AI-generated fan wikis are flooding game searches with errors

A writer researching the game Nighthawks found that a site calling itself a wiki was not editable and contained false information about companions, skills and unrelated works. Similar AI-generated sites are appearing for indie games, crowding out volunteer-run wikis and frustrating players who search for help.

False wikis target indie games

The Nighthawks site listed companions and skills that do not exist and mixed in details about the 1981 film and Edward Hopper painting of the same name. It invited corrections only by email, and that address bounced. The domain was traced to Spaceship, a website building service that also offers an AI website builder. A quick search found many similar sites, some editable and some only calling themselves wikis, often targeting indie games without large playerbases. Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender said his company has had to play whack-a-mole with AI-generated sites competing for search results and providing inaccurate information. One appeared for Corsair Cove but was part of a collection of more than 20 games operated by GameDB, whose creator admitted using generative AI. Bender said generative AI enables commercial enterprises to mass produce sites and flood search engine results to soak up traffic. Attempts to contact GameDB through its public email returned an error stating the remote server is misconfigured.

Volunteer wikis face search and cost pressures

Fan wikis were already contested. Hosting site Fandom dominates and introduced AI features that had to be rolled back because of inaccuracies and unpopularity. Independent wikis often struggle to appear in Google search rankings beneath umbrella sites. Fans rarely profit: they may give up ad revenue to larger platforms or pay hosting costs themselves. FlamingMojo pays for the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki out of his own pocket and runs no ads. Bender said the low profitability means even small ad revenue can be enough, and because the barrier is low, operators can spew out a mountain of sites. He also said some sites may aim beyond ad revenue, and in at least one case a generative AI site pointed users to download additional software with a paid subscription; the software had been poorly reviewed online and a website visit triggered a malware warning that it was potentially unsafe. None of the sites contacted for comment responded.

Scrapers and community response

Independent wikis also face heavy traffic from AI crawlers. Publicly available internal data from the Dune: Awakening Community Wiki shows 7 million requests in a 30-day period from AI crawlers, including 5 million from Meta alone. FlamingMojo said Meta hammers every page multiple times per second without sensible rate limits, while other scrapers can be directed to real pages. Smaller wikis may lack compute capacity for such spikes, and FlamingMojo said server costs have increased between three- and ten-fold due to generative AI. He saw at least five AI-generated wikis appear for the 100-player FPS Wardogs in the days after its September release. He said the sites hurt legitimate wikis' reputation because players are misinformed before a volunteer wiki has created or updated the relevant page, so they bounce off entirely. Bender said these tools make it easy for bad actors to flood and crowd out information that people dedicated time to create. FlamingMojo said independent gaming wikis are in a difficult place, facing SEO competition from corporate and AI sites as well as higher costs. FlamingMojo said the way to survive AI pollution is community, with many people chipping in a small bit and feeling shared ownership.

Sources: eurogamer.net