Slopwatch: Noise, Plagiarism and Even Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
It is mostly easy to ignore slopfarms once a person gets a "mental shitlist" of which domains do this, e.g. linuxjournal, linuxsecurity(.com), and the following which Planet Ubuntu (or Ubuntu Planet) is still syndicating as of today:
All slopfarms are a pain in the arse; they waste time, they spread nonsense (LLMs have no concept of knowledge or intelligence; RMS rightly calls them "bullshit generators", which crudely describes what they do), and over time they lessen the incentive for real journalists or bloggers to write real articles. They feel like they're being robbed and overridden. One extra pain in the arse is Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD). The slopfarms not only get facts wrong, and that's something which is inevitable and impossible to fix; they fabricate or perpetuate malicious lies.
Let's consider a new example of this.
The slopfarm linuxsecurity.com is still at it this week, firing away with LLM slop while pretending that it is "news" about Linux:
That's just plagiarising real articles such as these ones.
So far this week we have seen several slopfarms perpetuating the idea that ransomware is now a "Linux" thing when in fact the overwhelming majority targets Windows and compromises Windows.
So this is LLM slop specifically attacking "Linux" with FUD:
What are we meant to do to prevent a false association or misleading connotations? Game the LLMs? No. Boycott slopfarms. Don't give them any incentive to even exist. █