Ever since I started writing for TheGamer, I’ve been accused of being artificial intelligence several times, despite the fact that I regularly write about how AI is hurting the industries we most care about. Every time I publish a take that readers don’t particularly like, I inevitably receive an email saying my work is ‘rage-baiting trash’ that’s ‘clearly written by an AI’. This isn’t actually true. I am very much a real person, and so are all my co-workers, as far as I know. AI couldn’t generate our completely inappropriate Slack chats, and thank god for that.
However, that doesn’t mean that AI isn’t being used on other news sites and aggregators, because it definitely is. Just today, a website called Zleague.gg that brands itself as “the gaming super app” posted an article titled “World of Warcraft (WoW) Players Excited for Glorbo’s Introduction”. In it, the article quoted a redditor who was excited for Glorbo’s addition to the game, detailed reservations some players had about an item called ‘Klikclac’, and discussed rumours of a farming sim mini-game. Let me be entirely clear: none of these things are real. (You can find an archived version of the now-deleted article here.)
Glorbo was a trap intentionally laid to embarrass news websites that scrape Reddit forums for content. The OP themself, redditor u/kaefer_kriegerin, said, ‘Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot operated news websites to publish an article about this’, in the original post. It could not have been more obvious to an actual journalist that this was bait to AI, but of course, an AI wouldn’t know that – despite the name, it’s not actually intelligent, but a program designed to form coherent sentences from source material.
It was a clever trap, too. Redditors on the r/wow subreddit realised that ZLeague was scraping their forums for articles yesterday and quickly began making threads about completely made-up things in World of Warcraft. ZLeague made many posts about these fake discussions, but at some point somebody realised that they were being played, and all the WoW-related posts from the last two days were deleted. But before they realised, the Wayback Machine (which saves deleted content from the internet) had catalogued a few of their fake articles, including one about how redditors feel about ZLeague’s own practice of AI-generating content from subreddits.
Yes, it’s very funny, but it’s also deeply sad to see as a journalist. Journalists are actively under threat from the corporations that own their websites. GAMURS Group recently went viral for posting a job listing for an AI editor, who would be required to create 200-250 articles per week. The Gizmodo Media Group Union has been outspoken about its dissent to G/O Media’s plan to include AI content on their websites. io9, a part of Gizmodo, notoriously posted an AI-generated article called “A Chronological List of Star Wars Movies & TV Shows” which was egregiously and obviously factually incorrect. This is all against the advice and will of the journalists who actually keep these sites running, and is part of a C-suite push to keep websites earning exponentially more money at the cost of quality.
I’m thrilled to see these redditors actively sabotaging AI made specifically for click-farming, but I need us all to be conscious of the more insidious ways AI is hurting news and entertainment sites. This is a clear demonstration that AI is not actually capable of journalism, or indeed, any critical thought, and should not be used to replace journalists, as it simply cannot do the same job. It has no place on our websites, and certainly no place to be masquerading under human bylines – the Glorbo post was published by one ‘Lucy Reed’, who presumably is not a real person. If you can help it, don’t engage with these sites and posts at all, because they profit off clicks. And by all means, let the owners of these websites know how you feel.