As someone who writes about video games for a living, I am deeply annoyed/terrified about the prospect of AI-run websites not necessarily replacing me, but doing things like at the very least, crowding me out of Google, given that Google does not seem to care whatsoever whether content is AI-generated or not.
That’s why it’s refreshing to see a little bit of justice dished out in a very funny way from a gaming community. The World of Warcraft subreddit recently realized that a website, zleague.gg (I am not linking to it), which runs a blog attached to some of sort of gaming app which is its main business, has been scraping reddit threads, feeding them through an AI and summarizing them with “key takeaways” and regurgitated paragraphs that all follow the same format. It’s gross, and yet it generates an article long enough with enough keywords to show up on Google.
Well, the redditors were bored and play with the bots. very real.
And it…worked. Zleague auto-published a post titled “World of Warcraft Players Excited For Glorbo’s Introduction. Here’s are the “key takeaways”:
It is . . . everything necessarily absurd. The article left online for a while finally retired (here is a mirror, it is funny). All indexed authors as deadlines on the site are false. It turns out that all this is running with almost zero supervision.
This is a strange scenario because the site does not “steal” in the classic sense, which plagiarizes directly without credit. It cites Reddit threads and their authors and even the integration of the Reddit Post maximum of time. But getting Reddit fairy tale concepts from Reddit and expanding them is one thing, given that those are the largest communities for individual games on the internet, it’s another matter to feed Reddit threads into an AI and make them spit. But again, there’s nothing to prevent it. These subreddits can’t just be filled with joke posts to ruin a site like this, even if this express example is clever for laughs.
The only way this will ever be stopped is if Google steps in and dramatically deranks or bans AI-based sites like this, as begging for Google traffic crumbs is the only reason these sites exist in the first place. But since Google has its own very obvious vested interest in AI, I am not holding my breath.
Anyway, I’m excited for Glorbo, I hear he’s the replacement since the quest to deposit the Charlatan, the duck appearance.
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