File this under “Who could have foreseen this coming?” But fake story gaming blog zleague.gg got real last week after its virtual reality content farming bot was vandalized by an intrepid World of Warcraft player. No, I did not use ChatGPT or Bing Chat to write this article. Unlike zleague's “Lucy Reed”, sadly I have to work for a living.
Lately, members of the /r/wow World of Warcraft subreddit have noticed that certain websites (and perhaps others) have been producing questionable robot articles that increasingly appear to be based on Reddit posts. I noticed that. This is from zleague.gg titled “Should all WoW characters be created on the same realm? Player reactions”. are essentially articles created from reddit thread comments and content, garbled into SEO traps and promoted by Google and other search engines. Interestingly, WoW users decided to do a little vandalism.
It started with this post by /u/mataric. He says he's not against AI technology, but he is against people scraping other people's work and passing it off as their own. Perhaps it would be different if zleague.gg actually acknowledged the fact that they were actively stealing content from reddit in their articles instead of trying to hide the content with fake author signatures. It will be. Either way, the stage was set for cyberpunk-style trolls to confirm the growing pains of AI-driven content.
Matalik noted that if this is true, subreddits could experiment with pushing bot content to their homepages. As expected, that turned out to be true.
lol Someone on reddit posted about a made-up feature introduced in WoW, so a news site using an AI-powered scraping bot published an article about it and it worked pic.twitter.com/JwiovKt1FjJuly 20, 2023
WoW users started building shitty posts to see if zleague was stupid enough to run a story. An article was published dedicated to how excited players were that “Glorbo” was finally coming to the game, and it turned out to be true, and stupid enough. Unfortunately, there are no plans for Glorbo to appear in World of Warcraft at this time, but I personally petition the development team to make it happen.
ZLeague was also stupid enough to reprint an article from a thread asking people to reprint articles from a thread. Isn't it a bit meta?
I'm so happy to finally be able to talk about Glorbo. I remember my first day working on the implementation at Blizzard. That was almost 15 years ago! Great report for tracking this 👍 pic.twitter.com/Wh1hm0gikMJuly 20, 2023
World of Warcraft websites (created by humans), content creators, and even Blizzard developers got in on the Glorbo fun, but unfortunately Zleague.gg ultimately decided it wasn't all that fun. It was. The site removed all mention of AI-driven content related to World of Warcraft and went so far as to remove the entire World of Warcraft section from its website.
Zleague has deleted all WOW posts and removed WOW from the site menu on r/wow
A quick look at Zleague's “The Portal” website reveals that, as you might expect, almost all of the content has been collected from reddit. From Halo to Diablo to Valorant and beyond.
Wouldn't it be a shame if other subreddits started realizing that their content was being stolen as part of shallow algorithmic harvesting efforts?
Analysis: AI content will get dumber before it gets smarter
Recently, researchers discovered that ChatGPT, and by extension Bing Chat, have recently become stupid. It's not clear why, but websites like Twitter and Reddit make it difficult for these platforms to collect the data, the human data that, ironically, these services rely on. This may be the cause.
With websites and services like zleague.gg trying to make a quick buck by removing humans from the content creation equation, this way content can be created coldly without any effort or human intervention. We're going to see some weird feedback loops where users refuse to be repackaged. input. The result is hilarious and self-explanatory, but it will only get worse as AI content algorithmically spits out its own fake news, much like a fried JPEG that has undergone multiple digital degradations as a result of a microscopic copy-and-paste step. .
Additionally, AI will become even dumber as content farms like zleague look to force human writers out of their jobs. In the early days of Bing Chat, we noticed that Bing was effectively copying and pasting the guide content we wrote on incredibly niche topics without offering any compensation. How can AI learn if the quality of the content deteriorates? Will it lead to a centralization of information that is censored as companies see fit, or will the quality deteriorate exponentially until it collapses on its own? Either it leads to a step-by-step loop that degrades functionally. ChatGPT already costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per day Run. Perhaps, as predicted, if generative AI masochistically reduces its usefulness, the economics will simply no longer add up. But hey, what do I know? Ask ChatGPT instead.
