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‘World of Warcraft’ players trick AI-scraping website into publishing nonsense
- robertlagrant 3y ago> Gaming sites traditionally employ human writers with a deep knowledge of the subject Citation needed.
- interestica 3y ago[flagged]
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoThey didn't say how deep the knowledge is. Puddles have some depth.
- Cpoll 3y agoBut the analogous statement is "puddles are deep."
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoI don't see the problem. They are deep. Not as deep as a lake but they are deep. They are also shallow. Not as shallow as a divot made into a sheet of paper (which doesn't go all the way through) but they are shallow.
- dylan604 3y agoAround here, we say more width than depth when politely insulting someone's lack of knowledge. I assume it has British influence
- Apocryphon 3y agoMore breadth than depth sounds better.
- dylan604 3y agoBreadth isn't a word a cowboy would typically use though EDIT: after further thought, height isn't a word a cowboy would use either. around here, there is a staggeringly large number of people that say "width and heighth"
- Apocryphon 3y agoAh, well I was factoring in the British influence. I could see such a modified phrase being used in an academic setting for sniping between intellectuals.
- dylan604 3y agoWith Breadth, I think you are moving past influence and flat out making it British.
- tekla 3y ago"IGN writers exciting to start playing game they just finished reviewing"
- sharkweek 3y agoI know you're joking, but I do actually really enjoy a handful of their YouTube reviewers, and more than once have used their reviews to make a purchase decision for a game. Only gripe is the kind of always float between 7-8 scores for games that really should be ranked lower or higher, but the content of the videos are normally good enough outside of the score given.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bjacobel 3y agoGamergate was almost a decade ago. Let it go.
- jabroni_salad 3y agowell this is a WoW thread, so I guess icy-veins is the citation: https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/fire-mage-pve-dps-rotation-cooldowns-abilities https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/fire-mage-pve-dps-rotation-coo... All of the guides on this site are written by top-ranked players and backed by simulation data. Most of the guides can be customized to your character's talent selections and the leveling guides let you set your current level so as not to show things you don't currently have.
- politelemon 3y agoThe crucial line: > But again, there’s nothing to stop this. These subreddits can’t only fill themselves with joke articles to screw up a site like this, even if this one specific example is good for a laugh. Most threads will be normal conversations, and reddit (and other discussion sites) can serve as a simple way of summarizing and generating news for 'free'. I'm thinking that HN too could serve as a source for tech related news, couldn't it? Summarize the target article, then join it up with summaries/sentiments of the top comments in the thread. I didn't say I'm doing it, but if I could think of it, someone's probably way ahead of me already and has tried it.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y agoThey can't only do that but they can embarrass someone who's passing an AI writer off as human. At minimum, they'll have to message in some way that the article was written by AI lest this trick is pulled to embarrass an author which was otherwise considered to be human.
- pdpi 3y agoEven if you don't want to just summarise the comments, you can view the comments section for most articles as crowd-sourced research on the topic. You can easily walk away from most interesting discussions here with a shortlist of topical articles, books, etc, and often some colour commentary straight from the horse's mouth.
- nfjro8 3y agoAnon because I know startups working on that exist and should not talk about it Information wants to be free; right now it’s a browser plugin that reads DOM and allows tagging; that human work is fed into a training system The idea started as make Twitter community notes it’s own thing as browser plug-in and then expanded into model training to look like a user browsing the web and read DOM Not hitting an API, so no fees yes? It’s the user making the interaction choice Rate limits are going to be the only defense against AI trained to look like doom scrollers
- frozenlettuce 3y agoI created a website that does the following: - pick HN items with more than 400 votes - gather their titles in a list - ask the AI to filter out the ones that are not tech-related (bay-area topics, politics) - scrape selected articles - write summaries - publish static website other sources are reddit subreddits and rss feeds (official languages' blogs and github's releases page). The AI is quite gullible. That can be avoided by giving it more context and having a review step where you make sure that you are enforcing your editorial rules. Another thing that I've been wondering is having a cheaper model (gpt-turbo-3.5) write articles and then use a more sophisticated to review them (gpt4)
- gochi 3y agoEvery time someone has used an automatically publish feature of any type, it always ends poorly. Either personal information gets posted they didn't intend, incomprehensible grammatical errors, or as in this case completely falsified information gets released. It's a very old lesson we should have learned from newspaper days but I guess with how fast people in AI are moving they don't care about "old lessons". Outside of that, it's interesting to see how people try to combat and highlight AI platforms. Jokes like these, paywalls, limited invites, increasing API costs, and so on. Very interesting times for online information.
- pixl97 3y agoOld paradigm: A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on New paradigm: An AI can conquer half the world before the killswitch operator can pick their axe up.
- lapetitejort 3y agoThat's why it's important to suspend the axe above the wires ahead of time. It's also important to to remind the AI that the axe exists. The Axe of dAImocles
- chiph 3y agoAbout ten years ago there was an Agile conference that published a hashtag where anything that used that tag would automatically get shown on the monitors around the building. 4chan found out, and well, things went predictably. Automatic publishing is always going to be vulnerable to content poisoning.
- zamadatix 3y agoI hope the Warcraft developers call some real future addition Glorbo now.
- Apocryphon 3y agoDoes Blizzard still do April Fool's jokes? If so they're all set for next year.
- rickstanley 3y agoYes, but only out of season April fool's jokes.
- Apocryphon 3y agoIs that a reference to the Diablo Immortal announcement
- rickstanley 3y agoYes.
- Crosseye_Jack 3y agoDo you guys not have phones (to google the reference)?
- jdwithit 3y agoThey aren't as funny and elaborate as they once were, but yeah, they still do post something every year. In the early days of WoW they used to publish really good fake patch notes that were right on the line of credibility with a couple fake bombshells mixed in. The forums would melt down with posts from people who forgot it was April 1. Good times.
- ynac 3y agoExciting! This looks and feels a lot like the counter culture experience I had in the 80s as a hacker. The sense of fighting The Man may now be taken up against The AI. Well played game nerds!
- pksebben 3y agoI feel like we've seen this any time that the tools are new and powerful enough - the folks unburdened by hierarchical structure can and do move fast, so when there's a sea change they can get in there and do some good damage until the behemoths catch on and steer their resources towards shoring up what they perceive as defects (frequently identified as anything that reduces their control over any system or it's connected parts). My hope is that things get faster and more chaotic as we move forward. The best stuff happens when the empowered are scrappy and in it for the love and not the money.
- dylan604 3y agoI always like how this just brings to the surface the lack of respect the creators of the thing, in this case AI, that it will be abused by the public. The public doesn't care how/what the devs want it to do. The public cares about what they can make it do. See hot rods, overclocking, or any of the millions of other examples.
- Apocryphon 3y agoNow that's hacking
- ehnto 3y agoYep, and even if the US regulates it, the public will take it underground, and overseas will keep pushing on. The cat is out of the bag. I would still like to see these companies try and fix any negative externalities mind you. If they just throw their hands up at helping accelerate SEO spam then that'd be disappointing.
- dylan604 3y agoThat's the thing that makes me laugh at the pageantry of this time waste. Do people really think that US companies are the only ones working on this tech? I love how the US still has the notion that the rest of the world gives one iota about its "morality" dictates.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Liquix 3y agoLink to the scraped post: https://snoo.habedieeh.re/r/wow/comments/154umm2/ https://snoo.habedieeh.re/r/wow/comments/154umm2/
- TechBro8615 3y agoI don't doubt that the redditors caught this company using an AI, but frankly the generated text doesn't look that different from what an underpaid human would write. I'm sure most of these gaming websites have a "content calendar" and "pipelines" for paying their outsourced writers $0.80 per word with instructions to source new content from relevant subreddits. With AI they've just found a way to do it more cheaply.
- monkpit 3y agoThe article quotes the OP saying they hope it gets picked up by bot-driven news sites. While it’s possible, I don’t think a human would include that bit.
- falcor84 3y ago$0.80 per word is actually really decent money; I'd expect them to be paying a lot less.
- dylan604 3y agoat first because of the context, I read it as ¢0.80 cents per word, but my brain got all tripped up over the dollar sign. I then started thinking about looking for a way to apply for that job. For $0.80 cents per word, I could wax poetically for pages upon pages of nonsense. I could even make it more beneficial for me by never using more than 2 syllable words. Using 3+ syllable words would start costing me money.
- sfn42 3y agoIts easier if you drop the redundancy. Write $5, not $5 dollars. The dollar sign denotes the unit, there is no reason to add the word after. Alternatively you could just write "5 dollars", there is no need for the dollar sign when you write "dollars" right after. That way you dont have to worry about keeping your redundant units in sync.
- StrictDabbler 3y ago$0.08-$0.12/word is the rate for a quality short story in a moderately respectable science fiction magazine like Clarkesworld or Asimov's Science Fiction. This is also a generally-quoted rate for blogspam. The blogspam rate will crater in response to ML but still I expect the short story to become a dead format. Many good ones will be written but there will be nowhere valuable to share or find them.
- ac2u 3y agoCalling it now. Glorbo will be in the next patch.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoMore discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36815902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36815902
- dang 3y agoWe merged that one hither.
- caseyf 3y agoDeleting a now viral post is kind of a weird move from a spam site that is probably desperate for traffic
- coffeefirst 3y agoYeah. But on the other hand, this is Made For Advertising (MFA) content. The worst thing that can happen to it isn't notoriety, it's getting on the naughty list with Google or the programmatic ad markets. The former can gut its traffic, the latter can gut its ability to monetize. Ironically, it's looking like the war on trash AI content is going to be fought by adtech firms who need to plausibly claim their customers aren't going to be wasting money on worthless inventory.
- tofuahdude 3y agoThe jury is definitely still out on whether that content is actually worthless inventory to advertisers. Shit tier websites with "quality" ads (ie something I want to click on more) can be very valuable to advertisers. This fight needs to be fought by search, not ad tech. Ad tech has too many perverse incentives.
- MSFT_Edging 3y agoCan we just make a new internet, and let the ad markets and AI fight it out on this internet?
- csense 3y agohttps://gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
- PUSH_AX 3y agoWhatever it is they do for money, people visiting in this context are unlikely to convert, taking it down also mitigates a little of the reputational damage at least.
- 3y ago
- constantly 3y agoI don’t really play games at all and the only system I own is a Nintendo Switch. I played the new Zelda and am really enjoying it. When I get stuck or have a question I google it. When I google it, I note that the top say 10 sites that answer my question all have similarly-formatted articles and also have the same mistakes in the answer to the question. I expect nearly all the sites pointing to Zelda tips or FAQs are not original in any way and are instead just regurgitated from one another through AI to form a webring of shit. At least I use ad blockers and block JavaScript so they don’t get some ad revenue.
- RGamma 3y agoOn Kagi I just block that shit since it's relatively obvious. Some trustworthy sites in this space are gamefaqs(!) and IGN (and game magazines and others I can't recall now).
- monkpit 3y agoGameFaqs is an absolute gem. Load everything at once as text, no interstitial ads, no auto playing videos, no bs.
- ehnto 3y agoYep, game wikis and guides have been a cesspool of SEO bullshit for a little while now. I guess there's money in the ads. I find it hard to believe Google doesn't have the data required to figure out which sites should be getting domain authority, but I understand it's an antagonistic and ongoing battle between SEO spam and search engines.
- theoriginaldog 3y agoThat is the main reason why I fall back to good old book guides. They are actually quite fun and make me nostalgic, because in my childhood we used them too. Piggyback is a publisher that makes great ones, they publish only one per year and put a lot of effort and work in their guides. They made the offical Tears of the Kingdom guide too, can recommend.
- 3y ago
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoSomething tells me this is a hidden advertisement for WoW and it's upcoming xpac.. I feel like journalism hit a new low every months, and it's not going to get better any time soon.. is 'AI' the new 'tech'?
- dylan604 3y agoAI is the new journalism. Forget this at your own peril
- minimaxir 3y agoThere is no upcoming expansion for WoW announced. Literally everything in the meme post is made up.
- WhereIsTheTruth 3y agoYou must be new to WoW, blizzcon is just around the corner
- Al0neStar 3y agoLast xpac was less than a year ago.
- brailsafe 3y agoThere's nobody new to WoW, it's a billion years old at this point. Not that I'm not tempted to re-sub for the last bit of the current patch.
- minimaxir 3y agoI am currently an active WoW player (just got Keystone Hero for the first time this season!) It is unlikely given the current patch cycle and plot that a new expansion is announced this BlizzCon, but definitely next year if not before then. Either way, the argument that the BBC is doing this article as a sponsored advertisement is absurd. Other outlets have written up this story.
- llm_nerd 3y agoWeird article. The way it vilifies what this site does -- aggregating and summarizing social media activity -- but then does exactly the same thing is hilarious irony, and perfectly encapsulates the anti-AI contradiction. Similarly, it celebrates that some random site published wrong information, when the cause was a subreddit publishing wrong information. e.g. Some rando happening into that sub would be just as misled. All in all, very silly.
- minimaxir 3y ago> Similarly, it celebrates that some random site published wrong information, when the cause was a subreddit publishing wrong information. If any legitimate journalism outlet posted wrong information, it would be the fault of the outlet and immediately be retracted with a profuse apology.
- llm_nerd 3y ago"Legitimate journalism outlet" It's some crappy gaming app that aggregates "news". Who cares? This is such a meaningless bit of outrage about nothing of any consequence at all, beyond "AI will not replace us!" luddism. I think it's a bit hilarious that you work for Buzzfeed. The single and only reason I am aware of Buzzfeed's existence is that they endlessly post listicles that are simply aggregating reddit posts, tweets, etc.
- minimaxir 3y ago> Who cares? The people Googling information about World of Warcraft who are getting misinformation.
- msla 3y agoI think we all know that doesn't occur. Retractions are printed in small type on an inside page, if at all. That's been the rule for decades, if not centuries.
- Cupprum 3y agoFor a minute i thought it was supposed to be Glorzo from Rick and Morty. That would be fun, people in WoW running around with squids on their faces.
- 19h 3y agoI was trying to find out about video stabilization options on Linux yesterday and stumbled over an article that extremely confidently was discussing a tool that’s maintained by the „authors of ffmpeg“ … which surprised me. So I googled it and couldn’t find it. Then I put the name into quotes and found three articles mentioning it, all by the same company.
- worrycue 3y agoSo it’s actually starting to happen. LLM generated content filled with hallucinations are flooding the web. The internet will soon become completely useless as the signal to noise ratio plummets until it’s practically impossible to sort the wheat from the chaff. That AI transformer paper really is Pandora’s Box.
- m3kw9 3y agoNo surprise if LLMs cannot verify because they have no access to the actual game. They bet on the data being good
- rpastuszak 3y agoHaha, I made https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io https://meat-gpt.sonnet.io (the site is my way of poking fun at crappy AI startups, I won't spoil how). Now, one of the biggest sources of traffic for me (ca 70-80% at times!) are crappy AI app catalogues which not just include my MeatGPT but also hallucinate the most beautifully stupid descriptions of what it does. I couldn't imagine this stuff working better to be fair: taking that juicy slab of meat from my site and then proceeding to repeatedly slap themselves in the face with it screaming "please give me more". I mean, I love generative art, and built a self-publishing medieval content farm[1], but this thing just writes itself, across multiple sites. [1] https://tidings.potato.horse https://tidings.potato.horse
- getpokedagain 3y ago[flagged]
- NoToP 3y agoI am now fully convinced there is an alignment problem.
- acomjean 3y agoAmazing but confusing…
- sizzle 3y agoFunny I made SpinGPT…
- b800h 3y agoHonestly at this point I'd be unsurprised if the Forbes article about the trick was written by AI as well.
- archo 3y agohttps://archive.is/ws3pw https://archive.is/ws3pw
- astrea 3y agoImagine trying to explain the sheer amount of effort that goes into blogspam to someone from the 90s.
- kromem 3y agoThis is happening on a lot more gaming news sites than just this one. I'm regularly seeing articles in my Google News feed that are summarizing Reddit threads with questionable accuracy in their coverage that are clearly AI generated. All that said, when it does work correctly it's actually kind of useful and timely. For about a year now since seeing the advent of decent generative text AI, I'm starting to dream of the day I no longer use my devices to go online and just get a phone call from an AI voice that tells me if I have anything urgent in my email or summarizes news I'd actually give a crap about. The web has gone from something I truly loved to an abusive relationship so entrenched in my day to day I can't boot it from my life. I for one welcome an AI intermediary that needs to suffer through reading SEO spam and click bait headlines and nonsense comments to synthesize a useful summary of what's important to me.
- visarga 3y agoGoing online without your AI agent would be like not using a mask during COVID.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoAnd this article is literally the same shit word for word as the AI post that they are complaining about. A newspaper article about a reddit thread.