AI-generated fan wikis spread errors in gaming culture

AI-generated fan wikis are riddled with errors and muddying the waters of games culture. Generative AI tools have made it easy for bad actors to crowd out good information. A website masquerading as the 'Nighthawks Wiki' was not actually a wiki and only invited corrections via email. The fake Nighthawks Wiki contained false information listing companions and skills that do not exist. It included unrelated information about the 1981 movie and the Edward Hopper painting in its sources. The domain name of the fake Nighthawks Wiki was traced to a website building service called Spaceship that offers an AI Website builder.

Tim Bender, CEO of Hooded Horse, has had to play whack-a-mole with AI-generated sites competing for search results. An AI-generated site for Hooded Horse's game Corsair Cove was part of a collection of over 20 games operated by GameDB. GameDB admitted to using generative AI to create its collection of game wikis. Generative AI enables commercial enterprises to mass produce sites and flood search engine results to soak up traffic. An attempt to contact GameDB via their public contact email resulted in an error stating the remote server is misconfigured.

FlamingMojo saw at least five AI-generated wikis appear for the game Wardogs in the days after its release in September. AI-generated sites have hurt the reputation of legitimate wikis because players get misinformed and bounce off before the real pages are created. Fandom has introduced AI features that had to be rolled back due to inaccuracies and unpopularity. Independent wikis rarely make money, often sacrificing ad revenue or paying for hosting out of pocket. FlamingMojo pays for the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki out of his own pocket and does not run any ads on it. A generative-AI site was found pointing users to download software flagged as potentially unsafe by malware software. Meta alone accounts for 5 million of the 7 million requests from AI crawlers to the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki. Server costs for independent wikis have increased between three- and ten-fold due to the impact of generative AI.