Dear Steam,
Please put a filter tool in so that we, the player, can choose to filter out AI slop.
Thank you.
That’s fine and I like that. We, the gamers, we can decide and it should be like that. We just need Valve’s assistance by helping us with thorough AI disclosures. We can do the rest by controlling slop and clones with our wallets and filters.
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Let the people play what they want, even if it is slop! And the stealing/inspiring part - i get it, it is frustrating and not fair, but not the AI is the problem here, it’s just a tool - the problem is with the copycat’s reasoning (that is to make a quick buck and don’t give a damn about broader consequences for the future). If the game is a shameless copy it already is prone to be copyright claimable (although i don’t believe in legal batles, especially for small developers or not wealthy individuals that clearly are disadvantaged from the start), if it is not - let the Poeple decide. Of course it poses a threat of oversaturating the market - i don’t care, it’s not new - Steam has been oversaturated with non-AI-porn-game-slop for years now and nothing bad happened.
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They should make it easy to avoid it though by requiring AI use disclosures by developers and then including a filter for users to automatically filter AI like you can filter adult content out.
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?
Hot or Bot
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.
That is a built in feature in steam
People have been complaining about too many games years before AI, but most don’t remember when steam was such a gatekeeper that they didn’t even allow visual novels on the store. I think having a way to filter AI generated game assets is enough.
They should just surface the reviews more prominently, and let me buy a Steam Frame. The last part is key.
How much does it cost steam a single game? Maybe that is irrelevant, but if not, i doubt many of those games are going to make good sales
Hey Valve, could you use AI to port all of your own old Intel versions of Mac games to Apple Silicon?
is ai a tool or a crutch?
Can be both.
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Add a “AI Slop” feature in the reviews to track that. Let publishers flag games built on their IP. Give the store front some feature options for both.
The flag one should probably have a verification system and trust system to prevent IP trolling though. Reviews should probably also have rep system to weight reviews to tbh
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Why not just have a slow release for new games; only have them show up in search results for n users. Then the original and gain traction and get word of mouth before immitators emerge. Not perfect, could use moderation as well, but sorta a temporal patent.
You know who also doesn’t "gatekeep"developers? Piracy websites, which I shall now use.
Steam is only worth it so far as it’s convenient and user friendly. AI slop flood is neither.
So you’re going to avoid ai slop on pirate sites just like you avoid them on steam? What point are you making?
What point are you making?
That if I have to suffer through bad curation and filtering any way, paying for the service becomes irrelevant and I might as well get the games for free? The whole “piracy is a service issue” is GabeN’s most famous quote.
And now, AI saturation is a service issue
I mean, suppose Steam adds a search filter for AI, does that move the needle? And I feel like it’s going to become impossible to avoid, not so much was there AI used in creating the game, but how was it employed. I know my obvious prohibitions would be AI voices, storyline, art. Probably more.
It’s simple, really. Steam allows 18+ games, but it treats them under a special regime, you can fully disable them from view. AI games should be the same.
“Oh but developers will just lie” yeah they can lie about having a +18 asset in the middle of the game too, but as soon as they are caught and it’s proven, they are banned. Same if they hide malware.
“Oh but no game developer will disable Claude from VSCode, now what?”
There’s a difference between the kind of AI slop that dominated the latest demo fest vs using Claude in an IDE.
- 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?
Valve may just have to grit their teeth and actually hire people to do community work 😞 RIP. Where will they get the money??
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.
When you say cloning are you meaning like how there’s now 200 different versions of lethal company on steam now?
And 2048 was a direct ripoff of Threes! That’s not a new problem, but the quantity is likely to become absurd.
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.
Oh damn wow
I played some of them. They very different to be blatant clones. Just cloned idea
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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.
People were mad at the Steam Greenlight system, so when Valve listened and opened the doors to pre-AI slop, then they started whining about their games being buried in a sea of shit. I can’t blame Valve for taking a cautious approach.
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.
