Redditors prank AI-powered news mill with “Glorbo” in World of Warcraft

Collection Notes:

An overview of the collective action of Reddit users to break a bot-powered news site that would regularly scrape Reddit for “free” content. While the users themselves seemed at first to approach their introduction of a fake World of Warcraft character as an experiment to prove that their suspicions were correct, it branched out to include testing the boundaries of research and the reliance of some nominally authoritative sites (such as IMDb) on a preponderance of secondary sources rather than a single confirming primary source.

It also, almost incidentally, led to the sort of organic collaborative play that comes when an audience decides to “yes-and” their way into developing an imaginary work by describing–or even creating themselves–source materials that support the existence of the work… or, in this case, the existence of the character Glorbo.

-Katherine Crighton