‘World Of Warcraft’ Players Trick AI-Scraping Games Website Into Publishing Nonsense

trashhalo@beehaw.org to Technology@beehaw.org – 266 points –
‘World Of Warcraft’ Players Trick AI-Scraping Games Website Into Publishing Nonsense
forbes.com

A website called zleague.gg has been scraping Reddit threads, feeding them into an AI and publishing auto-generated summaries without proper oversight. World of Warcraft players on Reddit noticed this and created a fake thread about a made-up feature called Glorbo to trick the AI. The AI then published an article summarizing the fake Glorbo thread, showing that it was easily fooled. This highlights issues with AI-generated content crowding out human writers and the need for Google to better regulate such sites to ensure quality. The Glorbo prank provides an amusing example of how gaming communities can push back against AI overreach.

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This highlights issues with A-I generated content crowding out human writers and the need for Google to better regulate such sites to ensure quality.”

Can agree with the first part of that statement, but Google regulating…feels like handing a fox the keys to the hen house.

Regulation of industry should be coming from our legislators, but they’re too busy polarizing their base, abasing themselves to donors and gilding their own cages to care.

Apologies for the rant, but this whole “AI” imbroglio is a textbook case of the cart put before the horse whilst heading downhill.

Yes, exactly. Google is causing this problem by making a way for this crap to be monetized, and driving the human eyeballs to it. The solution is not to further enable Google as a gatekeeper to information, but to simply replace them.

Regulation should come from the industry not the legislators. Legislators don't know enough about it anyway and will end up just getting the biggest players to write it anyway.

But if the industry does it, certification would be voluntary and it would be transparent who wrote the regulation. Much easier for smaller players to contribute and shape it.

And the best part is that if it sucks, they don't have to participate. And then they can try again

In a perfect world maybe it would work that way, but I’ve seen too much enshittifaction via vertical integration or ego driven CEObros to have anything but skepticism for industry regulation, self-regulation in particular.

And we've seen too much industry manipulation in government too.

But the big companies turning their platforms into absolute crap isn't actually a problem for the industry. Other players will rise up (such as lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and other non activity pub sites) and make good platforms.

Yes, any capitalist system that relies on "self regulation", basically the honour system, is a fantasy at this point.

Much of the issues seen out of the US are because their approach to legislation is industry-led. You really do not want lobbyists and special interests writing legislation. You also don't want politicians drafting it either. In other countries, you have a strong non-partisan civil service that can carry out consultations and work out the nuts and bolts. Elected politicians should be kept to the making the higher level decisions on what to look at and in what general direction to move in.

Realistically, the industry here would be Google, Microsoft and Facebook. <s> All of whom I'd definitely trust with this </s>

The legislators themselves should be getting educated instead so they can actually make good decisions.

But that's not what happens.

Greatest recent example is Elizabeth Warren. She supposedly wasn't going to bow down to the big banks and wrote legislation to "help" the consumer. All she did was end up writing legislation that the big banks highly approved of, killed off many of the smaller banks and made banking way less competitive so that the consumers are suffering.

But if you get a coalition (example ICANN) to regulate stuff, you'll get a better mix of both small and large companies.

The issue with Google de-emphasizing bad AI in search results is that they aren't impartial. I sort of want them to do it anyways, but I also don't trust them, because they're competing at AI content.