LLM Slop Attacks Not Only Sites of Free Software Projects But Also Bug Reporting Systems (Time-wasting, in Effect "DDoS")

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 08, 2025

The Register's Connor Jones has just reported on what some blogs (including the original post from Daniel Stenberg) said. To quote the article "Curl takes action against time-wasting AI bug reports":

Curl project founder Daniel Stenberg is fed up with of the deluge of AI-generated "slop" bug reports and recently introduced a checkbox to screen low-effort submissions that are draining maintainers' time.

Stenberg said the amount of time it takes project maintainers to triage each AI-assisted vulnerability report made via HackerOne, only for them to be deemed invalid, is tantamount to a DDoS attack on the project.

Citing a specific recent report that "pushed [him] over the limit," Stenberg said via LinkedIn: "That's it. I've had it. I'm putting my foot down on this craziness."

From now on, every HackerOne report claiming to have found a bug in curl, a command-line tool and library for transferring data with URLs, must disclose whether AI was used to generate the submission.

Some projects also complained about slop being submitted as code, wasting the time of contributors, who are often volunteers. They therefore decided to ban any slop. But good luck identifying/detecting it without false positives (i.e. without insulting people who actually did write code).

Criminals from Microsoft love to market slop as "efficiency" and the serial strangler from Microsoft helped attack the GPL with slop.

What Daniel Stenberg says is yet another example of slop working against real efficiency. It can paralyse otherwise-productive projects.

Time for Daniel Stenberg to rethink his relationship [1, 2, 3] with efficiency-destroying Microsoft and GitHub, the slop machine. He needs to shun those who enable the problems he's encountering.

In addition, news about Free software is under attack by slop. Not only do Microsoft-controlled LLMs spew out FUD against Linux, they also produce a lot of chaff, like this from "LinuxSecurity (a malicious slopfarm):

Pure slop:

Also this:

Pure slop:

Due to SEO manipulations this lessens the incentives for real people and real writers to write about Free software.

Microsoft, the leading purveyor and promoter of slop, is a cancer. █