Reddit Users Trick AI Into Reporting Fake ‘Glorbo’ News in World of Warcraft
Last week, a Reddit user named kaefer_kriegerin posted a fake announcement in the World of Warcraft subreddit about the introduction of a new feature called “Glorbo.” In reality, Glorbo doesn’t exist. The purpose of the post was to expose a website that uses AI to automatically scrape content from Reddit and publish it with minimal changes.
Members of the World of Warcraft subreddit had noticed that several gaming news sites were automatically collecting content from Reddit. To catch these bots in the act, they started posting about fake updates in the game.
“I’m so excited, they finally introduced Glorbo!!!” wrote kaefer_kriegerin in their trolling “announcement.” “Honestly, this new feature makes me so happy! I really want major bot-run news sites to publish an article about this. I have to say, ever since Hearthstone started hinting at this in 1994 [the game actually launched in 2014—Ed.], it was obvious that sooner or later Glorbo would be added to World of Warcraft.”
Other users joined in, leaving comments like, “The new Glorbo development team for World of Warcraft will be doing an AMA soon.”
Soon after, the news about Glorbo actually appeared on a gaming news site called The Portal, operated by Z League. The article simply repeated the original Reddit post, adding nonsensical details from the comments. Notably, the author, “Lucy Reed” (likely a bot), published over 80 articles that day.
As news of the Reddit experiment and Glorbo spread quickly on social media, The Portal deleted its post and eventually removed all World of Warcraft-related content from the site.
Why Automate Reddit Content Scraping?
The likely reason for scraping Reddit content is to boost Z League’s visibility in Google search results. This is a questionable SEO tactic designed to increase rankings. Additionally, it raises the chances that people will visit the Z League site, which sponsors gaming tournaments and benefits commercially from increased traffic.
According to ArsTechnica, it’s unclear exactly what technology Z League uses to collect data from Reddit, but some large language model APIs and open-source models with custom scripts are capable of handling this task.
Ironically, after the story about the Reddit experiment went viral, another Z League bot named Ashley Beam automatically published an article about the incident titled, “World of Warcraft (WoW) Players React to AI-Generated Content on Popular Gaming Sites.”