In mid-July

In mid-July of 2023, a gaming news site called Z-League published an article about a new feature that would soon come to the remarkably still popular after all these years massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft, that feature called Glorbo.

Among other sub-features, Glorbo would include a new mandatory item called ClickClack,

a huge new quest to depose Quakian, the aspect of ducks, and a, quote, small, cozy island,

end quote, called Zoop.

The publication of this article was celebrated on a World of Warcraft subreddit, a game-specific forum on Reddit,

not because everyone was super excited about this seemingly bulky new game update, but because

the Glorbo update was not real. This subreddit community had made it all up. They did this

because it was becoming increasingly clear that Z-League

was using some kind of bot to scan the conversations taking place in that subreddit,

and then using AI to generate articles based on those conversations before then publishing

those pieces to their site. So rather than reporting on actual news or doing any

kind of reporting at all, this website was scraping what happened in this popular subreddit,

grabbing keywords and popular discussion topics, then auto-generating articles based on all that

hubbub, all that conversation, creating something a bit like game

industry reporting, but without the traditional trappings of journalism.

No speaking to the people involved, no fact checking, just sucking up and spitting back

out the content of a forum, without the permission of those participating in that forum, or compensating

them in any way.

This did not go over well with the denizens of this subreddit, hence their effort to intentionally

feed this seeming AI system, bad data, to poison the well, essentially, making up the concept of glorbo and an increasingly

elaborate and silly feature set in order to show how ridiculous this approach to pseudojournalism is,

...