This is pretty amusing to see. Nothing really related to Linux / Steam Deck gaming, but more a state of the industry post that I thought you might also find fun. Redditors managed to trick an AI-powered news scraper.
AI powered news is something that is (annoyingly) going to become more common, whether we like it or not. Many bigger publishers are making moves into AI written articles. The problem is, "AI" is dumb and the articles are always full of errors or in this case — posting about something completely made up.
Redditors played a bit of an internet joke getting hyped over a fake announcement for World of Warcraft adding in the "Glorbo". The post titled "I’m so excited they finally introduced Glorbo!!!" reads:
Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I just really want some major bot operated news websites to publish an article about 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!
Feel free to comment below what features and stories you want to see in the future! Maybe you’ll be quoted on some trustworthy news websites as well!
That same day a website named "The Portal" scraped it, ran it through their silly "AI" processor and published an article about it, even including quotes from the user above about hoping "some major bot operated news websites to publish an article about this". They've since removed it but you can see it thanks to the Wayback Machine:
Even funnier, is that same website then also did an article noting "World of Warcraft (WoW) players are expressing their frustration with popular gaming sites that appear to be using AI to scrape content from their subreddit". AI article bots causing a nice self-own there.
A growing problem that will no doubt continue to get worse. You've all seen just how terrible the likes of Google search is now right? It's thanks to AI, constant clickbait farms hammering SEO techniques to become the top result and all sorts of trickery. Search engines are a mess now.
Why do websites do it? Pretty simple really: the more they publish about big-name stuff, the more they could rank up in search engines, get people to click to them and get advert revenue.
One thing is for sure, you won't see any AI written stuff here. I may not be the best writer but at least I'm real…last I checked.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
The early internet was a very strong bastion of the idea that independent individual choices all by themselves could create and defend an excellent space, albeit based on the idea that the very design of the internet itself gave great power to that ideal. That turned out not to be the case; the internet now is dominated by a few small players, and content is dominated by push (by those dominant players and their algorithms) rather than pull from individual internet denizens. Pull hasn't disappeared, but its impact has shrunk a great deal, and it gets shaped a whole lot. The final user has turned out not to have that much power compared to the corporate dollar.I strongly trust in the power of the final userOh, hey everyone, a time traveller from the early internet!
Why just the internet.
"Be the change you want to see in the world", altough not the exact words, the base concept stays still.
In general, the idea that just individually behaving well can create change is overblown. And in fact, it has often been pushed by large corporations precisely because they are aware it will not work; so they invented individual "carbon footprints" to divert people's attention away from regulation or creation of different infrastructure, emphasize recycling plastic so people won't think about mandating alternatives to plastic, and in general emphasize individual action as consumers so people won't think about political action as citizens.
So there has to be a misunderstanding.
My thinking is that If we look at the past, we deserve what we have today, as a collectivity made of individual choices converging under the influence of some big players.
Projecting the past will certainly paint a dark future, but i'm not pointing my finger to google or microsoft, my life is full of out of ordinary choices and full of consequent sentences like
"why do you do that, it is pointless".
I know that is pointless, because the rest of the users have the power to take what I think is the wrong path, but this has not to stop others to take different paths, which is sadly exactly what is happening, flatness.
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