Vatican Speaks Out Against Slop, Promoting Instead "Truth, Dignity of Work, Social Justice, and Peace."
Today was a relatively slow news day, so not many slopfarms were active, not even the ones with "linux" in their domain names. Some seem to have thrown in the towel after months of "experimenting". In Google News, slopfarms have become rarer, with few exceptions like these two over the weekend:
They're both fake. Google needs to delist, not derank them. They're plagiarism by slop.
Apropos slop, the Vatican has come out with some statement, as people anticipated (it had talked about this being imminent for quite some time). To quote the opening:
Marking the 135th anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIV releases his first encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ He appeals for the safeguarding of humanity, promotion of truth, dignity of work, social justice, and peace.
"This fits in with what Cory Doctorow is writing about "reverse centaurs"," we got told, and "Cory's paperclip quip refers to this" [1, 2] (a decade old).
"He's got a book coming up soon on the topic, "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI" [and] I hope he is able to squeeze in some aspect of the encyclical either directly or by addressing some of the issues it raises well enough to see the parallels."
Religion (no matter which) does not oppose machines, but LLMs aren't useful machines, they barely mimic intelligence either, they're just plagiarism programs that take a lot of energy to do a lot of plagiarism. We need more people out there to understand that and speak about it sensibly. Don't get conned by the hype - it's corporate marketing. █