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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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Nate Silver just accidentally posted a link to an AI slop article. A quick delve into the article text makes it obvious that the contents were blatantly copypastaed directly from the output of ChatGPT. Various GPT detectors also agree, giving it a solid 100% confidence of being slop. Unfortunately, it seems that nobody in the replies even seems to have noticed or cared.

I'm of course already used to my google searches being clogged up by black hat SEO slop, but I expected it to just live in the shadows quietly collecting clicks and boosting pagerank. So it was sobering to see an aislop article just get posted like that by someone I regard as at least somewhat intelligent.

What does this say about the world? Are normies, even somewhat intelligent ones, incapable of distinguishing the most obvious stinky smelly chatgpt output? Or did hundreds of people read the headline and drop a snarky comment, and not a single one bothered to read the article? It's either a depressing anecdote about human nature and social media, or a depressing anecdote about the lack of intelligence of the average human.

Of course aislop grifters should be fedposted just like indian call center scammers, but sometimes I can't help but feel like the victims deserved it. But when they bother me waste 5 seconds of my time again, I am right back in fedposting mode.

Edit:

Since you idiots are out here defending the slop, these quotes are hallucinations:

“I get it,” Walz told the audience. “A lot of folks aren’t watching MSNBC. They’re watching ESPN or TikTok or just trying to make ends meet.”

“We need to reclaim who we are as a party of opportunity, of dignity, of everyday Americans,” Walz said. “If we leave that vacuum, someone like Donald Trump will fill it again.”

Here's the full recording of his talk and you can check the Youtube transcription: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MPt8V3MW1c4 And before you ask, the fake article specifically claims these fake quotes were said at his Harvard talk, not at some other time.

So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.

So again the AI put totally false words into somebody's mouth and you apologists are defending it.

It’s not our fault that AI generated slop-Walz is just as serviceably mediocre as the real thing.

This made me laugh.