World of Warcraft community creates fake character to fool AI

(Image credit: Blizzard)

The World of Warcraft community managed to trick an AI-powered bot into publishing an article about an character that was entirely made up.

Earlier this week, the WoW community was all a rumble about Glorbo, a character that was right around the corner for Blizzard's long-running MMO. The trouble was, Glorbo was entirely fictitious, a fake feature deliberately hyped up by the WoW community in the hopes of tricking an AI bot to write about it on a website employing AI writers.

It didn't take long for the ruse to work. A website called ZLeague unfortunately took the bait hook, line, and sinker, and reported on the fascinating new Glorbo having World of Warcraft players beside themselves. Unfortunately, the AI-written article has been taken offline, which comes as no surprise whatsoever.

Lol someone on reddit made a post about a made up feature introduced in WoW so that a news site using AI-driven scraping bots published an article about it and it worked pic.twitter.com/JwiovKt1FjJuly 20, 2023

It's sort of like the Krusty Gets Cancelled episode of The Simpsons, where everyone's very excited over this hot new thing called "Gabbo" coming to town, but no one really knows who or what Gabbo is. The AI writing the article about Glorbo wasn't any closer to deciphering what Glorbo was than The Simpsons were about Gabbo at first.

It's this exact sort of scenario that journalist unions have been warning would happen. GMG Union, for example, published a letter to G/O Media warning of the perils of using AI writers instead of humans to publish new articles. Management ignored the concerns, and published an article of Star Wars rankings written by an bot, which was unsurprisingly filled with errors.

G/O management ignored our letter and proceeded with publishing AI-generated content on our sites. This is unethical and unacceptable. If you see a byline ending in “Bot,” don’t click it. https://t.co/mJIwsk9EKGJuly 5, 2023

That the WoW community would go to such lengths to prove how inaccurate AI writing can be is truly admirable. Perhaps ZLeague's management, and other management around media industries, will think twice about using AI bots to write articles in the future.

In World of Warcraft news that is actually factual, WoW Dragon's dragon riding is here to stay for future expansions.

Hirun Cryer is a freelance reporter and writer with Gamesradar+ based out of U.K. After earning a degree in American History specializing in journalism, cinema, literature, and history, he stepped into the games writing world, with a focus on shooters, indie games, and RPGs, and has since been the recipient of the MCV 30 Under 30 award for 2021. In his spare time he freelances with other outlets around the industry, practices Japanese, and enjoys contemporary manga and anime.