Players of World of Warcraft Tricked AI-Scraping Game Website Into Publishing Fake News

Users on Reddit decided to see if they could fool AI-scraping bots after discovering zleague.gg. What makes this blog interesting is that it uses an AI scraping bot to take information from their sub-Reddit and creates posts from them. So they decided to get back at the bot by creating a lengthy thread discussing the arrival of Glorbo in World of Warcraft. The only problem is that Glorbo isn’t a real feature.

To make this work, Reddit users on the sub-Reddit got to work. They began posting and commenting on the new Glorbo feature in a bit to get the AI to scrape the information. But this wasn’t just a couple of posts and comments. As RPG players know, you have to go all in when it comes to role-playing.

So many went on to carry on full conversations about the new feature. Not only expressing excitement about Glorbo but even having reservations about how some items affect “casual players“. But that’s not all, some even began spreading rumors that tied the introduction of Glorbo with major map changes and even a new mini-game that was a farm simulator.

The comment that drove this looked something like this, “I have to say, since they started hinting at it in Hearthstone in 1994, it was obvious that they would introduce Glorbo to World of Warcraft sooner or later. I feel like Dragonflight has been win after win so far, like when they brought back Chen Stormstout as the end boss of the new Karazhan? Absolutely amazing!”

Finally, they also discussed the possibility of a new playable race and other game changes to tie it all together. The result was multiple sites, not just the one mentioned above, that use AI to scrape the internet for news running with stories about this new feature.

As you’d expect this was a great exercise, thanks to committed World of Warcraft players, to show what could happen if AI has no oversight. Especially considering that WoW players are often known as some of the most committed players online.

So though some may worry about AI taking over writing roles, it seems as long as players have anything to say, it won’t work out so well for those publications.

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