I remember about 2 years ago, the Steam Next Fest was basically of more importance than Christmas for me. Not only did it used to remind me of a time when demo disks were common for PC and Console games back in the day, it also finally made developers take proper demos seriously. What advertising is more honest than to actually let the players experience a snippet of your game. It was awesome?
Fast forward to 2026. The last Steam Next Fest was absolutely overrun with AI slop. I’m not talking some “placeholder” assets. I’m talking AI generated art, AI generated description and some of them looked like they where the first attempt of a local model to one-shot what the “dev” had in mind. The current Next Fest is a little bit tamer. But the last one was literally 90% slop.
In my opinion Steam really needs to have a big fat disclaimer required if any AI assets are present in the current game or promotional material, something akin to the warning that abandoned Early Access games receive.
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What I care most about is the gameplay and having fun. As long as people are being creative and making their vision come to life, I do not mind some AI here and there. What I care most about is the gameplay and it actually being fun and well made.
It is important to note that the AI created assets should feel original in some way. It should not be the standard “make a knight in cartoon character style”. It has to be a somewhat novel combination of styles or something that is experienced as original.
I’d rather someone be able to make their dream game with some AI assets than them not making their game at all.
It’s everywhere on Steam because their whole system relies on community tags and voluntary developer disclosure, and Valve don’t seem to give a shit when developers are exposed as having lied.
I’ve mentioned it on Lemmy before but got downvoted because people don’t want to hear criticism of their beloved Valve, I guess.
What do you want Valve to do when the developer has lied?
Do we know if users can tag games and it show up as filterable? Like “AI” or something?
Users can create and tag games and then exclude games based on that tag. There’s even an “artificial intelligence” tag but looking at the games tagged by it that means something else than what we’re discussing here.
But I think what the other person was pointing at is that developers are supposed to have AI generated content disclosure when they have any pre-generated AI content in their game or use AI to live-generate content. AI assisted tools (such a using AI to code the game) don’t need to be disclosed. You can find an example of AI disclosure on ARC raiders because they’ve used AI to generate voices. This is something developers are supposed to fill disclosure but a lot of the devs don’t even when their game does release with AI assets. And my question was that what is Valve supposed to do when the developer chooses to ignore that clause?
Ah I see. Ill have to try and see if I can get that working.
At a certain point, there is no trust based tools that will work when you have a bunch of automated systems like this. The community will have to prune and the system itself will have to allow us to have easy to work with tools to exclude low quality slop moving forward. Because right now…its not working.
Missing disclosures on the store page is not an reason for refund either which is pretty annoying.
Valve has built a system with no mechanism for accountability.
Fully agree, even more so because people are really bad at spotting ai consistently. Waterpark simulator also had a controversy where people were talking that it’s obviously ai generated splash art and they had to show screenshots from the Photoshop file to prove them wrong.
At first I thought the term, “AI slop” was funny. Now I think it’s generally bad. Slop (aka awful writing/art/code) existed long before AI. Now people are starting to call reasonably well-made stuff “slop” just because AI was used at some point in the making of the thing. That’s unreasonable and it’s actually really bad for the anti-AI crowd’s image.
Just last night (on a Discord server) someone claimed they flagged a story as “AI” because the cover image may have been created with AI. When I opened the story to check it, it was full of so many grammatical errors and just generally bad writing I thought to myself, “there’s no fucking way this is AI!” Also, WTF does the cover image have to do with the story at all? Its entire purpose is to just draw attention to the story. It’s irrelevant.
By reporting that story as AI, that person just lowered the trustworthiness of all “AI” labels and anti-AI sentiment in general.
Also, WTF does the cover image have to do with the story at all? Its entire purpose is to just draw attention to the story. It’s irrelevant.
No, it’s not irrelevant. If one is willing to use AI for something so mind-numbingly mundane as replacing a stock image, it tells me they’re willing to use it for anything, marking everything else from that point as suspect.
Ah, “the fruit of the poisonous tree” anti-AI sentiment. I think it’s a ridiculous stance, but I understand.
Don’t ever let anyone hear you speaking to your phone or check a weather forecast! That’s AI and by using it, you’re just contaminating the world.
Also, if you catch COVID and end up in the hospital, make sure to refuse all the treatments that are drugs discovered by AI. That’s literally generative AI, BTW. Same exact tech as LLMs. Pharmaceutical companies are building data centers left and right to find more drugs like those COVID treatments. Don’t let them put one near you!
The only way they might have a point is that the marketing department and the developers are probably not the same people. Unless this is a 1-5 person operation.
You’re right that it might be overused and maybe slop has always been a thing, but when properly applied, there couldn’t be a more perfect term than “AI slop” imo
When I think, “AI slop” I think of things like fully automated tweets, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, etc that are literally created from prompts like,
make sure to post about topic X at least once a day. OMG, that shit is toxic waste as far as I’m concerned.…but cover images? Who TF cares‽ If the story is successful, they’ll replace that image with something superior made by a real artist. In the mean time, they were never going to pay an artist anyway so it’s not like it hurt artists.
Having said that, there’s one very specific industry that has already been completely destroyed by AI: Stock images. Getty? Nobody pays for that anymore when they can just generate something with AI. But how upset can we be when stock image companies are such highly exploitative corporate entities?
For me, it’s like someone vibe coding an alternative to Photoshop with minimal effort. Like, yeah, I’m sure it’s missing loads of features and has tons of bugs but it hurts Adobe (a proper villain) so let’s go! Haha.
I’m not informed enough to say if it was the right label here, I’m just saying it’s a good term when properly used.
I limit Steam Fest to demos of games in my wishlist that didn’t have a demo previously in order to decide if I’ll keep it or dispose of them. So I really don’t notice the slope.
I started scrolling through the list of demos, but stopped after like a minute because every other thumbnail was AI-slop.
Its frustratingly sad.Oh, no! There are more game choices than usual because tools are getting better, allowing more people to create their vision? How terrible. /s
They’re supposed to be tagged as such
Those are partially user maintained tags. Graveyard Keeper 2 had a recent controversy because the cover art appears to be AI and it wasn’t tagged as such, causing a lot of discussions in the community hub.
Aren’t these inherently new or forthcoming releases? One can’t expect community tags to be in place for newly released content.
Yes I did say “supposed to be”. Meaning you should at least be able to filter the ones that are tagged, while reporting the rest.
Unfortunately, these are not the usual “tags” that you can use to filter. AI useage is a notice from the developer, a bit further down the page, just above the system requirements.
Supposed to, but with zero repercussions for failing to disclose. And a missing disclosure isn’t considered a valid reason for refunding, so customers who realize they have been conned can’t even request a refund.
