WOW Fans Trick ‘AI’ ‘News’ Scraper Into Covering Fake New Game Feature
from the yes-I-can-absolutely-do-that,-Dave dept
Language learning technology’s (aka “AI”) introduction into journalism has been a blistering mess. And not just because the technology is undercooked (which it is), but because the folks in charge of most major media outlets are incompetent cheapskates who simply see the tech as a way to cut corners, wage war on labor, and automate all of the clickbait attention economy’s very worst impulses.
The result of that continues to go about how you’d expect, with a ton of rushed computer-generated articles filled with dumb mistakes.
But last week there was a fun wrinkle when users over at the r/wow subreddit tricked an “AI” scraping the web for news into publishing an article on a new World of Warcraft feature that doesn’t exist. The fans created an entirely new game mode and lore called Glorbo, talked about it as if it was a real thing in the subreddit, and got a website called The Portal, owned by Zleague.gg, to treat it like a real thing:
“The Portal, owned by Zleague.gg, ran an SEO item on Glorbo headlined “World of Warcraft (WoW) Players Excited for Glorbo’s Introduction”, quoting the main Reddit thread directly. Though it appears The Portal has since realised its mistake and removed the post, it can still be read in full on Archive.Today. The original post does not appear to denote that the story was automated. The author byline on the piece does not lead to a bio or social media links of any kind.”
While this was a fun prank related to gaming news, the same kind of lazy rushed implementation of “AI” is also occurring in the broader field of journalism. And while the tech may improve over time, the kind of greedy, incompetent leadership we’ve seen in media generally won’t.
There are plenty of ways these language learning tools could actually help journalists do a better, more efficient job. But we’re not injecting the technology into a healthy journalism and media environment. We’re injecting it into an already very broken clickbait bullshit generation machine, effectively supercharging all of its worst tendencies.
The goal for a lot of the VC types in media is to create a giant pointless ouroboros of clickbait gibberish and ad consumption that shits money. A giant wheel of pointless, often-manufactured engagement that is largely free of any pesky concerns about silly things like paying human beings a living wage, the quality of the end product, or the health of the broader industry.
Filed Under: ai, clickbait, gaming, journalism, labor, media, news, scraping, world of warcraft
Companies: reddit, zleague.gg
Comments on “WOW Fans Trick ‘AI’ ‘News’ Scraper Into Covering Fake New Game Feature”
I think an old data processing rule is going to still apply, which is garbage in -> garbage out.
I see a future with narrowly tailored AI for a specific purpose, with confined inputs designed to curtail such garbage.
One day we’ll address the ad market which drives this and so many other stupid business models.
Where are all the bros who are so concerned about ethics in gaming journalism? I guess they don’t care as much since an AI isn’t female.
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They’re busy dreaming up pranks like this one, in order to point out the absurdities of AI journalism in stark fashion.
Don’t worry, it won’t be long before some U.S. Senator or Representative will be the subject of a similar prank, and then the kid gloves will come off, trust me on that one.
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They can die in a fire for all I care.
All that’s really needed here is to go on to train the AI to do research, in order verify whatever it has made up. Or perhaps another AI trained in research can double-check the article-writing AI, that process would also work.
But the point is, if the tech sector making all these advances in machine learning doesn’t get on the stick, you can be sure that the governments of the world will write laws that either force them to do so, or else knee-cap them by holding bullshit-generating AI owners directly responsible for said bullshit.
Ramifications people, ramifications. It’s a word long in disuse by nearly everyone in the tech sector, and it’s about to rear its ugly head in ways that we don’t even want to imagine.
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Large Language Model AI’s are an extended Thesaurus, useful for exploring ways to say things, but the stories they create can have less of a relationship to reality that a reporter writing clickbait.
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Yeah, nerd harder
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That’s literally not possible for large language models. There’s a reason why some people call LLMs “stochastic parrots”, as coined by Timnit Gebru.
LLMs are not “proper” AI, and honestly I think . They have literally no understanding of the context or veracity of the material they harvest. Being able to “do the research” would go into general AI territory, aka having actual understanding of context and what is true or false, but that’s probably decades away at the very least.
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Bleh, the first sentence in that first paragraph should’ve been “LLMs are not “proper” AI, and I honestly think conflating the two is to some degree intellectually dishonest”. I probably should get some sleep.
Re: Re: Re: LLMs=automatic coin counters
Parrots are 10squared(idk how to superscript) tiers above LLMs. They can function irl, observe, gather their own data. Feed themselves. LLMs are nothing but abstract collating sorters, like at the post office.
The AI rush really shows how innately dim the various movers and shakers really are. (See Elon’s text msg.s) They believe what they’re saying. Crypto dudes, Transhumanists, Libertarian Longtermists, its as though they’ve all a life-changing head injury and don’t know it
Re: Re: Re:2 Doh! Me too
… all >suffered< a life-changing head injury and don’t know it
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Well, the “stochastic parrot” term is in relation to how parrots and some other types of birds can mimc speech but don’t actually understand it.
Speaking of greed, it might be interesting to note that high-speed trading is done based on automated news analysis. And Blizzard is a public company, so someone who knew what they were doing could’ve probably made quite a bit of money if pranking were not the goal. It’s nominally illegal market manipulation, but good luck proving it; I doubt any of these Reddit posters are going to jail.
One could likely find a way to label an article as parody that wouldn’t be picked up by AI—but might preclude prosecution—which is really the only new thing here. Otherwise, it’s not much different from the perennial “author Stephen King has died” rumors of the early millennium (and apparently a few months ago).
It gets better:
The content-scraping bot found a thread discussing the subject of its AI scraper Glorbo article, and subsequentently posted an article talking itself titled
“World of Warcraft (WoW) Players React to AI-Generated Content on Popular Gaming Sites.”
Haha, seems like now they’ve stopped pulling content from Reddit altogether, which was always a bad idea.