Slopwatch: Fake Text and Images, Financial Bubbles, and Scams in "Intelligent" Clothing

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 31, 2025

Today's "Slopwatch" will be a bit longer and more detailed than usual. We'll explore several angles, taking note of the shift in media consensus. A lot of media is nowadays openly blasting the slop cargo cult, which misuses the term "AI" (like some other cults misuse the term "crypto" to sell a familiar old scam). Now that "daddy Google" is pushing slop instead of sending Web users to news sites a lot of the media is rightly upset, even if belatedly so. Why did it wait so long before complaining and even moaning about so-called "AI summaries" (slop, plagiarism, ripoffs)? Here's one prominent publisher with "OpenAI Can Stop Pretending" (new article about the the company that keeps pretending it has money rather than massive and fast-growing debt!)

Yesterday we published "The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse" and around the same time someone in Microsoft-centric thelayoff.com wrote:

It's not just Builder AI that was way overhyped. I believe the entire Gen Ai industry is. Not just Microsoft, even Open Ai, Anthropic and all of those other startups that appeared in this ecosystem.

A technology that offers only 90% reliability will never be used for serious business. It will take the industry around 5 to 10 years to figure out how to get to 99,999 reliability. For this to happen a new architecture is needed which isn't available as of today.

During my time at Microsoft I always found the company wide meetings about Gen AI cringe. Satya and Kev-o would ask various people about Gen AI and how they benefit from it. Nobody could give an example about actual practical use.

So this is from people who saw it from the inside, allegedly. It's "Gen AI cringe". Nadella is pushing a scam. He's a scammer. How will this end? There's only one way this can end; the only question is, when?

Looking at Linux news today and last night, we found this fake 'article':

LLM slop from a Serial Slopper (SS), just like Brian Fagioli:

Fake 'article':

Notice the slop image, as usual from him. Looks like Linux Journal has begun using slop images and so has webpronews.com [1, 2, 3]. When people stumble upon slop images they should immediately suspect that the text too is LLM slop. Those two things typically go hand in hand.

Yesterday we also published "Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism". Well, the principal culprit has just done this again:

This is in Planet Ubuntu right now. This is at least the third time in this past week; for sure the above and maybe this one as well (fourth in a week, about 30% of Planet Ubuntu!), so Canonical has something to be worried about. If half or even a third of Planet Ubuntu is just LLM slop, people will lose interest in following Planet Ubuntu.

LLM dilutes sites. It ruins them. It's just an "Ouroboros of Shit" [1, 2]

Finally, for now at least, take a look at what Cory Dransfeldt published: "The 'agentic' web is nothing more than a moat"

To quote:

Copilot in Edge. Gemini in Chrome. AI chatbots in Firefox. Opera becomes an 'AI agentic browser'. The Browser Company announces Dia and declares that 'traditional browsers' will die. Perplexity is building an 'agentic' search browser.

These will — supposedly — make search better, information easier to retrieve, write code while you sleep and on and on. Nevermind that Google search has become unusable precisely because they made changes to squeeze more ad revenue from it and then stapled utterly unusable AI responses to the top. Maybe they'll be a friend, a companion, they'll get rid of your gambling debts, help you quit smoking, it'll disinfect, sanitize and run your business for you. They'll claim it'll do anything provided it gets them more funding.

Why should we switch browsers? Why should we develop anything that caters to these new browsers? Pushing people to develop sites and services for an 'agentic' web being foisted on us by the same people that pillaged the web we have is a special kind of cynical.

Yes, Cory Doctorow (a different Cory) already said it was all BS back in 2023. We've been saying this before the chatbot frenzy ("ChatGPT") because this whole "AI" hype goes several years back, with Microsoft buying mainstream media ad space/segments selling itself as "AI" (without even specifying what that meant). It started around 2020.

Sooner or later one can expect almost every "AI" company to turn out to be a fraud. Sometimes what they mean by "AI" is just cheap labour somewhere else, as we discussed in IRC a few hours ago. Sometimes what they mean by "AI" is just someone else's labour, taken and presented to people without any attribution or identifying markers. There are currently many lawsuits about that. █