Slopwatch: Sites Gone Rogue, Google Promoting Lies, and DDoS Attacks by Plagiarism Giants
They also exhaust our water and energy supplies
Today's Slopwatch starts with the Serial Slopper, who leveraged many articles about LibreOffice 25.8 to come up with this ridiculous clickbait, prefaced by slop graphics:
We recently wrote about LinuxBSDos.com becoming a spamfarm/slopfarm [1, 2] (the WWW has everything now: slop about spam, slop about slop, and spam about slop). Here it goes again:
For a number of months it was quiet and then, after writing some real articles, it started blasting out garbage. Spam and slop:
That domain/site effectively behaves like a scam site now.
Speaking of "Linux" sites becoming scam-like, this is the latest from linuxsecurity.com:
That last one perpetuates further some recent FUD, e.g. [1, 2]. The issue here is a hole in particular Apache-connected software already patched 2 years ago. It has nothing to do with Linux. ActiveMQ is not Linux and not a part of Linux.
LLMs are a FUD amplifier in this case. They're not intelligence or anything that possesses comprehension abilities. This is not AI. It fakes or emulates comprehension by parroting the words of other people, failing to engage in any actual understanding/comprehension. The "hey hi" (AI) hype kills people, but LLM addicts and pushers don't seem to care about the overall effect.
As of this evening, about 30% of the search results for "Linux" in Google News come from just one network of slopfarms, i.e. fake articles with fake images and anti-Linux bias/FUD. Here are half a dozen of them:
Notice they're almost identical. Why can't Google detect these as fake sites after more than 6 months of boosting them every day?
Same for these:
A twin of slopfarms get to badmouth "Linux" using automated/bot-produced text with help from Google News.
Also these two (same FUD as above, misleading by intention; there are more examples in yesterday's Slopwatch):
Google gives an incentives for these slopfarms to carry on.
RMS has long called LLMs "bullshit generators". But they're worse, they generate FUD and smears, not mere "BS".
Then there are aspects like these, as covered hours ago by The Register MS:
There is real damage done by the slop cargo cult.
Society needs to do whatever it can to curb this hype because it stands for nothing but negative things. Charlatans and frauds engage in a war against artistic industries, mislabeling plagiarism as "AI". █