Apple's LLM Slop Told Us Luigi Mangione Had Shot Himself, BetaNews Used LLMs to Talk About a Dead Linus Torvalds
LLMs are not harmless toys. They're so pointless and yet so potentially bad that we need to call out the losers and frauds who use them to make fake articles (example from this morning).
A month ago BetaNews published a fake 'article' about a dead Linus Torvalds. Due to it being crafted (by prompting) to be clickbait it became the most commented 'article' on in the site. Yes, a fake 'article' became a "hit". They can blame it on some bot.
Lovely, isn't it?
Linus Torvalds turns 55 in few days and, unlike RMS, he does not have cancer and is probably in relatively good health. Why talk about a person at age 54 as if he's gonna die soon? It's morbid. Spamnil did that to RMS about a decade ago.
Does this look like a person who will die soon?
No, he seems to have also shed off some spare weight in the past 1-2 years. So quit making it sound like he's at risk of dying and thereof we need to find a successor/heir to him.
Similarly, why does the media act all shocked that Apple used LLMs to make claims (based on BBC) that Luigi Mangione had killed himself? He killed a man with a family, a physically healthy man aged 50 (like the Saudi who hurt and killed about 200 people in Germany some days ago). Maybe Apple and BetaNews want to reverse the narrative a bit and say that those Germans "deserved it"? And facing legal action, they would just blame it on "the AI"?
Last night's long article by Dr. Andy Farnell explained why we're so much worse off with LLM slop.
LLMs or their outputs - especially on the Web (where they can be found and not properly labeled) - are a cancer. They're disease that must be identified and classified as such. The issue isn't "AI", the issue is fake or unverified text being spewed onto Web pages with hardly any accountability for it. When people intentionally do this action can be more easily taken against them, and sometimes that happens. █
Also see: BetaNews Has Become a SPAM/Slop Factory, Brian Fagioli Publishes Fake 'Articles' | It's Morbid to Talk About Living People as If They're Dead | BetaNews, Inc. Became a Spam Operation/Web Site, LLM Spew (Slop) for SEO Disguised as "Articles" | BetaNews is Beta-Testing the Site as LLM Slop With Microsoft Propaganda Thrown In | Even the Managing Editor of BetaNews is Doing Slop and Spam | At BetaNews, "Most Commented Story" Is Not a Story But LLM Slop! (Readers Talking to Bots) | BetaNews is Run and Written by Bots That Make Clickbait | BetaNews, Desperate for Clicks, is Pushing Donald Trump Spam Created by LLMs (Slop) | "Latest Technology News" in BetaNews is Press Release SPAM (or LLM Slop, Marketing, Fake 'Review')