Slopwatch: Serial Sloppers and Slopfarms in Google News (e.g. Linux Journal and WebProNews)
THERE are some new articles about a new version of Thunderbird, but to some Serial Sloppers those articles are merely a "training set" or a soup of words to tokenise, then plagiarise:
Terrible slopfarm. Many of the fake articles there are about slop. Circular boosting of a scam, using the scam.
There are other slopfarms like these (latest in linuxsecurity.com):
Linux Journal became a slopfarm while older (original, real, authentic) articles got purged at some point, according to former insiders. This may seem like an article about GNOME (BSD and GNU/Linux, among other UNIX-like operating systems), but it's not hard to see it's just some output of a chatbot:
Meanwhile in the WebProNews slopfarm:
Lots of Phoronix ripoffs by bots:
Another slopfarm promoted by Google News today:
And Google News is of course still promoting a triplet of slopfarms (operated by the same people) that relay this FUD using LLMs with slop images on top:
Due to Google News promoting these, other (real) news sites later link to the above slop as real sources. Google legitimises con artists.
A patch for the above-mentioned hole has been available for nearly 2 years already. Also from the same network of fake 'articles', as of hours ago:
In our last "Slopwatch" we showed the two sister slopfarms having a go at the same theme. Then there's this:
Google News is actively promoting and giving visibility to these fake articles, which are attributed to fake people, laden with slop images, and composed of/by LLM slop. This means that Google plays an active role (if not deliberately then through utter neglect and carelessness) in plagiarism. An argument can be made that unless Google demonstrates a genuine effort (with positive effect) to crack down on this abuse, then Google can be held legally accountable. Google is gaining financially by: 1) helping plagiarists (with "Gemini" - formerly "Bard" - slop); 2) listing and relaying/directing people to slopfarms, which are parasitic and legally problematic. If some ordinary, helpless person did this, he would be "Aaron Swartzed"; but GAFAM? No, GAFAM is exceptional. █