Slop (So-called 'genAI') is Not a Skill, Slop Gets You Suspended or Even Sacked, It Can Eventually End Your Career
half an hour ago: There is No Such Thing as "AI Skills", "AI Competency", "AI Fluency" Etc.
Benj Edwards, a so-called 'Senior' so-called 'AI' so-called 'Reporter' at Conde Nast's Ars Sloppica, used to publish, on average, almost once a day except on weekends.
Then this scandal happened:
- Just Like The Register MS, Conde Nast's Ars Technica Has Just Publicly Admitted That It Published Fake Articles (Slop) Made by LLMs About Serious Subjects
- Benj Edwards (Ars Technica) Used Fake Articles to Promote Ponzi Scheme for Conde Nast and Its Client (Marketing)
- "Senior AI Reporter" at Slop Technica/Ars Sloppica Has Written Nothing in Nearly a Week, Did Conde Nast Suspend Him for Fake Articles With Fake Quotes?
From what we can see he has published nothing for 11 days now.
Was he suspended?
Did he get sacked to save face (the publisher's)?
Did he resign to spare himself any further embarrassment? He seems to have been a serial slopper or repeat slopper/offender, as we showed last week.
Just how many past articles are fakes? Does anyone there bother checking? Is the publisher too afraid to even check?
There is a neat analogy somewhere in all this. Think of some fine dining restaurant with a talented chef that over the many years/decades earns the place a great reputation and then, as demand grows (expansion/s), sees an opportunity to grow profit not by persisting with meticulous attention to details (or bringing more reputable chefs) but instead a mindset of mass production. The restaurant recruits unpaid or barely-skilled interns/students to do the chef's job and sooner or later the diners can see and taste the difference. Think of "SPAM" (the food) or slop. Worse yet, imagine them buying canned food from Aldi and warming it up, pretending it was prepared inside the kitchen. Sooner or later people will realise they got conned are still pay (or have long paid) considerable amounts of money for hyper-processed garbage with preservatives that cost not much in a nearby shop.
The disappointment and revelation would then doomed any former (past) goodwill earned by that restaurant.
That's what happens to Slop Technica or Ars Sloppica as Alex Oliva told me we should call it.
This is not unprecedented over there at Ars Sloppica. Not too long ago they paid salaries to a man who was shadowing Microsoft with fake articles that had been prepared by or with Microsoft. Later it turned out he was raping children and he was sentenced to prison. After that, despite what happened, Ars Sloppica kept all his planted-by-Microsoft 'articles' online (the Microsoft UEFI apologists still link to those articles, which are misleading SPAM from an actual pedophile). That said a lot about the journalistic standards of Ars Sloppica. █