Good news for anyone reading this who happens to be me: My job is safe, at least for a while. How do I know? Because at least I—unlike the AI article generators scraping the World of Warcraft subreddit for stories—know that Glorbo isn't coming.
"Glorbo" is a made-up new WoW feature created by a Reddit user named kaefer_kriegerin. Having noticed that bots were plumbing the WoW subreddit for threads to turn into stories without any regard for verification, kaefer took it upon themself to teach them a lesson.
I’m so excited they finally introduced Glorbo!!! from r/wow
They wrote a breathless hype thread about an upcoming new WoW feature called Glorbo in the hopes of baiting a bot into turning it into a post, even going so far as to say they "just really want some major bot operated news websites to publish an article about this". They got their wish. It wasn't long before a site called Zleague.gg had produced an article about the unbridled enthusiasm of WoW fans for the introduction of Glorbo.
- The hooligan hacker guild that tore up WoW's newest raid (twice) just posted video evidence of the whole thing, and it's got me feeling weirdly nostalgic
- 'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon'
"Players express excitement for Glorbo's arrival and its potential impact on the game," read the first of four "Key Takeaways" on Zleague's article, purportedly written by an author who is really putting me to shame, having written over 50 articles in the last day alone. What potential impacts might Glorbo have, you ask aloud to your screen? Excellent question, and one that the robots unfortunately can't really answer, given that pretty much no one in on the joke in the Reddit thread ever wrote about what Glorbo was actually going to do.
Players "eagerly anticipate the changes Glorbo will bring to the game," reads the piece, but warns that some users have concerns about "Glorbo being overpowered". Heck, some players are even accusing Blizzard "of being inconsiderate towards non-Glorbo players"! As if the company didn't have enough to worry about with that Diablo 4 patch. "This debate highlights the divide between players who appreciate the power boost Klikclac offers and those who feel it unfairly disadvantages casual players," wrote Zleague, sagely.
Plenty of other users—and even a Blizzard dev—got in on the joke. Comments from other Reddit users on kaefer-kriegerin's thread about controversial features like "Klikclac" and "zoop" were also picked up and folded into the AI article. Over on Twitter (spotted by the humans at Wowhead), WoW dev Kyle Hartline expressed their relief about being "able to talk about Glorbo finally," though Zleague didn't notice that one.
The article over on Zleague got taken down shortly after kaefer_kriegerin declared victory, but it's still accessible via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. Perhaps this will encourage AI evangelists to be a bit more careful about where and when they deploy the tech in future? Ha, no, of course not. It's Glorbo's world; we're just living in it.
