Congratulations to the Destiny 2 game community, which after several days of hard work and enthusiasm has managed to make Glorbo happen.
If that above sentence made absolutely no sense to you, don’t worry: it’s (mostly) not supposed to. You see, Glorbo isn’t real. But it’s quickly turning into a real trend that MMO community members are using to trick AI websites into writing about fake trends in their beloved games, effectively exposing websites that are using AI to scrub communities and generate nonsensical headlines.
The return of Glorbo
The whole thing started last week with World of Warcraft, when a community member came up with the genius idea to trick AI websites into writing about a fake topic by making a Reddit post expressing enthusiasm for “glorbo” being added to the game. The community all got in on the joke, posting reply after reply expressing various feelings about the non-existent game feature, some of which were eventually aggregated into a completely ridiculous, completely serious, and now completely removed post on Zleague.gg about the fake trend.
Since then, the Destiny 2 community has gotten in on the joke, and in the last several days the Destiny 2 subreddit has been absolutely stuffed with Glorboposting. And today, they too managed to trick an AI into writing a sincere article about the trend.
The article itself makes almost no sense at all, including a section asking, “How to find the Destiny 2 secret boss Glorbo?” that fails to answer this question entirely, and repeatedly seeming to confuse whether Glorbo is a boss, a bug, or a secret strat throughout the article. It does appear to be drawing on actual boss strategies, including a mention of Simmumah Ur-Noku from the recent Ghosts of the Deep Dungeon, but everything Glorbo-related is absolute silliness.
Glorbo mania is spreading
To the delight (or maybe horror) of the community, it actually seems like multiple AI-written websites have picked up Glorbo. So while this is a pretty funny prank, it does put a spotlight on both the volume and lack of scrupulosity out there from AI-written websites that are just taking any keyword they scrape enough times off Reddit and turning them into hodge-podge piles of nonsensical text with an air of authority. Be careful what you read out there.
And congratulations to the Destiny 2 community on its newfound Glorbo. Who knows what MMO he’ll turn up in next? All hail Glorbo.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
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