World of Warcraft players wrote about a fictional game element, “Glorbo,” on a subreddit for the game, trying to entice an AI bot to write an article about it. It worked:

And it…worked. Zleague auto-published a post titled “World of Warcraft Players Excited For Glorbo’s Introduction.”

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That is…all essentially nonsense. The article was left online for a while but has finally been taken down (here’s a mirror, it’s hilarious). All the authors listed as having bylines on the site are fake. It appears this entire thing is run with close to zero oversight.

Expect lots more of this sort of thing in the future. Also, expect the AI bots to get better at detecting this sort of thing. It’s going to be an arms race.