AI-generated fake wikis flood search results for indie games
Eurogamer finds a wave of AI-built sites posing as game wikis, filled with fabricated content that crowds out real fan projects.
What to know
- AI-generated websites are impersonating game wikis, often outranking legitimate fan-run wikis in search results for indie games with small communities.
- These fake wikis contain fabricated characters, skills, and irrelevant information (e.g., unrelated movies or paintings sharing a game's name), misleading players seeking help.
- Publisher Hooded Horse says it must constantly compete against AI-generated competitors like GameDB, a network spanning more than 20 games whose operator admitted to using generative AI.
- The Independent Game Wiki Network has tracked at least five such AI-generated sites appearing within days of a single game's (Wardogs) release.
“The whole purpose of putting out a wiki is so when [players] search for help, they end up at a site that helps them. And instead we continually hear from players who stumbled up on these things and got confused and are wondering what's going on”
Tim Bender, CEO, Hooded Horse · Eurogamer ↗ · Oct 26
Jay Castello Eurogamer journalistTim Bender CEO, Hooded Horse (game publisher)GameDB Operator of an AI-generated wiki network covering 20+ gamesFlamingMojo Member, Independent Game Wiki Network
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump articlesposts
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Hacker News resurfaces the story a week later
The Eurogamer piece is resubmitted to Hacker News under a shortened title, drawing new attention with 49 points and 22 comments, and is cross-posted across several Mastodon bot accounts tracking HN activity.
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In this new era it is almost zero effort to stand up a convincing website on any topic, which is mostly correct, but riddled with small confabulations and errors. It can take typing one sentence (even with grammatical errors) to do so, the bar is now zero for creating plausible 'content' and flooding the internet with it. As the article notes bad…
2 more of the top 3 · 18 posts in this stretch
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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…
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I’m building a shed at the moment, and it’s become basically impossible to find reliable advice on tools or techniques by searching the web. It’s all just slop feeding back on itself now, unless you are lucky enough to find a forum post from before, say, 2023.For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar…
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- 4 days quiet
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ResetEra forum picks up the Eurogamer report
The article is shared and discussed on the gaming forum ResetEra, extending the conversation beyond the original outlet.
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Hooded Horse CEO details 'whack-a-mole' fight against AI wikis
Tim Bender describes how Hooded Horse, which builds its own fan wikis, has to compete with AI-generated sites like one run by GameDB, a network covering 20+ games whose creator admitted to using generative AI.
“[Generative AI] enables a run of basically commercial enterprises to mass produce and try to flood the search engine results of games to soak up their traffic…”
— Tim Bender -
background
Eurogamer exposes AI-generated fake wikis for indie games — Journalist Jay Castello traces a fake 'Nighthawks Wiki' full of invented companions and irrelevant content to an AI website builder, then finds many similar sites targeting indie games with small communities.
Also covered reported alongside — the timeline has no entry for these yet
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first by Eurogamer.net, 15d ago · also Eurogamer
and 1 smaller piece
What people are saying 15 voices from 1 site · best of 18 · verbatim
- Nov 2
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Remember strategy guides? One dedicated person can document a game in detail. A small team can manually review every wiki edit and contribute most themselves. We just need reputation (there are reputable people) and funding (the game companies themselves have funded these).Alternatively and for more general communities, the solution is invite-only…
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Even if you could come up with a perfect vetting process and create a site with only 100% factual content, wouldn’t the scrapers and trainers just gobble it up and make their own sites, ad-filled and ranked higher in search results and AI responses?
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> We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-written.I don't think the boundary should live at human-written or AI-written, it should just be factual.This weekend I was playing Stalker 2 and got frustrated that the trader prices in the game seem nonsensical. I spent a lot of time trying to research the mechanic but most…
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Wikipedia is mostly going in the direction of just having very strict rules enforced via human review. If you get caught using LLMs and refuse to stop, you get banned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_wit...I think its working so far.Wikipedia has always been different from other sites for leaning more on human labour…
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By the way, since fandom and fextralife were already such a huge blight on the concept of wiki, for a while people have been making solutions that might incidentally also help with AI slop wikis. For instance,
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I think a break will develop at a line of critical importance. 'Less important' sites like Reddit will continue to accept AI content and degrade over time. More important sites like Wikipedia will lock down to prevent AI contributions.
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We're going to need sites where 100% of contributed content is human-writtenIt needs to be verified. That's all. That could be by a human, but it could be by AI. The point is that any content that's written by AI might be wrong, so if you're not checking it you can't trust it. AI is pretty good at checking it's own work.I imagine with a fan wiki…
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> Attempts to reach GameDB for comment via their public contact email resulted in an error, stating "the remote server is misconfigured".this is such an emblematic thing for the slop peddlers
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> ... I put the question into Google and clicked the first result: the Nighthawks Wiki.The problem here is Google. Bad websites have always been around.
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I can make something and produce a digital signature for it. AI can't fake the signature. We meet in real life and exchange keys. You pass my key to your browser so when it encounters content with my signature it marks it as having come from somebody whose humanity you have verified. We build a network of such relationships. Maybe it's enough to…
- Nov 1
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…