Slopwatch: Slopfarms and Serial Sloppers Still at It
Not a day or no week would be complete without a mention of or a small sample of slop du jour from Sloppy Brian, Day, Google News, and all the rest. Last week we said we were gratified to see some Serial Sloppers no longer slopping and we said we didn't want to mention them by name until later, assuming that a full "slop rehab" may take at least a month to confirm. Key points explained in the past: 1) when people start slopping other people won't believe them anymore. 2) it's "addictive", so the longer one goes on polluting one's "portfolio" with fake 'articles', the harder rehabilitation can be (a bit like "once a cheater, always a cheater"). 3) LLM slop lessens the incentive for honest writers to carry on writing. This means that even if we adapt and somehow ignore all the LLM slop online, the level or volume of real journalism left "out there" will gradually diminish.
Today we'll give just 3 new examples of slop about "Linux".
Here's LLM slop distracting from the fact that Microsoft got cracked many times there:
This too is from a slopfarm, one that's promoted by Google News despite it being 100% slop images and LLM slop: (it is basically a bot-generated site meant to look like a news site)
Like 4 pieces so far have been capture by us making LLM slop about this news:
And no, it's fake as usual. Slopfarms and Serial Sloppers aren't the same thing but overlapping phenomena. Slopfarms would be literally just bots, some of them being "clever" enough to con Google News into listing them. Apparently Google is too understaffed to figure that out. Its money goes towards harassment of critics. █