post":
Page source does not demand omission from search engines and the likes of them.
The above does affirm the strong suspicion that somebody got caught using LLMs (to compose spam and add that spam to the front page of The Register MS).
Or they knew about it all along (even the management) and felt shame that they got caught.
How embarrassing if true (they'll probably never admit this).
Instead of being upfront about it (like Business Insider was some months ago; it admitted catching cheaters as authors) it seems like The Register MS tried to brush/sweep this one under some rug. █