Slop and Flop (IBM), Slopfarms and Hybrids (Linuxiac)
Slopfarms are sites/blogs - or sometimes whole domains - that are 100% LLM output. We coined this term about 2 years ago and many terms that we coined in the past caught on and spread, including "openwashing", "social control media", and "GAFAM".
Here's a great example of slopfarms:
They use slop images, slop text, and in more recent years (2025 onwards) even some author names were pseudonyms.
Here's a slopfarm - a former news site (yes, it used to be a real, legitimate site) - that has infested Google News for about a year already. It was in the indices before it became a slopfarm; then it changed and became just a firehose of slop:
Those are just some of the latest ones. They're not good; they get many basic facts wrong.
As we noted last year and again this year, Linuxiac also experiments with becoming a full-time slopfarm. Some articles are still real, some are 100% fake/plagiarism, and this very latest one in slopfarm is seemingly a mix:
What compels a formerly OK site to dabble in slop?
Did Bobby Borisov assume he would never get caught?
We'll continue to monitor this.
Meanwhile, in relation to IBM, someone has just posted a good comment in relation to a likely paid puff piece about slop:
The proof is in the pudding. The claim is that they have an order book chock full of AI consulting business. That may be true but there are already a lot of consulting choices available and more are emerging all the time. There is nothing about massive success stories related to watsonx or WCA. Those successes would possibly foretell actual future growth.The author(s) should be required to use IBM internal AI AskHR, AskIT for a week (or even a day) before declaring that IBM is an AI darling. Actual IBM AI today is similar to when IBM was flogging Notes and Freelance when the rest of the world decided that they were garbage.
IBM is not an AI darling; it's an AI poseur.
IBM tried - and failed - with slop. Companies don't profit from slop; watch what happened to Google and others.
They can take the "masses" (horses) to water by drowning GMail or Windows or whatever with slop, but they cannot make them drink. █