No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.
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Honestly if we can just prioritize giving real developers a spotlight to be seen and heard, sorting specifically by no-ai and having awards and events for no-ai, then I could see this being a potentially good thing. The low effort game devs of the past will all naturally sort themselves into slopper categories and out of the market.
The only problem is that perhaps not enough consumers are competent enough to care if a product is slop.
Part of the issue with this approach is that you essentially get to something like a karma system, where well known developers are pushed to the top.
This is something Valve just spent a lot of time and effort to undo, so small, new indie devs get as much storefront space as the veterans.
Valve really are the good guys huh
for me, step one is allowing me to block from sight, ANYTHING a by a supposed AAA developer. I do NOT want to see anything from ea, ubisoft, etc when searching for games.
another would be, if the game is early access and has 30 DLCs... I never want to see that companies 'products' again.
and honestly, that's it for me. Idgaf about ai slop of clone games (yet), good chance they are still individuals doing it and not some massive corporation.
I will always support the smaller teams whenever possible... I never want to see anything from rockstar, Ubisoft or whatever... all trash
Good news, you can already do that

Doesn't work. I tried that with paradox, but still keep seeing their games. I'm not sure what exactly it blocks, but it's not games from search results.
It removes them from all the suggestion places like the discovery queue and front page. For search results IIRC you have to ignore individual titles, and set your steam search settings to default to "hide ignored items".
Well. The real problem is that there's no way to definitively detect AI. And slop scammers are certainly not going to volunteer that information.
Slopping asset flip and cash grab games have always been a problem. That's nothing new. AI just made it easier to do.
This is a problem that's existed for 20 years basically. AI has only just made it more of a problem. It's not new.
If we could have solved this problem we already would have.
AI disclosure at a minimum I agree with wholeheartedly.
But basically every other solution everyone is throwing around is more or less just f****** stupid. Someone who legitimately makes a game for themselves. That is actually fun because they made it for the purpose of them themselves playing it. Even if they used nothing but AI is still probably going to be a better game than some half-assed cash grab or asset flip made by a legitimate human with no AI.
The problem isn't AI. The problem is s***** people making s***** games with no integrity or intent to play their own creation.
If you want a fun game, you have to make a game you would play. How you enforce that is f****** beyond me though.
Why the fuck do you fucking censor stupid shit on the fucking internet?
You know you can swear in this goddamned place right?
Voice to text auto censors words and im too lazy to fix it? Shit, fuck, piss, cunt, bitch, slut, retard, asshole.
That help? I can start slinging harder slurs along with it if you really are that upset. Like its just words. The only this that matters is you know what im saying. If i start mixing up every letter and fucking grammer, randomly adding censors none of it actually matters so long as its understandable.
I think a lot of them will in fact volunteer that information, and there is definitely a definitive way to detect AI: ask the developers to show their work. Images have layers, 3D assets can be demonstrated. Code is only slightly more ambiguous. On top of all of that, there is an obvious quality difference.
I think a lot of them will in fact volunteer that information
LOOOOOLOLOL
ask the developers to show their work
Nothing about that is definitive. And Valve isn't going to review it anyway.
Sloppers think it's the future, most of them have no idea how hated they are. Their shitbots tell them "AI assisted tools allow you to do more, better, faster" and not "yeah boss everyone will hate everything we make".
How is asking them to prove they did or can do work that they didn't and couldn't do not definitive proof?
Nobody is doing schoolwork to sell a game. What an asinine take. Valve also isnt going to pay people to go through all that code.
I was agreeing with you. Nobody is going to pay anybody to pour through every one of the 10k or so games that get released everyday. Its a costly practice for little reward from their point of view
- Require AI tool disclosure
- Enforce that. Spot check.
- Give us a filter to show/hide AI-flagged items
For cloning, I'm not sure of the best solution. Allowing the owner and users to report it is nice. But what happens when people are coincidentally working on a very similar game and release around the same time, even without knowledge of each other?
When you say cloning are you meaning like how there's now 200 different versions of lethal company on steam now?
Some needle-in-a-haystack game came out and got cloned to death is what I'm seeing in the news. People can't differentiate the original one vs the clones and it's hurt sales. Some companies are stopping open betas and other things as well to avoid it being cloned before they go to full release.
And 2048 was a direct ripoff of Threes! That's not a new problem, but the quantity is likely to become absurd.
Valve may just have to grit their teeth and actually hire people to do community work 😞 RIP. Where will they get the money??
Yeah out of 100 vibe coded games. Iv come across like 3 that were legitimately good.
Those three where actually very very good games But they were tiny little things clearly made because the guy who made them WANTED to play them.
While the rest where just asset flips or clearly just attempting to make a cheap quick buck.
It's just a great example of the problem. AI by itself doesn't cause an issue. We already had this problem. Asset flips low-called a crash grabs have always been a thing.
Problem AI caused is now it's a thousand times easier for literally every lazy f*** to do this.
Banning AI games should not happen. It is possible to make something legitimately fun and worthwhile playing with nothing but AI.
We need to solve the fact that every d****** can just s*** onto the steam store with no effort and leave something half built and abandoned.
Disclosure at a minimum. Better filtering harsher vote waiting.
My problem is every other idea I can think of unfairly smacks legitimate AI games or legitimate games that use AI as an actual proper tool as opposed to just a lazy way to asset flip.
Is not a lot of good ways to do this. To be fair, if there were we wouldn't have asset flips in low quality cash crabs either.
This is what they need to do. Give people the choice.
If it's not technically doable, then we'll do it ourselves, we'll fight over which game is and isn't full of slop. And, we'll be wrong sometimes, but increasingly right. Because, soon ALL media will be full of slop, including games.
The only way to avoid it will be to play old games. Which is fine by me, but there's always the next generation of gamers coming up who won't be so picky.
Steam already has the first two, and I'm pretty sure it has the third because it's illegal. It's just a matter of effort and volume. So many generated games can be put on Steam that it's almost impossible to keep up. If they don't disclose generative AI usage then it takes time to discover, and that time can steal the spotlight from the legitimate games.
In what world would adding a UI filter to hide games that use AI would it be illegal? Cite a law. Explain why all the other filters are not?
I think you misread what I wrote. It's already illegal to steal someone's work. If you're making a game and releases a demo and then someone copies it, that's copyright infringement. It's not a rule that Valve needs to add because it's an implicit rule because it's illegal.
Ah, so not the "first two" as in bullet points 1 and 2 in my list.
So, a few things here:
- Some things are covered by trademark. This can vary by jurisdiction
- Some things are covered by copyright. Also, this varies by jurisdiction
- Properly going through all the paperwork first is the safest, requires time and money, only applies in relevant jurisdictions, and requires time and effort again to enforce for only what it covers.
- Assuming the creator has the time and effort to go through 3 (if not, some stuff is arguably prior art but requires more time and money to prove), they have to be aware that anyone has created a clone of their work that would, at least in that jurisdiction, infringe.
- After they have found it, they need to contact valve and whomever else.
- If they're not happy stopping there, then there's the whole legal process (costing more time and money)
Edit: this is also not even the exhaustive version of the list.
Yes, that's why my first comment talks about effort, compared to the amount of slop that can be made. You aren't allowed to steal people's work, and you're also required to tag if your game uses gen-AI. It's just prohibitive to keep up with all of it now.
The legal process though is a formal requirement to sue them. Valve doesn't need to go through that. They could (and I think do) have a system for developers to claim that a game has stolen its work and request for it to be taken down. You don't need to go to court for a private company to enforce that. It's just that, again, it's impossible to keep up with it now. It's too easy to create a clone so, even if it's taken down, another one can appear in its place trivially.
. They could (and I think do) have a system for developers to claim that a game has stolen its work and request for it to be taken down.
I agree with this. Something like community notes on other social media might help on identification and alerting other users, but making sure that's not gamed by bots and the like is a separate issue.
Dear Steam,
Please put a filter tool in so that we, the player, can choose to filter out AI slop.
Thank you.
I think we're reaching a point where there is going to be so much stuff around be it games, tv, movies, music, etc all made by AI and all just garbage, that it will make curating a huge deal. Like we'll need to have services whose sole purpose is to sift through the marketplaces and find quality stuff to then present to people. So you'll have a two tiered system where on one hand you can browse "everything" and it's just a deluge of stuff and then on the other hand you can go to a curated marketplace that only lists stuff that is known to be high quality. But it's going to take time for those curated places to pop up, and in the mean time we are gonna be swimming in slop.
Like in the pre-search-engine internet you would have indexes, or whatever they were called, listing useful websites.
Yikes. On the one hand, curated lists sound like a breath of fresh air right now. On the other, that's AI setting us back 30 years.
My search engine even labels AI slop websites, that it pulls from open-source lists like https://github.com/alvi-se/ai-ublock-blacklist. So yeah every day I feel like the need for curated lists is getting stronger even for "useful websites". Too much noise these days.
Rotten Tomatoes -> Bots and Tomatoes. Is it AI slop or hot?
Neal Stephenson explores these ideas in a few of his books. Basically that there is so much false information online that the biggest advantage you can have is good software for sifting through it.
Pretty much this. I am reminded of when reality TV first came up, it was thought that it would be a passing fad lasting maybe a year or two. People get exited by it at first, then get bored of it craving something with more substance. It never happened. Turns out the slop machine hit a level good enough that many would lap it up. Survivor is going into it 51st season right now.
But while this stuff can be produced (be it text, TV, software), you can curate it. Those curated lists will become the new social treasure like how some movie critics could become minor celebrities in themselves. Yeah there will be AI bots trying to do that as well, but if they fall flat, so to will their respect.
You're going to see the media organic content labels, just like groceries have "regular" and "organic". There's demand for such a certification so it wouldn't surprise me to see that in the near future.
So basically the current steam curators system but you have to pay to see what they curate. And valve wins again
Well I think there could also be a place for like niche curators. Like a blog that goes and finds all the strategy games that are actually good and posts reviews of them. If your a fan of that type of game you follow them, they try all the shitty ones so you don't have to, and point you to the good ones. Same with other niche things.
You don't have to tell developers anything except that they need to disclose AI use, and then you need to give customers the ability to filter them. For the sake of your platform. Because nobody wants to go through Next Fest and scroll through piles of slop or be duped into buying a sloppy game over and over.
They can tell them to let us gatekeep. Ai needs to be labeled.
I'd say not only labelled, but at the very least if we ain't ostracizing generative ai being used in any part of the process, we should at least have the dignity to have it quarantined. I for one don't feel like buying and installing malware because a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code decides to upload to Steam, let alone literally any other platform.
You're already using an operating system where generative AI was being used in some parts of the process and creative tools have had generative AI functions since even before the LLM craze.
If we are talking autocomplete for IDEs, not generative AI. Also, a lot of the predictive code lines thing are just based off of what's most likely to come next, as ( most likely ) trained off of others work. Whereas I'd argue that is different enough from an LLM since it's basically the IDE version of the autocomplete on your smart phones keyboard app ( if you keep it on ). For LLMs, I would argue that they generate generic code that majority of the time needs cleaned up in order to even function since it will often, especially from back before I ditched it, look at your request saying you are using a specific language version and disregard because it thinks it can just use any code from that language and it'll work. Don't even get me started on how generative AI companies purposefully make their "software" write code in a way that is extremely bloated snd could easily be cut down to a couple lines just so they can say how their AI ( emphasis on artificial ) can write more code faster.
If we're talking filters on art programs like Krita, also historically not completely generative AI. Majority of them ( at least on Krita ) rely on transforming your art by whatever the code says it should do as compared to generating a new image/texture. No prompt nor a need to mass steal art online in order for these filters to work. As for even something like an autofill colourize mask thing, that relies more on some form of gap detection, which isn't considered generative AI, AFAIK. Just an advanced bucket fill tool.
If we're talking things like ESRGAN, sure, and I absolutely have problems with that as well, but they're ever so slightly lesser versions of the problems I have with LLMs and such.
I am well aware that some forms of it have existed for long before LLMs, but they were much more tame and weren't being used to destroy the internet and planet to the degree it's being used now.
If we are talking autocomplete for IDEs, not generative AI
They've been using small-ish LLMs for that for a few years for now actually, started with github copilot in 2021, but then other plugins became available and Jetbrains started including their own.
I don't mean intellisense that we had 10 or 20 years ago already where it suggests based on namespace visibility or whatever, I specifically mean where it suggests based on the context of your entire method or even file, not just the single statement
I was wrong though, apparently older content-aware fill is not generative AI, merely transformative. So I guess for example Photoshop has only had AI (generative fill, generative expand) for 3 years. Still, it's getting likelier and likelier that people working on different projects in different domains use AI features without even realizing it's AI.
If we’re talking things like ESRGAN, sure, and I absolutely have problems with that as well, but they’re ever so slightly lesser versions of the problems I have with LLMs and such.
Yes, stuff like that is mostly what I was referring to. Anything ML, neural network and so on. Not promptable, but still trained on a bunch of data that most likely is other people's art.
What about experienced developers who use AI, do they still count as a yahoo who cannot actually read their own code?
I think it's a difficult situation because a programmer that has been making software before AI was even a thing is not the same as a vibecoder that doesn't know what a variable is.
Is the programmer reviewing the code ai shits out or blindly trusting it?
Depends. If they continue to use it on a regular basis, I give them a couple months before their ability starts to decline and theb apply yahoo to them. Otherwise if it's more of a one off thing, I still personally do not trust the code but wouldn't call them a yahoo yet.
Solid win for those of you who like to wade through 200 AI slop titles before finding something good.
And before that, wading through 200 asset flipping games before finding something good.
Ironpineapple's job gonna be very interesting for the next few years.
I think the problem with a ban is that the creators of AI slop will stop disclosing or tagging it.
Allowing it with tags + letting users filter it out might be the best way to reduce it?
I'll take slop by 1 person, over AAA garbage any day
Try 10000 slop by 500 people
Honestly, the few times I've come across a good slop game. Day have been some of the best little indie games I've ever played.
AI has giving people who can design a good game. The ability to now also make those games by themselves.
Not everyone can be toby fox and do everything sadly.
The problem is those few games are made by people who made those games for themselves because they wanted to play them. Then they decided to share them but first and foremost they were still for the author.
Hey guys, just made it way too easy to put out s*** that you don't want to play yourself in an attempt to make a quick buck. To share that's always been a problem but it's just gotten worse.
Enforce an AI label, abusers get delisted and not allowed to be on steam for 3-5 years. Allow users to block AI labeled games.
Edit: I think the ban should affect the developer and publisher too. That way the publisher makes efforts to prevent release of slop too.
100% this.
if using AI in your product adds so much value to your product, then why are you hiding it??
Why would anyone making AI spam label their spam as AI?
Because if they don't they get banned which makes their shoveling harder.
Presumably some may try to slip it through. That's where community and Valve have to step in to police it together to get the dev and publisher banned for a duration.
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