‘World of Warcraft’ players trick AI-scraping website into publishing nonsense
forbes.com
forbes.com
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.
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.
On the other hand, those Stack Overflow clones get top billing all the time. I do not think this is a data problem, but an incentives issue. More ads=good
There was a time when Google Search would nearly always nail it with the first result, but now it feels like you have to wade through several results and be a prompt engineer to find relevant results.
Probably one of my most-used prompts, and it's batting close to 1.000.
Every now and then it will make a mistake, like forgetting the salt, putting a step in the wrong order, or the like, but far less often than you'd think. If you already have even a middling amount of kitchen experience, it's a fantastic use case.
A reasonably comprehensive cookbook like The Joy Of Cooking or something specific to your preferences seems like less effort overall vs Google or a LLM.
they are operating under the assumption you are a decent cook. any decent cook will know how to taste for salt and what is safe temperature wise. if you blindly follow instructions you are not a decent cook.
I may be biased though, "skim a recipe and wing it" is my default style anymore after all.
Think easting something in a restaurant then replicating something similar at home the next day just based on the flavor. Doing that for a few things is easy, but it takes significant time to get to that level across a wide range regional cuisines.
Also, portion adjustments are quite useful, as I mostly only cook for one or two people. Scaling isn't always linear, so that's been a helpful step.
Likely won't pair hot sesame oil with milk, for example. (someone please tell me that's not a thing).
The tool is currently best used by people who already know how to code/cook and don't want to spend too much cognitive bandwidth, but have the skills to mofidy as needed.
At some point I'm gonna say fuck it and simply maintain my own list of searchable links, which score each ad with a single negative point, and each relevant keyword or phrase with a single positive point.
Nobody wants to see a page of copies/duplicates by SEO rank. I recall years ago there was, for a while, a similar issue with Wikipedia clones but that problem was addressed. Not just games, recipes, but music lyrics, chords, etc - googling almost evert niche interest is rife with it.
I think the massive amounts of data collected by android devices while we're not using the internet and all the data collected by chrome while we are browsing means that Google no longer needs to mine our internet searches to collect the most intimate details of our daily lives. That's why Google no longer cares about investing time and money into making their search useful for us.
In fact, it's better for Google if a company's customers can't find their website due to all the spam because it means that company now has to pay Google to place an ad at the top of search results in order to be seen at all.
Many of those wiki ecosystems are used to view-pump twitch channels with embedded players, such as Fextralife's webring of wikis being bought up and built up, and don't forget those "1-feature VIP memberships".
Now we have 45 minute youtube videos of "100 new player tips and tricks for Red Dead 2!"
There's only one...for horse upgrade recipes. I also didn't know that GameSpot acquired them.
I too mourn the lost era of GameFAQs.
I owned a basic wordpress site with some guides written during COVID for a couple of popular (at that time) mobile games. It appeared in top 3 searches for the <game name> + <guide/event/best ...> combination.
Ad revenue was around ~$100 per month peaking around ~$150 at the new content drops. I have abandoned the website since, but it still is generating $100 here and there without me actively working on it for the past 2 years.
To the point - yes, there's lot of money if you own a network of similar websites. My competitors were paying $10-30 per guide submitted on their website because a few guides could easily get paid off in a couple of months from ad revenue and keep generating it years afer.
I could write more detailed story if someone's interested.
Instead, it's better for Google to let the search go to utter dog shit, blame issues on "algorithms" and get sites to pay to play with ads.
The top domain for almost every result in my niche is a shitty wordpress with centered text on a purple background. It makes about $10-15k a month even with its lackluster content. It's had spyware ads and porn ads. Still #1 for every query.
The funny part is, bing, ddg are even worse. Welcome to webapps in 2023.
I absolutely loathe to use fandom for that very reason. They game the system to appear first, even when another, better, wiki exists.And it is nigh on unusable. Sadly one game that really depends on the wiki, that I play only has a fandom site (warframe)
When you say it’s still going strong, are you referring to homebrew dev or something?
But yeah, SEO has so ruined the internet I expect some sort of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon solution to spring up to fix it.
Very similar to those few advertisement sites with a huge block of wonky into text taking forever to get to the answer.
Secondly, I was helped by a lot of people when I was a young developer and this is how I give back. Since it's a sum of maybe 10 minutes a day, which I was largely already using for this anyhow, it's nearly free. If it ever became a job I'd stop.
ToTK straight up sucks for accessibility, cognitive and sensory stuff especially.
I find myself using the ZD TotK map more often than I'd like:
https://www.zeldadungeon.net/tears-of-the-kingdom-interactiv...
And trying to remember what specific enemies are where is not fun for me. Is it fun for anyone? The Compendium doesn't keep track of them when you fight, despite the fact they respawn every blood moon.
I want another Savage Lynel Bow. Where did I see that Silver Lynel? I can't remember, but I'm not hunting it all across the map hoping for the vague ping of my Purah Pad sensor when I'm already on top of one. Should I be making my own notes as well?
The log is a great idea, but there's lots of stuff it doesn't capture. The quest descriptions often aren't sufficient and markers are often the person that started the quest. Great(!)
I appreciate the subtitles, but why is so much of the game unvoiced?
Not a concern for me as I'm playing on PC, but why no button mapping?
Even with internal FSR and AA disabled so it doesn't occasionally dip to smeared potato quality, it can be hard to spot things if you don't know explicitly where to look, even for hawkish eyesight. The Ultrahand glow can help, but it's a rubbish solution.
No colour blind settings. WTAF.
There are so many missed opportunities to make this amazing game vastly more accessible. Nintendo has made it clear they don't care about accessibility. It's a real shame, because accessibility makes things better for everyone.
Why doesn't the game do this, it obviously knows what enemies are where? If you've already encountered them, why not just let you filter that enemy on the map?
Even if it made you take a photo like it does for the compendium, that'd be better than the "sometimes vague locations" we have now. Why not list map locations of that enemy for all enemies in the compendium? Or at least the special ones like Lynels, Hinox, Talus etc?
> No colour blind settings. WTAF.
Do color blind settings through the OS work for gaming, or does the game have to be designed to accomodate to them in some manner?
Not that it would help Switch players nor absolve Nintendo of their apathy towards accessibility.
I'm not sure if this would be exposed in whatever emulator you're using, but the Switch does have console-wide button remapping in the system settings. This obviously isn't sufficient though, since at the very least it presents a huge hassle for having different input settings per game or if multiple people are sharing the same profile. Unfortunately, Nintendo either doesn't recognize the limitations of only having a single system-wide remapping or doesn't think it's worth prioritizing better solutions within their first-party games.
I think it's pretty clear Nintendo just straight-up doesn't care. They do the bare minimum, if that.
ToTK would want per-mechanic remapping ideally. Like the ability to remap vehicle stuff, archery stuff, throwing stuff, mecha spirit thingy separately.
But per-game stuff would at least be a step towards this decade.
The lack of colour blind settings and QoL stuff (that are accessibility for cognitive), and the lack of voice content, are the things that really rustle my jimmies.
Stuff that would immediately make the game more accessible to everyone, not even just disabled players. Not doing that isn't just scummy, it's lazy.
It's quite frustrating at times. I broadly have fun with it, but improving these things would make the game a lot more consistently enjoyable.
I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for.
As far as color issues, I too share color vision deficiencies but everything I have encountered has been carefully designed with shapes in mind so that color is only an enhancement. I STRONGLY believe that this approach to design is much, much, much more accessible than any toggles and filters buried in menus. Could you share with me some examples of where color was key to solving a puzzle or identifying an enemy or item?
>I don’t understand how you could fault the game developer for not supporting this feature, since it is made by a company that sells specific hardware that they guarantee support for.
I'm not sure if you're misunderstanding my complaint, and/or if I'm misunderstanding that part of your comment.
It's my fault for being overly succinct. The interpretation of mine seemed obvious when I wrote it, but reading it back now after your comment, mine is definitely ambiguous.
I don't really care that the onscreen prompts doesn't match the controller labels I use for the emulator. That's very much a "me" problem that I could solve if motivated. I'm playing on a 360 controller so I am not motivated.
(Thank you for the info about a mod manager, but I'm fine with manual mods too. It was implied but not stated in my OP that I'm already using some. At the moment, DynamicFPS at 30FPS, with TotK_1.1.2_ChuckPatch=FSRDisable+QualityReduceFix+Shadow1024+1008p.)
My deep frustration is that Nintendo make it clear they don't care about any sort of accessibility, the lack of in-game button remapping in ToTK on Switch is just one of many symptoms of that.
Say, for a hypothetical example, I am someone with limb difference or someone with issues with muscle memory, using a licensed controller. I can't just scroll across the ToTK menu to settings and move "jump" to A and "use" to Y etc. Why?
Button remapping is a standard feature for most games elsewhere, not least because it's something non-disabled people want. And nobody thinks, "I hate this has an option to map buttons how I want."
Another related symptom is Nintendo, unlike the other two competitors in the space, don't have an accessibility controller. It took Hori to step in to do that. (The Hori Flex. MS have the widely praised XAC, Sony's PS5 Accessibility Controller is on pre-order with a launch here in December.)
Nintendo was leading the way in making cardboard origami robot controllers and a fucking fitness hula hoop though.
As for examples of colour blind issues, Ultrahand welds are green.
radic202 on GS: >I have Protanopia (unable to tell the difference between Red and Green), hence it makes is sooooo difficult when using the hand to move and assemble items. I do manage though by targeting well or by pure luck. There are some other instances where I can't see a cliff or item located in the grass but that is OK for the most part.
I wanted to give an example image before realising that if you too have colour vision issues, this may be an especially dumb idea on my part.
But to illustrate Ultrahand as radic202 above when sticking some wood together, I took a screenshot of the first decent Ultrahand video I found on YT and shoved through pilestone's Color Blind Vision Simulator with the R/G Blindness option.
Possibly a relatively extreme example but I picked a random frame to screenshot that had a lot of green weld and brown wood in it: https://imgur.com/a/I0NZvIz
Yeah, you can manage to use Ultrahand, but it's vastly more difficult than if you could just set the weld colour to blue.
Nintendo didn't bother adding options for customisation of stuff like this for people with different needs, knowing that about 8% of men are colourblind and there are lots of people with limb difference or other physical difficulties.
Hell, those of us who played Zelda on the NES have a worryingly increasing risk of deteriorating eyesight, arthritis, and dementia in our near future. Old age is a bastard.
But instead Nintendo put in a menu option to turn off the HUD for prettier pictures or whatever... Thanks Nintendo(!)
Any real accessibility for people with differing needs in Nintendo games is by accident, not by design. Any accessibility stuff that's only needed by people with different needs isn't even an afterthought because "fuck those people".
That's not ok.
I'm afraid I may be matching your tone here...
>Have you tried getting out a piece of paper and a pencil and making your own map?
No, I use a better map that other people made. My comment specifically links to it.
>Or do you need a developer to do everything for you?
It would be nice if the developer made their own in-game map and Compendium better, yes.
I am incapable of re-writing Nintendo's own map and compendium code. Even if I were technically capable, I couldn't sign it so it wouldn't run on an unmodded Switch anyway. So fixing the issue properly is indeed something I cannot DIY and would require Nintendo for.
And while it's not an explicit "need" for me, not everyone has the same set of needs. That's a thing about accessibility. It would be a really nice QoL improvement for the game though.
Remembering where everything is on the sprawling multi-level world is obviously an issue that even Nintendo recognised. Some Compendium items do have location info in the Compendium. But not all items in the Compendium though, coz it's a shit implementation.
Is "remembering where shit is" a core mechanic that brings you joy or otherwise enhances the game? One would assume not, but it's not a rhetorical question, please feel free to answer.
You suggested the solution to a half-assed map and compendium is "use pen and paper", instead of asking, "why did the devs half-ass the map and compendium they put in the game?". Do you not think you may be looking at this from the wrong angle?
The success of TOTK, and the availability of articles and Reddit posts has made it ripe for the picking.
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.
> 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.
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
- 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)
I’d really like to see this - any chance we could?
I’d like the inverse too (the rejected links! Politics, history etc).
They are a great source of weekend reading. But you’ve included the repo, so now that’s on me.
This is the prompt that generates the articles: https://github.com/lfarroco/news-radar/blob/main/src/writer....
While some news can be generated exclusively from scraping Reddit threads or whatever, most decent journalism incorporates some form of reporting, i.e. the generation of novel information from trusted sources. Even without reporting, if you can't add to the store of knowledge in the world by writing the article, it doesn't offer any value to consumers or advertisers. That includes the the world of SEO spam. An effort has to be made to distinguish your work from the competition, or else your site isn't winning those top results.
Reddit threads are often just full of emotional responses to news already generated in this way. At some point along the line, a human has gone out and spoken to another human, forming an novel angle or argument, pursuing a line of inquiry, connected dots no one else has yet etc. That's news, not a summary of existing attitudes.
There is valor added by journalists in even niche sectors. A journalist that reports on cars knows about the industry itself and can give an informed take on different developments, he might know how a car works, he might know about different trends in design, or markets, or whatever else. That is his added value.
When it comes to videogame journalism, though, they act as little more than spokespeople for corporations. They generally don't understand the product or how it works (mechanically or in terms of design), and in some cases aren't even adept at playing videogames themselves. The only thing the world would lose if no game journalist ever mentioned WoW again and the devs communicated directly with the playerbase would be the appearance of impartiality journalists give.
Lots of folks more accomplished than me who hit way harder. All the coverage about crunch, for instance, or sexual harassment scandals at big companies—-these are topics broken by games journos.
If your only exposure to this world is shitty SEO spam or cleverly-disguised marketing, I could see why you’d think the way you do. But there is so much good games journalism out there. I don’t recommend writing off the field like that.
Ad-based “news” is always going to have this problem, because getting clicks just requires getting people to the page; the quality of the content doesn’t matter nearly as much as the headline. The incentives for quality content just don’t exist in the current business model.
Paywalls obviously aren’t the solution, either, because news is nothing, now if it can’t be shared, and paywalls stop that dead. It also takes time and effort to build a brand, as you rightly stated before. The other important factor is how easy it is to lose trust in that brand, which means high stringent and transparent fact checking needs to be a part of the solution, alongside _proper_ retractions when someone _does_ get it wrong.
The only way I can imagine things improving is for independent journalists to get together to ditch the big media outlets and find some real solution to monetizing their work and keeping everyone accountable to accurate reporting. Obviously that’s much easier said than done.
Sorry to be blunt but, that's not games. That's games journalists who want to be activists in their own fields. That, just as the gorillionth take on how this or that is problematic, is just people wanting to inject their politics into a hobby and it can't disappear soon enough.
I don't see that as an advantage of journalism. I see that as an evil to endure for a good that isn't there.
I hate to retreat into platitudes here but good journalism shines a light in the dark, it comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, that’s kind of the name of the game.
If you’d prefer these topics go unaddressed and companies continue to take advantage of their workers or whatever, not sure we have enough in common to have real discourse on the subject. Sorry to be blunt lol.
>>Actually here Game Journalists also report on X, Y and Z
>Nah that is just people injecting politics and being activists
This is a pretty dumb "No true Scotsman" argument you are smuggling into the conversation here.
At a revenue level how do you quantify that value? Unless you are a brand (TIME, Washington Post, etc) the only metrics are page views and time spent reading the article that eyeballs wander across ads.
Arguably a clear well written article may perform worse than an AI generated article that bleeds over on to a second page. Some of the most valuable content on the internet is not well written pieces on the political climate, but "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" with a 75+ image one per page photo gallery.
How do I quantify the value of reporting? As a writer and reporter, not a finance dude, I'm really not qualified to answer that. But it's interesting you say 'unless you are a brand' because I feel like the brand is what you get from building up years and years of trust with excellent reporting.
In your second paragraph, I don't think your assertion is correct. It isn't 2008. While you were correct at one time based on trends in the industry, "OMG YOU'LL NEVER GUESS HOW THIS CHILD CELEB TURNED OUT" content never cemented itself. It had a high-water mark and that kind of thing hasn't made good money in years. The New York Times is still the most valuable brand in journalism and it's thriving against its competition. Not only other legacy brands, but let's be real, look where Buzzfeed is at today. Shitty content lost revenue-wise as well as on a moral basis. The only way to reliably make good ad revenue is to spam articles but it's not a profitable (or serious imo) way to run a journalistic enterprise. I believe paywalls/subscription models will continue to dominate while the losers fight for scraps.
The LA Times makes $380,116 per employee. Outbrain, one of the largest click farms makes $841,768 per employee. Taboola makes $784,780 per employee. Combined the latter two bring in enough revenue to equal 1/4 of the entire print media industry. That isn't even counting hybrid companies like media.net that do a combination of clickbait and traditional advertising.
(This is all 2022 data)
I return to Buzzfeed because I think they’re a good example of a place that tried to do both but because they had so much low-brow clicky clicky, the brand ultimately suffered. Despite winning a Pulitzer in 2021 it really has a terrible reputation among non-industry folks who haven’t forgotten how the brand came to prominence.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate good journalism. 90% of the world does not and they just want to be spoon fed garbage at a faster rate. Look at the most popular shows on TV for example, they aren't National Geographic documentaries, but instead trashy reality television.
Journalists today only provide unnecessary exposition and emotional poetry (read: wasting my reading time) and actively cause more problems and conflicts in society than they address and resolve (sensationalism and fearmongering is what brings in the clicks and thus the money).
I have no sympathy whatsoever for such a rotten, morally devoid, worthless industry, and while I doubt "AI" will bring about any fundamental difference or improvement it will at least make the process of journalism better reflect the actual value of the final product.
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.
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.
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.
This is _hacker_ news. I don’t care about what it was “intended” to do either; I care about what it can do when pushed to its limits!
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.
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.
That AI transformer paper really is Pandora’s Box.
Maybe I should ask ChatGPT to help me come up with more ideas…
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.
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.
I don't get what's up with this attitude of "It's already shit, so it doesn't bother me that AI makes it even shittier."
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.
New paradigm: An AI can conquer half the world before the killswitch operator can pick their axe up.
Automatic publishing is always going to be vulnerable to content poisoning.
Citation needed.
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"
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.
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.
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'?
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.
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.
If any legitimate journalism outlet posted wrong information, it would be the fault of the outlet and immediately be retracted with a profuse apology.
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.
The people Googling information about World of Warcraft who are getting misinformation.
Retractions are printed in small type on an inside page, if at all. That's been the rule for decades, if not centuries.