Yet another Hacker News

AI fan wikis riddled with errors are muddying the waters of games culture

31 points rdmuser 2 hours ago 11 comments

skhr0680 1 hour ago | parent

Fandom (ex-Wikia) has been a dumpster fire since day one.

nieve 1 hour ago | parent

As witness the choice to squat on the name "Fandom" when they were notoriously averse to treating fandoms reasonably.

jacquesm 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gboss 47 minutes ago | parent

I’m not sure I’d call most enterprise code repositories, carefully curated. I think lava flow is way more standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_flow_(programming)

Terr_ 39 minutes ago | parent

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 a mistake.

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.

goda90 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

xlayn 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

rdmuser 39 minutes ago | parent

In case anyone isn't familiar with that type of steel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel

oez 8 minutes ago | parent

Similarly, radioactive signatures are used to identify modern forgeries of classic oil paintings!

jonathanberger 24 minutes ago | parent

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.

OgsyedIE 13 minutes ago | parent

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:

https://x.com/Merryweatherey/status/1395152040389713922