If you’re proud of your use of LLMs, you’d want to promote it. The only legitimate reason to conceal it is you consider it problematic.
LLMs are a competency solvent and credibility chipper. It’s bad enough if you can afford sacrificing some slack, but a lobotomy it’s catastrophic if you haven’t.
It’s about context. I’m working on a game right now, an idea I’ve had for decades but has always been out of reach. AI has helped me a lot to develop it quickly while also working a full time job. And I’m also working hard to avoid disclosing the AI use - not because I don’t want people to know but because of the deserved stigma around AI slop.
Steam’s current stance (last time I checked) is that if the AI makes assets the player sees, hears, reads or otherwise experiences first-hand, then you must disclose it. But if the AI is used as a tool to produce the code that runs the game, it does not require disclosure. I personally agree with this and have tried to adhere to these rules.
In practice, it means that rather than having some generative tool make my in-game textures, I instead had AI create code that procedurally looks at 3D assets and defines how an artist would draw lines to represent that object if they saw it in real life. And when it comes to audio, I’m doing my own Foley work. For all of the dialogue in the game, I’m writing it myself, which is going to amount to hundreds of hours of work.
But it’s worth it to produce a game with a human touch to it, which doesn’t need to disclose use of AI-created assets. If there was a requirement to disclose use of an LLM in producing the backend code, I gladly would. AI has saved me countless hours by writing the game’s source code, which would easily have taken a year or more for me to write and debug by hand. I just don’t want my game to be lumped in with games that are churned out from an AI without an eye for quality, completeness, or a unique look and feel to the assets. I’ve put too much work into this game for someone to take one look at an AI tag and decide that it’s low-quality slop.
Fucksticks attacking you is a reason t want to hide it
Not necessarily true. The legitimate reason to hide it is irrational stigma. Why voluntarily paint a target on your back, if there’s no downside to not doing so? Just refuse to engage in the AI tagging, and all anyone has are unverifiable accusations.
SteamDB has a filter for the AI Content Disclosed tag, which means we can exclude games with it. Now I know some lie, and others also use to state that they don’t use AI, however it’s the best we’ve got for now.
https://steamdb.info/sales/event/713414759190366804/?displayOnly=Demo&tagid=-1368160
This kind of slop isn’t exclusive to AI, it just made the cost of making one less
Just look at the publisher Playway, they were already doing barely functional slop way before
The massively reduced effort and cost is the problem here, though
Not really. Maybe gamers will have to be a little more selective with the games they buy. That would actually work out better than what we had before AI.
Not really, as in its very easy to spot
GabeN will never allow that because it will eat into his bottom line
You mean the guy who owns and controls the only storefront in the entire industry with a forced AI disclosure?
While I want an AI filter, it isn’t the kind these people want. What I want is an AI that looks at my owned games, reviews, wishlist, and personal sentiments, then assembles a list and calendar of games that I am likely to play.
I enjoy hentai games - but don’t like ladies with big boobs nor thicc butts. Your standard filter wouldn’t be able to understand that.
Ditto for my preference of stylized aesthetic over photorealism. A huge chunk of games would vanish from my sight, with that taken into account.
Doesn’t the new Steam personalized calendar work for you? On paper it sounds like exactly what you’re describing https://store.steampowered.com/personalcalendar/
Not quite. It only takes hashtags, it doesn’t consider things that can be described in plain English. IMO, one of the valuable things about AI is that it can take multiple factors into account and determine whether something is the right mix to interest me.
For example, I like Shoot’em Ups, but only if they got upgrade progression systems similar to Tyrian 2000 and Sky Force. Temporary power ups and roguelike Shmups aren’t my thing. An AI can parse the game description and screenshots, then determine whether it has what I personally enjoy.
Oh that makes sense yeah
Maybe something like the interactive recommender but with a lot more sliders so you can adjust specific aspects https://store.steampowered.com/recommender
I have yet to see the actual numbers about this, I’m pretty sure it’s worse than what my gut feeling (and anecdotal observation) tells me: I download a TON of demos during Next Fest, it’s my favourite events of the year, so I tend to browse through hundreds of demos sorted by charts.
- February had around 3000 demos and 717 of those has declared using generative AI (keep in mind there’s also a bunch that did NOT declare using it, a lot of Steam capsules artwork are generated by AI despite no disclaimer for example)
- June had 4411 demos (27% more) and 553 of those (12%) has declared using generative AI (27% less) (that can mean either less demos using generative ai OR more demos hiding the fact they’re using generative ai)
- October (current edition) has 6509 registered demos, that’s a huge jump (57% more)
If you ask me the huge jump in committed demos is very likely due to vibe coding quickly becoming the de facto standard over the summer and turning out massive amounts of code in a few hours. I assume many “developers” have already accepted that this is how things are done for the moment and don’t even declare AI use anymore. “I haven’t written a single line of code last month!” is something I keep hearing lately. Even from indie devs who have already launched somewhat successful games on Steam. Some of them seem so happy about it that I wonder if they have any critical thinking skills at all because them essentially not working anymore means they’re all out of the job soon.
Making a game involves a lot more work than just coding. You don’t necessarily have to be out of work due to that. Some people may even be in work due to that, if they had a good strong vision for a game and it’s mechanics but we’re lacking coding skills. Still, it’s a complicated situation so it’s not black and white.
I’m pretty sure its companies capitalising on the hype.
They shit out a 75% complete game, then use AI to wrap models on a skeleton to make a “game”, that makes a good demo. Unfortunately the original company only wrote so much original code, so all these demos really can’t get past that (which makes an insane sales pitch, your hard work finally made your dream come true - just pay us $12.99 a month!).
It’s 8000 actually.
Oh, my source might be wrong then, where did you get the number?
From the next fest page.
Login to steam Home>Account>Store Preferences>Tags to exclude I put AI and Artificial Intelligence. It seems to do alright at filtering out the “ai” slop. Doesn’t stop me from checking to see if the ai warning is still there but haven’t seen any in awhile since doing that.
That filters out human-made games that are about AI
Games with no AI… do you know what games are? Because no
That’s a good start, but it only works with games where AI use is disclosed.
those are mostly for gameplay tags, you’re filtering out the Talos Principle games for example
I forgot we could do that. Will definitely enable this filter, the AI generated games are so annoying 😩
Steam/Valve doesn’t care.
Valve loves AI
What makes you say that?
I’m not going to pretend like Valve is some sort of Angel Corp but they also definitely have repeatedly skipped the opportunity to screw their consumers.
*every cooperation loves Ai.
I think at this point there isn’t a single player pushing back against it.
IDK nintendos stance on it, but even Capcom is updating the RE engine to have AI stuff now.
Maybe you who doesn’t understand what it is might be in the wrong?
Can I search only for games that do use it so I know it’s not been slung together by elitist pricks who don’t know how to code and refuse to use tools to help?
Oh wow another post from a licker who can’t consider the various nuances of this topic.
A production team using tools to automate portions of their workload is not the problem. I would argue we should have another term for these “AI” tools so that we can talk about them without the rightful fury we have towards AI as a whole.
Generative AI is a blight. Vibe-coding is a blight. A large number of people who have not drunk the AI enhanced kool-aid can see this clear as day.
And we arnt even talking about the blight data centers and their out of touch tech overlords are bringing to the conversation; its all entangled.
I dont give a shit if a team wants to use a model to help with certain tasks and then review it by hand before PR. That leaves a human in the middle who presumably understands the output based on their prior experience / years of hard earned knowledge. I also dont care if an artist wants to train a model on their own content to help with content creation, that’s a cool use case. Or a model trained on royalty fee / public domain…I can see a use case for this but we still need to weigh that against “could I have provided work for a local artist, programmer, etc.” Are we disincentivising these passions by taking away the already limited income sources available.
Anyway I forgot the point I was trying to make, Fuck AI (outside of a few morally acceptable use cases)
You do realise they’re the same fucking tools, right? Your wilful ignorance doesn’t change that.
You probably could do that. Even if it makes no sense to search for spam or slop content.
Ah, Mr. Sweeney. Don’t you have some CSAM to generate?
What the actual fuck is wrong with you?
Dude, I don’t mind the usage of AI on a small scale to solve small problems, but there are people generating 90% of the game with AI and only developing the remaining 10%, what the hell.
And? Your point? What is the cut off for human gruntwork to make it good and not badwrongfun?
Yeah, because the elitist pricks who don’t kbow how to code are definitely the ones NOT using AI.
The elitest pricks are the ones refusing to use the extremely useful tools available
Such filter would be problematic in itself, because it is publisher information. That means any non Ai tagged project is falsely advertised as non Ai.
Would still be help filter out some of the slop.
I think it would do more harm than being useful. Edit: it’s like using a virus scanner that only detects viruses that the developer says its a virus.
No, it’s a first pass filter. People against AI like myself know it’s a publisher declared thing but that’s still hundreds of results less I’d have to filter through. No virus scanner promises 100% accuracy, it promises to be part of a solution that still requires user diligence
That’s the issue with such Ai filter. Its useless if we have to trust publishers tag it correctly. If they do this ai slop, do you trust them doing that? It will bring false security for users trusting the filter would work correctly.
There will never be a perfect system. Already users rely on the AI tag on Steam, why not just make it easier to exclude those?
You’re letting perfection be the enemy of progress. You will never outsmart the most malicious dev or the laziest user. Ever. What you can do is make progress, take in feedback of how that improved things and where it still fails, and then make more progress.
Nah he’s right. If you add an AI filter then companies will just stop tagging their games as AI generated. It’s not a matter of anyone outsmarting anyone else it’s just common sense. There wouldn’t be any progress here, we would actually make things worse.
Steam needs to do something on their own, or crowd source it somehow. But they’ll never do that. They don’t even review games for quality level as it is.
Why wouldn’t you want to filter viruses that the developer says is a virus?
I think you did not understand the issue. I do not want to trust a virus scanner, that only trusts what the developer of a virus declares to be a virus or its safe.
Why wouldn’t you trust a developer that tells you that their software is a virus?
I think you didn’t understand the issue. I do not want to trust a virus scanner, that ONLY (important part is the word “only”) trusts a developer of a virus, that declares it to be a virus, or lies about it and declares it to be safe. I do not want to trust a virus scanner that just trusts the word of a virus developer.
Is it really hard to understand my English? Am I speaking Chinese?
Is it so hard to understand that your analogy is not applicable? This is not an AI detection tool. This is developers declaring “yes, this game was made with AI”.
I don’t think most malware devs care about brand reputation
I think that has nothing to do with my objection.
Well if a virus dev lied and hurt their rep it wouldn’t matter.
A steam dev lying has brand reputation to care about. Any company larger than a 3 person indie team has to care about PR if they want to be more than a one hit studio.
So I think it matters because its an impactful distinction between reality and your anecdote
Well if a virus dev lied and hurt their rep it wouldn’t matter.
I didn’t say virus dev, but an antivirus dev / tool. It’s like you trust only an antivirus tool, that relies on what the virus devs report. The antivirus tool represents the Steam filter in my objection.
Yeah so it still relies on virus devs report, like we both previously mentioned.
That is where and who I meant was lying.
Grandfather those in explicitly.
Just make the options yes AI, no AI, and unreported AI.
Takes the burden off small devs, but requires accountability for long, big projects
What accountability? Companies will just say “no AI” so they aren’t filtered. How will you enforce the tag while also providing due process for developers?
Report system to a manual review, utilising existing NSFW reviewal process.
If the dev can produce sources for their work, its obvious its not AI. If every project just “started finished”, and the dev known nothing about it, its probably AI.
And images make it obvious even when AAA companies use AI, making a lot of slop trivially bannable.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this alone at least pushed off the slop for half a decade.
