An Unfortunate Encounter With AI Slop

Today I had an unfortunate encounter with some AI slop content on the internet while theory crafting for my Old School RuneScape account. This is the first time that I have ever really encountered a piece of AI writing that was this obviously bad, and I wanted to talk about the experience.

Background

I have been playing a lot of Old School RuneScape lately, and am currently planning some grinds to get my Ultimate Ironman character ready for mid-game PvM content. As an Ultimate Ironman, my account has the restriction that I cannot trade with other players or use a bank. In practice, this means that 4-8 of my 28 inventory slots are unavailable to hold combat gear and supplies, as they are filled with tools, teleports, and other permanent items I need to keep on my character.

Sample inventory setup for my current star mining grind where inventory slots 21-24 contains tools for mining and teleports for navigating the around the map, and inventory slots 25-28 contain my seed box, rune pouch, looting bag, and gp.

My PvM gear setup will require weapons and armor for all three of the game's combat styles: melee, ranged, and magic. With ~30% of my inventory unavailable, it is important that I get the maximal use out of my remaining 20 inventory slots by using hybrid and tribrid gear: equipment that can be used for two (hybrid) or three (tribrid) combat styles. Being able to use one piece of gear for two combat styles reduces the number of inventory/body spaces required to hold that type of gear from 3 to 2, and being able to use one piece of gear for all three combat styles reduces that even further to a single body slot which requires no additional inventory spaces. To that end, I would really like to upgrade my current hybrid Armadyl d'hide boots to some tribrid boots without such a negative magic attack bonus. My current best bet for a pair of tribrid boots would be either the holy sandals with their +3 prayer bonus and no negative attack bonuses, or the spiked manacles with their +4 strength bonus and relatively minimal negative magic and ranged attack bonuses. Both of these boots are only available as a 1/1,333 drop from medium clue caskets, so it seems like grinding out a ton of medium clues is required to obtain either piece of equipment.

I have done about 50 or so medium clues on this account, most of which I got from monster drops and eclectic implings in Puro-Puro. Catching implings in Puro-Puro is really not something that I find fun, so I wanted to explore other ways of getting medium clues. I already knew about eclectic implings and pickpocketing gnomes as descent sources of medium clue scrolls, but I wanted to look at other methods to see if there was something that I would enjoy more.

Stumbling Upon The Slop

Alright so I want to find some analysis of medium clue scroll sources. A reasonable thing to type into a search engine would be something like "osrs best medium clue source", right? Ideally this would pull up a page on the wiki with some dedicated analysis, or a YouTube video from an OSRS content creator who has done that analysis themselves. Really either would work, since I am just doing some exploratory research at this point. Here is what I got when I plugged that search into DuckDuckGo.

The first result is just the wiki page for medium clues. Quickly scanning that page, I am not seeing any sort of dedicated analysis on clue scroll sources apart from the usual item sources drop rate table, so I go back to the search results. The second result is a Reddit post, which I try to avoid when possible since Reddit is just kind of a cesspool of unreliable information. Third result is from some website called FandomSpot. I have never heard of FandomSpot, but any website that has a navbar containing dedicated links to Pokémon, Skyrim, Minecraft, memes, anime, Genshin Impact, and some Sims 4 expansion, but not Old School RuneScape is uhhh... probably not a very reliable source.

Okay so fourth link in the DuckDuckGo search results is to some website called OSRS Money Making (don't actually go there since we will learn shortly that the website is shit). Again, I've never heard of this site, but it seems like the site is dedicated to Old School RuneScape content, so I thought it was at least worth a look.

Note that when I originally loaded this page on my Windows machine, that suspicious ad with the text "CREATE AI VIRAL VIDEOS WITH VEO 3" was actually at the bottom of the page, rather than prominently on the right side of the page as seen in the screenshot above. So with my original a quick scan of the page, I saw a color scheme reminiscent of the OSRS wiki, an image that is actually relevant to the topic being discussed1, some text that is not obviously suspicious at a glance, and nothing super sketchy (yet).

Passing the split-second vibe check, I start scrolling down the page to do a quick scan of the presented methods in the article to see if there is anything that I didn't already know.

I have not heard of the lizardman temple method, so my attention is piqued. But when I actually read the content of this section, everything begins to fall apart, and this is where I realize that this website just garbage AI slop.

First of all, the very first bullet point here lists Shayzien favour as part of the method requirements. This is odd because the entire Kourend favour system was removed in early 2024. It is entirely possible that this article could have been written before the removal of the favour system, but in that case why wouldn't the site admins update the article? The "how it works" section contains only the text "Enter the temple (Molch), pick or force stone chests, and dodge lizardmen. Expect 6-12 clues/hour." That is not a whole lot to go off of. What enemies are there? Is there any active component to searching the chests, or is it similar to opening the nature rune chest in Ardougne? I already happen know where the lizarman temple is, but another player might not, so where are the instructions on how to get to the location? Why are all five of the links in this section pointing towards other pages on the same website? The Old School RuneScape wiki is the source of truth for a lot of information, so it is odd that none of these links would direct to the wiki. Why is this section written using bullet points instead of just a paragraph? Actually why does this entire page have unnecessary bullet points everywhere?

And then it hits me - this page reads exactly like what an LLM would spit out if asked to produce an article on medium clue methods. The out of date information, the lack useful detail, the superfluous bullet points everywhere... IT'S JUST AI SLOP!

Shortly after, I found what I believe to be the smoking gun. Clicking on the "Lizardman Temple" link took me to another page on the same site where I was immediately greeted with the most low effort, irrelevant, and completely incorrect "information" I have ever seen on the web.

Just to get the obvious out of the way, this whole page reads like shit.

Lizardman Temple is an intriguing location in Old School RuneScape (OSRS)...

First of all, one would probably say "The Lizardman Temple is..." not "Lizardman Temple is...", and second of all, is the temple actually an intriguing location? Like, this is a fantasy video game that we play for fun, and I'm willing to bet most named locations are going to be some form intriguing or interesting or whatever other adjective one would encounter in the opening sentence of a first grade English paper. But the whole continent that the temple is a part of is intriguing. The whole game world is intriguing. This temple is not particularly more or less intriguing that anything else around it, and it just seems weird to use that language here. It would be like someone saying their back yard is an intriguing location around their house. Maybe their back yard is genuinely intriguing, but I am willing to bet the back yard is not any more or less noteworthy or mysterious than their shower or laundry room. Bonus points for repeating the same sentence further down, where now the Lizardman temple is apparently a "thrilling location" in addition to being an intriguing location.

Once inside the Lizardman Temple, players can explore various chambers filled with lizardmen and other challenges.

Well what do those various chambers looks like, and what are those challenges? This is supposedly an article dedicated to the temple, so why is it so sparse on detail? This sentence conveys almost zero information.

In addition to the terrible writing, there is also gratuitous amounts of obviously false information!

The very first sentence of the page says the location of the temple is "nestled within the swamplands of the Kourend and Kebos region", which is true. But immediately below that, under the "location and access" section the article says that the temple is now apparently located in the Kharidian Desert, which is so obviously incorrect that it is astounding to believe that an article containing that information made it to publication. Like, those two locations are literally on the opposite sides of the map!

Just to be even more incorrect, further under that location and access section there notes for how to get there via teleport which states "players with access to the Amulet of Glory can teleport to Karamja, then travel southwest to reach the temple", which is once again just completely wrong. Karamja is no where even remotely close to the lizardman temple and not convenient at all if your actual goal was to get to the (incorrect) Kharidian Desert.

When I was originally investigating this page, it was at this point where I became absolutely sure that this was some LLM-generated slop. The text on this page reads like an LLM that is vaguely familiar with Old School RuneScape just started completely hallucinating. No serious player would ever write this crap, and it is obvious that this page was not even given a single proofreading pass before publication.

Bonus shout-out to a section on questing further down the page which completely fabricates a connection between lizardman temple and the Dig Site / Fremennik Isles quests, attempts to draw a connection to a RuneScape 3 quest called Herblore Habitat which is not even a part of Old School RuneScape, and completely omits the one quest, A Kingdom Divided, that actualy does involve the lizardman temple. It is just... incredible.

This Sucks

Why did this get me so upset, and does it really even matter that much? Earlier today when this occurred, the time between entering my query into DuckDuckGo and realizing this site is AI slop was probably less than 60 seconds, which is not actually that much time lost, all things considered. But this still sucks. How much collective time is this garbage website going to waste for the rest of the OSRS community? How many of those community members won't realize the site is filled with bare-bones self-conflicting inaccurate AI slop?

As if this site wasn't bad enough already, if you dig even a little bit deeper you can see that this whole website is really just a shop that is trying to sell accounts, leveling & quest services, and in-game item services, all of which I belive is against Jagex's terms of service.

What really makes me upset here is that Old School RuneScape has one of the best wiki's of any game I have ever played. Seriously, OSRS players probably use the official wiki dozens of times per day, and there is a lot of effort put in from the wiki team to keep the wiki content up to date and accurate. And if you just punch a query into a search engine there is a chance that, like me, you could miss the information on that wiki and end up wasting your time on bullshit AI-generated content that no one could even bother to proofread, created as a funnel to get you to spend money. It's insulting and disgusting.

One of the greatest strengths of the Old School RuneScape playerbase is our collective desire to discover and share information about the game and its systems. We have a top-tier wiki, dozens if not hundreds of YouTubers creating high quality video guides, and thousands upon thousands of players collectively working on every possible flavor of optimization problem that the game has to offer. I mean heck, this whole journey started because I was trying to develop my own route to grind out the gear for my specific tribrid setup. Instead of writing about that routing, I am instead spending my afternoon in a coffee shop writing about a website that is the absolute antithesis of our community ethos.

Websites like the one I stumbled upon today will exist no matter what. Low-effort content mills were around long before the advent of LLMs, and they will continue to stay around long after the bubble pops and the AI industry collapses. But the rate and scale at which these LLMs and other AI tools can pump out incoherent garbage mean that right now more and more of the internet is seemingly going to be filled with bad actors using these tools to exploit and manipulate people at a rate that we have not previously seen.

For those of you who care, the actual information I was hoping to find with my original search can be found on the treasure trails strategies wiki page.

Footnotes

1. Although I would later find out the image was directly stolen from this YouTube video thumbnail by creator Kaoz OSRS.