World of Warcraft: Forever hit by AI-generated addon flood

Two years ago, Warcraft Logs had about 200 developers using its API, and two or three or four of them were being abusive. Today it has 10,000 developers using it, and 1,000 of them are abusive. That is the scale 404 Media reports has hit World of Warcraft modding in the days before World of Warcraft: Forever launches on Wednesday.

"There's been [an] explosion of development. Now, we're averaging a[t] least one commercial ask per day," says Sildri Silentcrest, CEO of Archon.gg and Warcraft Logs.

Some of the generation is now happening inside the game. A GitHub tool called witchcraft lets players call Claude or Codex to spin up addons while they are playing, and posts on World of Warcraft subreddits show users who only cop to using AI once another player asks. Plusmouse, an established addon developer, has made some of their GitHub repos private to keep the code out of LLM training data, and has filed complaints when copies pile up on top of their work.

"People are making rip-offs of my work and copying my ideas," Plusmouse told 404 Media. After releasing a nameplate design, they said, "Prior to that releasing I hadn't seen any addons adopt that style of design, and now, it feels like every AI addon ends up using that idea." The results are uneven: "Sometimes the code is so similar the complaint results in a takedown, other times it's just different enough to get away with it, despite feeling like my solution."

Warcraft Logs is reworking its API in response and introducing a paid commercial key. "We're changing our API to better align with the applications we want to enable," Silentcrest said. "We like things that help our community to dive deeper into their data, like tools that give you a deep dive on why you died to a boss or how you can improve on your next attempt." The article does not give a price for the commercial tier, or Blizzard's position on any of it.