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.
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.
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.