Thieves Complain About the People They Steal From
"When you point the finger at someone, there are three fingers pointing back to you"
This week Tux Machines was hammered by parasitic slop (LLM) bots, resulting in over a million requests per day. This is not valuable traffic, it's a darn nuisance to everybody. It kills the planet (energy wasted, not just human labour).
Tux Machines boycotts slop. It causes nothing but trouble, it's just low-grade plagiarism and a pyramid scheme, too.
The other day we linked to a post which contained what it called "Google AI" (basically plagiarism with mistakes added in).
The (semi) author responded in LXer as follows:
This is classic blame-shifting. If you use slop, and then people call you out on it, don't moan about the people who call you out on it. Accept that LLMs are seen unfavourably for very good reasons. Quit using them. This is why we boycott Bobby Borisov for nearly a year already. There are some other authors we avoid as they became serial sloppers.
The above is a phenomenon as old and same as ever: society needs to be criticised by some people, especially companies and rogue actors (e.g. Google's plagiarism services and people who use these). But they won't like it, they will find that 'upsetting'. They will attack the messenger.
The role of the state is to protect the messenger. Instead, people who work for slop giants (they now hide the commercial affiliation) engage in lawfare against us. █
Image source: Re digitized vintage public domain illustration of a black and white human pointing finger.