Slopwatch: Small Parade of Fake News About "Linux" and Scams Borrowing the Name (or Word) "Linux"
The Web is not in a good state/shape. Paradise it never was, but it got worse when various people used automated translation tools to make new and seemingly original pages, in effect pretending that translating someone else's work makes it fair use. At least: 1) that could add some value; 2) it was based on factual texts.
A similar modus operandi was adopted with LLMs, except LLMs did not translate whole texts, they just mixed and matched words based on chains and statistics thereof. It was never going to work too well, but companies of frauds and charlatans paid the media to pretend LLMs was some amazing innovation. As we noted yesterday, in passing, MIT Technology Review and The Register MS participate and profit from participating in this; consider new bribed-for (and fake) coverage for "AI", "In association withEY". There's a whole industry based around hyping up "AI", inflating perceived values of companies based on complete lies, false/misleading marketing at best.
In practice, LLMs are a risk. As one article has just put it: "People in the public relations industry told Press Gazette that many clients now turn to ChatGPT to write commentary and preventing this, and advising clients against doing so, has become a part of their job."
Once caught, nobody will trust you again.
Consider the slopfarm linuxsecurity.com:
Everything there is LLM slop, sometimes with slop images thrown in along the way. The site is basically fake and more people are realising it. Here's another slopfarm, this one promoted by Google News today:
They generate Linux-hostile pages using bots.
Another very large slopfarm is promoting a scam [1, 2] which piggybacks the terms "Linux" and "Pi":
So this scam or fake currency already lost almost 90% in value. Is that good association for the brand "Linux"?
Thankfully there are still slop-critical sites out there. Some are particularly angry about what's happening. █