On the other hand, frontier LLMs are extremely good at getting super accurate info from games. They’ll happily disassemble the actual game binary to get to the bottom of certain game mechanics, including ones not obvious in the game itself, without even an explicit prompt to do so; I can merely ask questions about certain mechanics. That’s way better than often guessed (and guessed wrong) mechanics commonly found in game wikis. I’ve observed this over and over again when vibe coding some helper tools for some games I’m playing; I used to build these for wider communities and got some recognition for them, now I can do what I used to finish in 100 hours in like half an hour of prompting.
It’s the shit tier free or super low cost AI hallucination engines used by the masses that are the problem.
I know the steel made before this particular year is look after because was not affected or build during periods of radiation, and that gives it qualities sought after.
When AI started I got a copy of 6 months before of wikipedia and open street map.
At some point you cannot trust anything because everything has been touched by everything as a regurgitation of everything.
So what's the solution? I imagine the right one isn't specific to fan wikis. We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written. Who is building this? How will it work?
If the solution merely makes it high friction to post AI content that is probably good enough. In other words if someone has to copy/paste the output of an LLM into a text field and even then the tech detects that and throws an error that would be a big step in the right direction.
Reddit, Wikipedia, fan wikis, reviews, Hacker News comments - I'm sure there are a dozen more categories I'm missing.
Every high friction system that doesn't involve manual approval line-by-line is vulnerable to LLM circumvention and most of the ones that do are still also vulnerable to it, as long as the users of the end product are financially viable to prey upon. Also, if a game feels like work, most players will go find a different game, leaving only a narrow playerbase possessing certain personality traits. That kind of narrow playerbase has no reason to ever worry about a shortage of human wiki curation.
We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:
None? This is a fundamental change in the ecology, with the introduction of a new invasive species. Like with code, there is no going back, and no way to review everything that is written.
The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.
There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.
The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.
I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.
I've seen a couple of these in search results while looking for info about more niche games and at first I thought they were fan made but like the article mentions they're not actually wikis, nor do they contain accurate information.
The ones I came across just contained nebulous prose with variously incorrect info about the game on a few barebones pages, with a custom domain name. They weren't using any wiki software.
I have uBlock Origin installed so not sure if the purpose was ads but I was baffled as to what the goal would be otherwise since they're useless for proper information, let alone a wiki.
Wait until you have to audit your average codebase post-AI.
AI is rotting pretty much everything that was carefully curated over the last couple of decades. If it can be expressed in bits it will be degraded. This is one of the most annoying side effects of AI, the general decrease in quality. Quality of discourse, quality in literature, quality of information, quality of software. It's everywhere.
There are at least different kinds of messes, and the new kind may offer different challenges which may eventually require different (easier? harder? invented-yet?) techniques than the ones we're used-to.
The problem I'm already having with LLMs (in miniature) is code/comments/docs where I don't know whether it's someone's intent or whether its un-reviewed LLM babble. That creates a continual stumbling block for figuring out whether the thing should be the way it is, or whether I'm looking at an unusually-coherent error.
Take the exact same messy pile of bytes but promise: "Everything in this made sense to a human at some point in the process", and that changes how one approaches the problem.
Before code would be intentionally a certain way, done as a known compromise that's less than ideal, or the developer flubbed in some way. Using commit comments and other surrounding details you might be able to identify which in many cases which could guide your next steps. I don't think you can do that with an LLM's output.
So this is why we are seeing all these CVE's and vulnerability disclosures? Because of the careful curation? Feels to me it is more like ignorance is bliss.
Those bugs (assuming validity) were there in spite of the careful curation. People tend to do what they can to the best of their abilities. Before compilers did much in terms of static checking a lot more errors made it into production than today. Better tools -> better code.
Whether AI written code is going to be better in the longer term remains to be seen. With what I've looked at so far I'm not super optimistic about this.
It’s the shit tier free or super low cost AI hallucination engines used by the masses that are the problem.
When AI started I got a copy of 6 months before of wikipedia and open street map.
At some point you cannot trust anything because everything has been touched by everything as a regurgitation of everything.
If the solution merely makes it high friction to post AI content that is probably good enough. In other words if someone has to copy/paste the output of an LLM into a text field and even then the tech detects that and throws an error that would be a big step in the right direction.
Reddit, Wikipedia, fan wikis, reviews, Hacker News comments - I'm sure there are a dozen more categories I'm missing.
We can put these together to conclude that every game and community that lacks that kind of dedication will die out and be replaced by psychologically personalized short-form dopamine-agonist videos, as exemplified in an infamous comic:
https://x.com/Merryweatherey/status/1395152040389713922
The unspoken assumptions that underpinned the web included the idea that it was made by humans and that content generation couldn’t be mechanized.
There are already YouTube ads for services that Humanize AI output.
The best analogy is that we are at the start of the Dark Forest era of the net.
I assume people will adapt, based on the things that don’t change. If you cannot make out authenticity of participants, then you index on correctness of argument. If the output is useful to you, then you got what you needed and can move on. A more transactional and less community oriented web.
There is no solution (though there will be plenty of grifters trying to sell one).
The open internet we currently know will be lost to mountains of slop just like usenet and email were even prior to the AI era.
The ones I came across just contained nebulous prose with variously incorrect info about the game on a few barebones pages, with a custom domain name. They weren't using any wiki software.
I have uBlock Origin installed so not sure if the purpose was ads but I was baffled as to what the goal would be otherwise since they're useless for proper information, let alone a wiki.
AI is rotting pretty much everything that was carefully curated over the last couple of decades. If it can be expressed in bits it will be degraded. This is one of the most annoying side effects of AI, the general decrease in quality. Quality of discourse, quality in literature, quality of information, quality of software. It's everywhere.
The problem I'm already having with LLMs (in miniature) is code/comments/docs where I don't know whether it's someone's intent or whether its un-reviewed LLM babble. That creates a continual stumbling block for figuring out whether the thing should be the way it is, or whether I'm looking at an unusually-coherent error.
Take the exact same messy pile of bytes but promise: "Everything in this made sense to a human at some point in the process", and that changes how one approaches the problem.
Whether AI written code is going to be better in the longer term remains to be seen. With what I've looked at so far I'm not super optimistic about this.