Where Slop Meets Ghostwriting: It's a False Analogy
Hours-old examples of IBM "ghostwriting"/churn: (words recycled, same misleading talking points or face-saving lies)
In our latest Daily Links an associate of Techrights added Chuck Grimmett's "On using AI in blogging".
"There is an awful lot of handwringing about AI-generated writing," Grimmett wrote, "but ghostwriting is not controversial in the same way, and the end result is the same: someone else wrote it."
"Someone else wrote" is not the same as "bot spewed this out" (moreover, a bot of sleazy companies).
"AI might be an extension of that," Grimmett argued. "I don’t see AI composition as fundamentally different from ghostwriting."
I disagree with Grimmett. It's a false or deeply flawed analogy. Slop (or text from chatbots in the context of text) isn't the same as an unnamed author. Sometimes we publish articles here anonymously attributed to unnamed authors. That's not slop. The words spoken are of a real person with real thoughts, potentially seeking discreet platforms for avoidance of retaliation.
But when people use the term "ghostwriting" they often mean marketing spam, wherein sites republish a bunch of garbage for rich companies (sometimes in exchange for payment, sometimes due to utter laziness).
I don't have contacts/links with Grimmett, but I wanted to illuminate this point.
Slop is a real problem, for instance this very prolific slopfarm in Google News, which has just plagiarised another article to come up with a fake copycat:
And another slopfarm promoted by Google News some hours ago:
This one sometimes admits that it just throws a bunch of articles of other people into a plagiarism blender to come up with something that only seems new and unique. In this case, the site seems to be Brazilian (Portuguese language), so they might use language barrier as a reason/excuse for the slop.
Either way, slop is a very inherently different problem; it's not the same as spam, even though slop (LLMs) can produce spam and sometimes SEO-enhanced spam to trick search engines into bringing a real audience to slop. █