‘World of Warcraft’ players trick AI-scraping website into publishing nonsense

Yep, 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.

What I find amusing is that even when ChatGPT responds to my gaming questions I find the response to be unusually wordy with a surprisingly heavy into paragraph before it answers my simple question.

Very similar to those few advertisement sites with a huge block of wonky into text taking forever to get to the answer.

Slightly off-topic, but sorta related.

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.

On 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).

Yea, its tragic. When I was a kid I would often just go to GameFAQs because that was the only real source, and the guides would be surfaced in google. Its still around but Google gives me 20 crappy ad riddled sites that require a new page click, listicle-style, to get through a 5 minute area

The other problem with static sites is that it's trivial for some jerkface to copy your content and repost it. The first case of that I heard about was almost 20 years ago when it happened to a friend. The social circle of the subject matter was small enough that she could name and shame to get it taken down. Today I don't know what you could do.

It’s identical to cooking websites. Take the actual ~100 words of relevant info and stretch it into a 10000 word article with 20 ads on it

The only system I own is a PS2, the greatest console of all time is still going strong in 2023

I noticed the same thing with Zelda. The marketability of game FAQs was realised up to a decade ago, but AI content generators, optimised by time-honoured SEO, has evidently accelerated the time to market for new platforms.

The success of TOTK, and the availability of articles and Reddit posts has made it ripe for the picking.

“Webring of shit” is simply an amazing description for this phenomenon. I hope this term catches on.

Unrelated, but YouTube is less vague when it comes to walk-throughs

add reddit to the end of your search query

I am now fully convinced there is an alignment problem.

Amazing but confusing…

Funny I made SpinGPT…

I keep hearing this sentiment on HN and IRL. As a journalist I think it misses the mark somewhat by failing to account for the value of reporting.

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.

I 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)

Even 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.

Anon 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

They 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.

Going online without your AI agent would be like not using a mask during COVID.

I 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.

I 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.

Yeah. 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.