Linux Journal Might Have Become the Latest Slopfarm Targeting "Linux", the Trends Are Concerning for Dying News Sites
We are sad to say that in some sense it looks like sites don't just go offline but go rogue, then go offline (without dignity).
They tarnish the Web with junk and then die.
Junk? Yes, junk! Misinformation perpetuated ad nauseam, almost ad infinitum (waste of energy, but they don't seem to mind profitability yet). Eventually it drowns out accurate information and simple facts.
Regarding the common observation that "[so-called] "AI" [is] running out of training data", one reader told us (citing The Register's "AI model collapse is not what we paid for"): "Sorry if you have already discussed this article. I encounter this line of criticism quite often these days. I have observed silly text on Google myself. I presume AI generated it."
Well, Techrights, I told him, "had 2-3 articles about it this morning. :)" (this one for instance)
They included a link to April's message to libreplanet-discuss. To quote: "Can AI distinguish between "free" as in "free drinks" and "free" as in "freedom"? We should watch out for this. The above makes me think that we should not expect much. Even if we observe AI getting the distinction right in a number of cases we should not expect it to be always correct. For one thing many people are confused and much has been written based on the mistake. it is unreasonable to expect that none of the erroneous material has been fed to the large language model (LLM) neural networks for training. In addition the above example indicates that AI is not good at coping with lack of integrity. Perhaps a contradiction which is obvious to a human being is not so for AI."
Linux Journal, we're sad to see and to say, is already using slop images and their 'latest article' is deemed by a reputable scanner to be another slop piece: "74% AI generated, 1% mixed, and 25% human" (not the first time).
If this is where Linux Journal is headed, then it'll only do harm. █