Link: https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1vljbs4/state_of_the_subreddit_addressing_the_ai_elephant/

This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/wow by /u/YourResidentFeral on 2026-08-11 14:39:46+00:00.

Welcome to 12.1 everyone!

Before I dive into some of the upcoming changes to our rules regarding AI, I wanted to say that our experiments seem to have gone well.

• Inline Images have gone over spectacularly well. Generally discussions have bubbled to the top but people mostly have behaved, so this will be staying turned on permanently. Our idea to have them enforced as WoW related imagery was very short lived. Learned the lesson there. Overall they have been a fun addition to the subreddit without turning comment sections into image reaction graveyards.
• Loot/Achievement Saturday has worked nicely as a compromise. It keeps the subreddit from being inundated with the daily "I did a thing" posts but still allows people to celebrate their accomplishments of the week.

Both of these changes are going to stick around.

With that out of the way. Let's talk AI.

The stance of this subreddit continues to be: We do not want AI Slop here. We want to create a space where artists and creators can showcase their love of this game in however they so choose, and AI generated content as a whole tends to drown that out. We will continue to remove images, text, video, and audio that are AI generated to the best of our ability.

Bluntly, its getting harder and harder to differentiate at a glance, and there are many false positives that we get in our queue. Continue reporting and we will do our best. There are APIs we can use to check these things but those cost money and use AI themselves and we don't really want to keep feeding AI into AI repeatedly especially with rising token costs.

That said. That genie is out of the bottle and there are two ways that are irrevocably so: Translation and Software.

AI Generated Code

AI models have pretty irrevocably changed the landscape of software engineering. "Vibecoded slop" has basically become part of the average person's lexicon here. An AI model in the hands of an experienced developer though is an incredibly powerful tool. Most things you use on your devices these days has AI generated code in it. Speaking from experience, there are two ways to use it:

• Its like having a junior engineer in your pocket. You don't trust their work implicitly, but you send it a lot of the repetitive busywork and let it take a syntactical load off your shoulders so you can focus on things like
• AI "web design" has become the new "I'm a developer not a UX designer" look replacing what used to be "This looks like craigslist".
• If the majority of your assets are AI generated your post may be subject to removal.

There are upsides and downsides to all of this, but one thing we've noticed is a large uptick of web tools and addons being built for the game as efficiency and access have gone up. Many of these tools we've noticed try to solve problems that have already been solved by the community in a different way. AI is forever going to be part of the software developer process moving forward in all likelihood, so we need to adapt our rules a little bit to them. We want people to share what they've made, but we want them to do so thoughtfully.

We will be adding a new Flair for "Addon/Website/Tools" that will allow creators to share what they've made on the subreddit. Automod is going to be setup to respond to these posts and the OP will need to answer the following questions:

• What does this do differently than other existing tools in the World of Warcraft ecosystem?
• You must disclose how AI was used in your process/workflow in ANY way? Did you use it to generate code? Did you use it to brainstorm in any way? Is this shipping with any AI generated Audio, Images, or Text? Are these intended to be placeholders or permanent?
• If the bulk of your assets or writing is AI generated that is grounds for removal.

Posts that do not include their disclosures in either the body or as a response to automod are subject to removal. We recognize that AI has become a part of how developers build things now. We want to leave it to the community to judge what levels are acceptable and if it has been used responsibly in these cases. The posts themselves must not be written by AI.

We also recognize that this sits in contradiction with how we treat other AI generated content on the subreddit. We debated if any artistic assets shipping would disqualify these websites/addons/tools entirely. This is a difficult one because on one hand we want to encourage transparency and on the other we do not want to normalize using AI for things like Art/Audio/etc shipping in the final product. I am looking for feedback from the community on this one as well as feedback on how we can do the disclosures better.

In the short term; the flair, the changes to the rules, and the changes to automod should be going live in the next hour or so. Though they will be subject to refinement based on feedback from this post.

Translation

Most translation tools already used a proto-ai/llm of sorts to do the job. Much of the technology that was used in translation software was the foundation for LLMs of today. As of right now nearly all translation tools are AI/LLM powered. Nu-reddit has a native translator that is LLM powered.

For better or for worse there is no way to translate something online anymore that isn't being run through an AI engine of sorts. A blanket ban on AI here doesn't make sense in this case.

We will explicitly allow AI that is used for translation if disclosed in a top level post. We understand that there's really no way to always enforce this 100% of the time and for smaller posts it doesn't really matter. This rule is more intended for those large, multi-paragraph posts where someone's first language isn't English and they put it through a translator. What used to be "Sorry, English is my 2nd language" has turned into "I'm going to write in my native tongue and put it through an AI translator".