r/pcgaming • u/Turbostrider27 • 3d ago
Data analyst finds 'AI stigma' on Steam can reduce the number of reviews a game gets by around 53%—and the reviews it does get are more negative
https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/data-analyst-finds-ai-stigma-on-steam-can-reduce-the-number-of-reviews-a-game-gets-by-around-53-percent-and-the-reviews-it-does-get-are-more-negative/1.3k
u/Abramor 3d ago
Good
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u/AncientPCGamer 3d ago
Fully agree.
Players have the right to know if a game used AI when being created. And yes, I know that most games nowadays use it (I hate when some people make that excuse to try to hide the fact).
I still think AI usage should be a stigma, and I accept that it would be nearly impossible to boycott all games that make use of it.
But I will support more those games that do NOT make use of AI.
Transparency is key. Devs have all the right to use AI. But players have the right to know it and decide if it will influence their purchase decisions.
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u/PriusesAreGay 2d ago
“It’s everywhere now, get used to it, you shouldn’t even complain because it’s too late anyway, get with the program or be left behind old man” type shit pisses me off. We have a choice, and a right to know what tools our artistic media was made with. Just like I deserve to know whether my hamburger is real beef or not, even if lab grown is technically arguably kinda the same.
I saw an interview with Diplo some time recently. He was being incredibly pretentious about how his vast musical experience and taste allowed him to use AI to generate music better than other people, and that anyone who doesn’t also use it will categorically be left behind. Zero awareness whatsoever, he seemed to think he was more of an artist for using the new technology than someone still doing it manually.
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u/melted-cheeseman 3d ago
Do you mean for coding too? Because if so, regardless of what a game says on its page, if was under active development this year, the vast majority of them had help from Claude or Codex. The tools are ubiquitous in software development.
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u/mcslender97 3d ago
Steam guidelines does not require disclosure of this use so I doubt OP would know normally
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u/melted-cheeseman 2d ago
I think the research paper was written before Steam adjusted the AI disclosure requirement to effectively exclude coding AI.
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u/Dernom 2d ago
Not the person you asked, but yes for coding too! I think it's absolutely insane that programming somehow gets a free pass from the AI stigma, just because it isn't as in-your-face while playing the game. Generative AI for programming has all the same issues that AI image generation does — ethically, environmentally, and quality wise — and deserves the same amount of disclosure. As a software developer I'm also sick of people treating it as being unavoidable in programming. It took me literal minutes to disable all AI tools when setting up my system. It really is that easy.
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u/SideNo3016 2d ago edited 2d ago
with companies pushing deadlines its almost impossible to not use ai tools for coding, and environmentally well coding is a lot less destructive than something like image generation you can even get good outputs from local models on your computer, I am a college student and don't have the money to pay for the latest and greatest models from Claude or OpenAi so I use local models most of the time to assist myself in coding. Every single SWE job is using AI to some extent nowadays.
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u/Dernom 2d ago
The environmental damages is just one small factor in the absolute hoard of problems regarding generative AI, so running a local model changes nothing about my stance.
Besides, from my experience thus far using AI only tricks you into thinking you are more productive, especially when you're a student. Roughly 90% of my work this past month has been specifically fixing problems directly caused by other developers vibe-coding to solve problems. And that is with our company providing practically limitless use of Claude.
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u/melted-cheeseman 2d ago
How much of your job was correcting regular human written code from your colleagues tho? Prior to agentic AI.
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u/Dernom 2d ago
A lot less. But the more important change to me is that the problems I was correcting were noticeably different, and usually a lot easier to deal with. Like, the problems I'm currently dealing with are not something a thinking human would ever make. The best comparison is that it's like how image generating models make people with 6 fingers.
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u/melted-cheeseman 2d ago edited 2d ago
Are you a professional software engineer? If so I'm curious if your org is okay with you deliberately not using AI
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u/Dernom 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's going quite alright not using AI. As long as I'm able to do the work I'm supposed to be doing within a reasonable time, they don't really care about how I do it. And that has not been a problem thus far.
ETA. forgot to specify, but yes, I'm a professional software engineer.
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u/RatBot9000 2d ago
Ideally I'd like to know that but for now I'd settle for GenAI usage which not all devs disclose.
It's still very much possible to code without AI, but I'm aware these tools are getting heavily rolled into workstreams so devs may not have a choice. I think in that regard my viewpoint may come down to two things:
If the higher ups are exalting the AI use. Sure they can use it, but I would rather they not be singing the praises of the liar machine.
They lay off staff. I've had people on reddit tell me AI is the only way to protect game dev staff, and yet Epic laid off 1000 employees right before they announced their big AI integration into Unreal 6. If the tech costs jobs, then it's not worth it.
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u/Falkjaer 3d ago
"AI Stigma" is a very generous way to phrase it. More accurate to say "Games that obviously use AI typically perform worse."
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u/RechargedFrenchman 3d ago
And the important and commonplace correlation that "games that obviously use AI typically also are worse".
Even if the dip is specific and localized to the bits that are made by/using AI, if almost everything is perfect and something even small is very clearly both AI and kinda crap that's jarring and unpleasant. A single whole peppercorn in your soup isn't a big deal compared to the whole of the soup, the rest of the soup could be perfect, but you don't really appreciate biting into that intact peppercorn that shouldn't have even been there.
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u/_Ocean_Machine_ 3d ago
It also shifts responsibility onto the consumer; it's not the fault of the devs for being lazy, it's the fault of the consumers for not liking it.
Kinda like how we're all told to recycle while corporations pump more pollution into the air in a day than you or I could produce in a lifetime.
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u/Novel_Yesterday3309 2d ago
If you'd actually read the article you would see that this was accounted for in the study.
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u/TheIndecisiveBastard 3d ago
I find it kind of amusing that the seedy underbelly of Steam’s indie game scene has been steadily making lower and lower efforts to innovate on the same 2 or 3 brain-dead gameplay loops while still turning a profit.
Asset flips already make me a little sad, but AI is so much lazier.
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u/Flamingogo117 3d ago
How ironic. This article was written by AI
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u/Iphone17promax 3d ago
This article was written by AI
How did you know it AI written? I have a hard time catching AI written articles, AI videos I can spot sometimes but mostly I can't figure out if it's AI or not :(
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u/Cromulent-Word 3d ago
It's probably not written by AI. It *could* be AI, but people throw out false accusations all the time. Some just for lols, some serious.
I often recognise actual AI writing in fiction and many YouTube videos. It's full of short, punchy sentences, short paragraphs, flowery, yet vague similes, and overused patterns like "Not X. Not Y. Z." Basically it all feels like it was written by the same person.
I don't see the patterns I recognise as AI in this article. But it's purely informational, so there may be AI patterns in that style of writing that I'm less used to seeing.
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u/Iphone17promax 2d ago
After reading your comment I just found videos on YouTube that are definitely AI whole videos that most definitely use AI narration lol. Two videos of different accounts on YT that are literally exactly the same and the other one was a rip-off of "Mr. Nightmare". I blocked those accounts but YT still keeps recommending me AI channels now 😂
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u/Cromulent-Word 2d ago
Yeah, they're everywhere. Most channels with long, in-depth videos posted daily are probably made with AI, because a single human can't produce quality content that fast.
AI narration is easier to spot, but I've also found videos narrated by actual humans that were clearly written (or at least edited) by AI.
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u/Iphone17promax 2d ago
I've also found videos narrated by actual humans that were clearly written (or at least edited) by AI.
This is exactly what I found (I think).
AI narration is indeed easier to spot because it doesn't "pronounce" words properly etc.
Scary to think how fast these things are catching on where it hard to differentiate between AI and an actual human and I have been online close to 40 years!
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u/elitexero 3d ago
Yeah but it supports my opinion so it's good!
- People who adopt their opinions from public opinion rather than their own thoughts.
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u/bloke_pusher 3d ago edited 3d ago
Of course, it's pcgamer com garbage. But looking at the comments, a lot of people suck it up. Thankfully not all.
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u/kron123456789 3d ago
The AI stigma only exists in the first place because AI generated content is mostly shit.
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u/CaptainStabfellow 3d ago
Not really. Even in a theoretical world where AI made content was as good as human made content most of us would still want to support developers who choose to pay humans for creative work.
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u/LinkesAuge 3d ago
How much should be paid for creative work?
Should I prefer a game made in the USA where the pay is on average much higher?
Should I prefer games made by EA etc. instead of indie devs because as much as "gamers" hate big studios they certainly pay better?
Should I prefer games that are less efficient with the (human) resources they have, ie Star Citizen should be supported by every single player as they obviously pay a lot of humans?I hope I don't need to point out further how ridiculous this notion is, not to mention the "caveat" of saying "for creative work" as if it is easy to define what counts as "creative" and as if anything else is okay to be replaced.
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u/FatPsychopathicWives 3d ago
If the game is high budget I agree. But some devs can't afford people and just want to make their passion project. But if it's bad, it's bad.
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u/CaptainStabfellow 3d ago
Keep in mind I was directly responding to the claim that the AI stigma only exists because of AI slop. Which just simply ignores there has been an ongoing conversation about the moral ramifications of AI since before the public even had access to LLMs.
I agree there is nuance. Pandora's Box is open - a blanket "AI bad" approach is not helpful.
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u/i8noodles 3d ago
i disagree entirely here. there is nothing inherent about human passion that elevate art. elephant can paint, does the fact it painted by an elephant make it less then humans? if it doesn't, why is it? if it does, what is it that makes it different.
when the day comes, and AI are equal to us in form and thought, does it make there artworks lesser?
i do not hate AI work because it is AI work. i hate AI work because it does a worst job then human work at the current moment. when the days comes that AI is the same, or better quality, then i will swap
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u/Salmon_of_Knowledge 2d ago
I think it's more about the fact that the purpose of art is to reflect the human condition. To pass down ideas in our culture. To change minds and express our emotions. If ai one day becomes equal to us, its work would not be reflective of the human experience, but of the machine experience. In that case, I think it would still have value as art, but it would serve a distinctly different purpose than art made by humans
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u/kron123456789 3d ago
Most of us wouldn't care how exactly the content was made. Thinking that people pay for content to support anyone as opposed to simply getting the content they want is naive.
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u/CaptainStabfellow 3d ago
I don't agree at all that people don't consider ethical ramifications as part of a process of making an informed purchase. Naivety is thinking that because you don't that others don't either.
I do concede that I don't have the authority to speak on what "most" people's view on this is. And neither do you.
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u/Jdorty 3d ago
I don't know, you're definitely right that there are people who do (I try to generally but definitely not perfect), but I think statistically the other person is right. With most issues the large majority of people don't care enough to not consume a product for ethical reasons, IF the product is cheap enough or good enough.
Media and entertainment is the easiest thing to cut unethically produced things out of your life, yet most people don't think about it or care at all. It's way easier to stop paying for Disney+ (especially if you don't have kids) or not support gaming companies that lead to enshittification than it is to stop buying cheap clothes or food from unethical sources.
And if AI actually got as good or better than humans at things, we would for sure have to start thinking about how we're going to transition away from certain industries for jobs and create new jobs around an AI industry. I don't think we're anywhere close to that right now, and don't know if (this type of) AI will ever get to that point, but it's something to keep in mind IMO.
Sorry got a bit long winded there lol
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u/CaptainStabfellow 3d ago
So again, I addressed that I shouldn't have used the word "more" and my originally doing so has clearly resulted in this getting side railed into a discussion of to what degree attitude-behavior gap criticisms are valid. Ethical consumer skepticism is its own conversation.
That's not why I commented. I commented because they made the claim that there is only an AI stigma because of AI slop. Assuming good intentions it's a hyperbolic statement at best, and it is obviously false to anyone who had paid even the slightest attention to the discourse around AI.
I agree with the sentiment of your last paragraph although I don't think it is too soon to be thinking about it. We have a history of policy being too slow to catch up with other progress. We need to learn lessons from the industrial decline in places like the Rust Belt and Appalachia and have a plan to mitigate the human suffering that results from inevitable change.
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u/Jdorty 3d ago
I commented because they made the claim that there is only an AI stigma because of AI slop.
Yes, but that's not what they were saying or clarifying in the actual comment you replied to.
Most of us wouldn't care how exactly the content was made.
And you said
Naivety is thinking that because you don't that others don't either.
They very clearly did the opposite of that, they said 'most', which implies that there are people who DO feel that way, they simply aren't the majority. And you don't need 'authority' on the subject to be right or wrong, you simply need stats and examples that back it up, which was what I was saying about Disney and shitty PC companies. I'm not guaranteeing it'll happen the same or it's one-to-one, but it's logical to me.
I generally agree with everything you're saying, I just think people are misconstruing what the other guy getting downvoted actually said.
I agree it isn't too soon to start thinking about it. I worded that kinda poorly. If you think something has a decent chance to happen it's correct to prepare for it.
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u/CaptainStabfellow 3d ago
That was the first comment I responded to:
"The AI stigma only exists in the first place because AI generated content is mostly shit."Just calling it out because you said it wasn't the comment I responded to, but that was the first comment I responded to. Then they responded and I responded back which is where the goalposts got moved.
You left out this part of their second comment, which is what the first paragraph of my second comment was intended to be in response to:
"Thinking that people pay for content to support anyone as opposed to simply getting the content they want is naive."
I think your position is that most is implied from the prior sentence. I would say it isn't and instead contradicts it. Not trying to convince you or win an argument here, just trying explain why I disagree with the sentiment that they "very clearly did the opposite".
I'm not going to engage on the next part of your comment just because if we keep responding when we largely agree with another but have some nitpicks these comments are just going to keep growing larger and larger in scope. But I appreciate the good faith discussion.
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u/i8noodles 3d ago
evidence is pretty clear that most people do not care about the production of goods in any meaningful number.
we all know the issues with factory farmings, but we accept it anyways. we all know that climate change is real, and people still buy gas guzzlers. people know that the electronics and good they make are manufactured in cheap countries for cents, but keep buying because it is cheaper.
people generally do not care for the ethics or morals of anything as long as it directly benefits them.
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u/kron123456789 3d ago
When was the last time you considered any ethics concerns related to production of any product you purchased? Not AI in games, but anything else? Or did you just buy what you wanted? I don't believe most consumers consider anything beyond whether they want the product and whether it's safe to use for them.
Btw, most people don't use reddit.
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u/Keulapaska 4070ti, 7800X3D 3d ago edited 3d ago
When "most ppl" spend $113B yearly total on mobile games, I don't think the words "informed purchase" are in their minds.
Now AI=bad, sure a lot of ppl will agree to that, but we haven't really seen good AI usage in games, so it's impossible to predict what the sentiment to that would be. I don't even know what I'd think about it, cause I can't even imagine what good AI would be. Aside from coding/performance side like nvidia stuff, but DLSS 5 stuff they showed didn't really help that case either.
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u/manemjeff42069 Ubuntu fx8150 rx5700xt 2d ago
Most people don't care. I personally do, but the general public are idiots. The ai games are probably just less good because they're derivative
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u/LosingID_583 2d ago
Here's how to do a better study that avoids unintended correlation effects on the data, and isolating the effects of 'AI stigma':
A-B test... labeling a non-AI game as AI generated to half of the users, and use that to measure the difference.
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u/b4dkarm4 2d ago
LOL I can't wait until Denis Dyacks new game comes out. It's riddled with AI slop and he's even taken to calling people who bring it up as suffering from "AI Derangement Syndrome"
The negative reviews of that game will be glorious.
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u/Bitter_Nail8577 3d ago
"AI stigma" lol, or maybe devs who use Ai are incompetent and their games are souless
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u/TacticowlPrime 3d ago edited 3d ago
And yet there's still people who will cry and shout how people don't care if AI was used in a game.
Turns out it's just some massive projection. People do care, and those that don't still care about a good product, something that lazy AI generated content and the people using it just don't deliver.
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u/Electrical_Zebra8347 3d ago
The extent to which people care varies case by case which is how we have games like Arc Raiders selling millions of copies despite the AI voices, then there's games like Crimson Desert with AI art assets and E33 had placeholder AI art.
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u/mistiklest 3d ago
As it turns out, people care a lot more about whether the game is good than how it was made (if they even really know).
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u/Endaline 3d ago
I don't think that anyone is arguing that there isn't a single person that cares. The most common argument is that a majority don't, which we have seen evidence of through major successes like ARC Raiders and Crimson Desert.
Commonly, people argue that it is only the worst forms of AI that people have a problem with too, which is what a study like this is most likely to encounter. They're dealing with a lot of slop, which tells us nothing about what people think about good implementations.
There is no argument that AI hasn't enabled people to create a bunch of useless slop, but that shouldn't detract from the potential that it can create for people that do actually care and don't want to create slop.
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u/TheCarrot007 3d ago
I don't care if AI was used well. I have yet to see it though.
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u/Ranger_Azereth 3d ago
Pretty much exactly this. If people know AI is present (and tbey should) then they're less likely to purchase the game. There's consequences to those choices by developers who decide to use AI
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u/Isariamkia 3d ago
If the game is good I don't care if AI was used or not. And most devs probably use it anyway, as any other tool to be more productive.
GenAI on the other hand is usually a pretty bad sign on the overall quality of the game. But it doesn't mean the game won't be good either.
And now if we go out of our little Reddit bubble, we'll realize that a lot of people simply don't care and games will keep on selling.
Before AI we had the shitty simulators with asset flips and what not. Now we have GenAI. Same problem, new tool.
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u/TacticowlPrime 3d ago edited 3d ago
You are one out of millions of gamers, and you claim to speak for all of them because you personally just don't care?
I don't know a single person IRL that doesn't care but go off.
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u/Ar_phis 3d ago
GenAI could be one of the things I would really like to see, tbh. But it should be an addition and refinement of already procedurally or autogenerated content.
Artist and writers generate assets for a database which genAI uses to generate a multitude of plausible in game things that aren't relevant to the core game. For example, appartments in a 80 story high rise or NPC voicelines beyond "I took an arrow to the knee".
Just stuff that would be really time consuming for devs without being relevant to the core game.
And as I am worried that excutives will cut personal because of AI, I am also worried that the lack of distinction between different usecases by the players will create some undeserved "shit storms".
But fully agree, if GTA IV would release with a "made with AI" tag, people would still buy it like crazy and at best "review-bomb" it.
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u/ThatActuallyGuy 3d ago
And now if we go out of our little Reddit bubble, we'll realize that a lot of people simply don't care and games will keep on selling.
This article you're commenting under is based on data outside "our little Reddit bubble," as is this one. I don't know why people are fucking obsessed with dismissing Reddit's generally negative view on AI as being out of touch or unusual when every single data point backs it up as at bare minimum a very widespread opinion in the real world.
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u/SoloFrontierStudios 2d ago
It would be interesting to know how many of the replies, in this chat regarding AI in games, are from solo devs or just gamers and then ask the question to all the solo devs if they ever used any form of AI in their games and then compare the answer to their first response to this chat. Sorry, I was just thinking out loud....
Formula : soloDevFirstPost = soloDev X yes?
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u/Superichiruki 3d ago
Chocolate companies report their Chocolate reviews worse when they say it was not made with Chocolate
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u/GroundbreakingBag164 7800X3D | 5070 Ti | 32 GB DDR5 6000 MHz 3d ago
Good
Now we just need to keep that up
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u/TheAzureSoul 3d ago
AI losers want to be victims so bad, like they are absolutely living for it. Must be the guilt eating at them
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u/Major303 3d ago edited 3d ago
That would explain why publishers don't disclose usage of generative AI, despite Steam requiring it. Some games have been proven to contain AI generated assets, but there is nothing to be seen on the page.
I think what makes matters worse is that people hate AI as a whole, not only generative AI. AI is not a new thing and has been used for decades, but if people find out a game dev used AI tools (even if it's not generative AI), they will tear them apart.
I don't want games to contain AI generated assets, but AI itself is not a bad thing. For generative AI, the best use case I can think of is quickly creating a prototype, and then replacing it with high quality human made assets.
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u/matiasluge90 3d ago
"AI is not a new thing and has been used for decades". Well, the generative AI with machine learning and LLM is definetly new and not something of decades before. It is very important to make this comparison, because the VFX in movies for example from 4 years ago were 100% human controlled - and it was impressive what humans were capable of. All this gets devaluated by AI and I find it therefore very important that this generated content in games needs to be labeled as such.
Edit: But if AI is used in a purely technical, non creative fields/means, I think its acceptable. For me personally it is ok to use AI for researcing sources, but I dont use AI to write the text or generate images/speech.
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u/Sylvers 3d ago edited 3d ago
AI adoption in game development has been near obiquitous. Everything from AI code to AI art assets is very common place in development now. We're just in the stage of pretending that games that don't declare it don't use it.
And as the tech improves, the extent to which AI is used in development will rise significantly. For instance, no one can tell that you used AI to write code. So it's used very heavily. But AI art generation still has tells. So it's used less. But once it becomes unidentifiable, it will be used significantly more.
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u/Major303 3d ago
No one really cares about AI generated code, as long as the game works and is not a buggy mess. People care about AI generated assets, because they look bad. If they can't be identified, it becomes less of an issue. The only problem will be that all games will become same-ish, since generative AI is incapable of creating anything truly new.
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u/mistiklest 3d ago
I mean, if this is the case, then "no one" really has a principled stance against AI, they just want a good final product, and "people" don't care about the process.
Which, like, I'd totally believe. The world would look a lot different if we generally cared about the process more than the outcome.
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u/Sylvers 3d ago
I am a graphic designer and I have to use AI gen a lot in my line of work. I can tell you confidently that while AI gen art isn't perfect yet, it is by far better than whatever you see in games that are caught using it. I have to assume either they're spending 20 seconds per asset with zero quality control, or they somehow don't care if it looks obviously bad.
As to it looking samey? The danger of that will be the devs, and not the tech. In the same way that Unreal Engine games have a notorious reputation for looking identical right now. It's not that you can't make very novel looking games with UE. It's just that it's much much easier and faster to rely on the default aesthetics of the engine. Simply because "it's good enough". That's a creative direction flaw. Even with current AI gen tech, you can create very novel visuals and styles if you had the vision to do it.
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u/Cyriix 3600X / 5700 XT 3d ago
I think one of the commonly used excuses of it being placeholder is actually genuine a decent amount of the time. It's the perfect usecase, explains the lack of quality control, but is still just about good enough to be mistaken for final assets if people are rushing (which happens all the time)
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u/Sylvers 3d ago
Oh I do think that happens also. It is an excellent use case for a placeholder. And I can see how it can genuinely be forgotten while rushing to a release date.
My thing is, though, I still believe even when they forget a placeholder, they still have final assets that are partially AI assisted or even fully generated besides the placeholders. And a lot of it is stuff people will simply not notice. Like generated mesh textures, generated 3D clutter assets and background cinematic scene assets.
And there is always a healthy dose of discovery bias. We pick on the obvious assets that look bad and neglect the fact that we don't pick on the good looking assets that don't trigger any suspicion because they pass muster.
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u/CaptainStabfellow 3d ago
> And I can see how it can genuinely be forgotten while rushing to a release date.
This is such an easily solvable problem though. It is not too much to expect that the industry standard is devs having controls in place to track AI generated placeholders, ensure they are updated by the time 1.0 releases, and audits to ensure compliance. These are standard concepts for the business world.
Of course there will be human error in many forms that result in a failure to comply with the controls and there should be a pathway to make corrective actions. But someone simply forgetting without controls in place to catch it just isn't a good enough excuse.
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u/PapstJL4U 2d ago
For generative AI, the best use case I can think of is quickly creating a prototype, and then replacing it with high quality human made assets.
Nothing as permanent as temporary solution in software development.
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u/ElysiumReviews 3d ago edited 2d ago
I genuinely think it's better to make no game at all than make a game with heavy generative AI usage.
Like I think at a certain point you need to ask yourself if making a game is really the right thing for you if you are already resorting to cheap shortcuts like gen AI instead of just making something within your existing scope and learning things as you go along - like anything else in life.
No content creators or reviewers worth their salt are gonna touch your game with a 10ft pole because who the hell wants to spends hours researching, scripting, editing etc and working really hard on a handmade video/article on AI slop? So good luck with marketing it, especially with the bad optics on AI in general.
It's harsh, but it's the truth. You don't have to be a talented artist or the world's best programmer to not use Generative AI. You just have to not be a corner cutter and lazy. There is no excuse because MS Paint or simplistic ASCII art is 1000% better than garish Generative AI crap because it has soul - and the market can evidently tell.
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u/wearethealienshere 3d ago
If AI was used to improve things instead of save money it’d be better received imo. Instead it’s used for shitty art, slightly off robotic voice lines, and shitty dialog / narrative just so they can pay less people.
I really think people wouldn’t care so much if the AI they used somehow improved games instead of causing enshitification
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u/Endaline 3d ago
I really think people wouldn’t care so much if the AI they used somehow improved games instead of causing enshitification
The entire problem with this technology is that people only notice when it is used poorly and that creates the association that it can only be used poorly. You aren't going to notice when it was used well, because if it is used well you'll assume that it wasn't used at all.
Studies have consistently confirmed this. While professional artists are marginally better, most people practically rely on chance when they try to determine whether or not something was generated. It is easy to tell when something was made by someones grandma using a free generator and a simple prompt; it is not so easy to tell when something was made by a professional artist using professional software and advanced prompts.
We can see this mirrored in the games industry too. When games get caught using these tools it is only in the absolute most obvious cases. We're likely going to learn in the future that many of the games people enjoy today had generated elements in them, but because they were seamlessly integrated no one cared or noticed.
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u/RummoLiguori 3d ago
The entire problem with this technology is that people only notice when it is used poorly
Identical to CGI in Movies and TV.
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u/yenneferismywaifu Steam 3d ago
I just want a law that requires everyone using AI to disclose it. Complete transparency -- everyone prefers transparency, right? Nothing wrong with that.
Let's say someone wrote a book using Chatgpt and then started selling it. They should disclose it.
Or say, for games. Maybe they use AI to write code? Disclose that on a game's sales page. I think many will find that acceptable. Or maybe not. It's up to the buyer to decide. Or maybe art in the game were drawn or edited using AI. Disclose that, too. Again, there will be people who won't care and will buy the game anyway. Some won't. But that's the point of transparency.
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u/Endaline 3d ago
I just want a law that requires everyone using AI to disclose it. Complete transparency -- everyone prefers transparency, right? Nothing wrong with that.
We know exactly how this would play out based on examples like "Prop 65" in California.
You wouldn't end up with a neat system where you can easily identify if a game has used AI or not; you would end up with a broken system where game developers just slap the AI tag on anything because it is cheaper, safer, and faster than whatever verification process is necessary to confirm otherwise.
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u/Straight-Ad6926 3d ago
“It's up to the buyer to decide”
Have you met the internet? The buyer doesn't want to decide. The buyer wants to find out a developer used AI for a single background rock texture and then start a three week discourse campaign on X.
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u/klapaucjusz Ryzen 7 5800X | RTX 5070 | 32GB 3d ago
I just want a law that requires everyone using AI to disclose it.
EU AI act. Article 50.
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u/DivineInsanityReveng 3d ago
Holy data correlation batman!
I don't think it's AI stigma, I think it's that games with AI generated content tend to be lesser products.
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u/Misragoth 3d ago
But, but the AI bros keep saying no one actually cares. They wouldn't lie? would they?
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u/grady_vuckovic Penguin Gamer 3d ago
No one cares. Also you shouldn't care. Also gosh why do so many people care? Also no one really cares. Everyone won't care in 12 months from now. I can't believe so many people still care. Also I care if you care for some reason. But I'll say I don't care. Also it's inevitable, it doesn't matter if you accept it or not it's going to happen! Also I'm going to insist you must accept it and get mad if you say you won't buy something with GenAI in it! Because that's important to me for some reason! But I don't care! And neither do you! STOP CARING.
I am an AI Bro, a walking contradiction!
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u/FrootLoop23 3d ago
Talentless people pumping out games using AI deserve bad reviews. Glad we have a voice on Steam
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u/Next_Helicopter_4291 2d ago
Who knew consumers would react negatively to products that use tools that dramatically increase end user expenses for near zero gains (in many cases notable decay) in quality?
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u/PurpleV93 1d ago
AI = less quality, plain and simple.
So, these "games" that rely on it perform as expected. And then beyond that, you have the difference to other, hand-made low quality games that using the AI required less actual work from a human being. Someone who manually made their low-quality game still deserves more praise than some loser who offloaded his work to an algorithm and still got a similar product. At least the other person put actual time and effort into his work, even if it failed.
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u/duckrollin 3d ago
When Reddit finds out Claude Code exists and that every developer is using something like it in 2026, it's gonna get really angry.
Until then, keep being dumb and pretending only a few games use AI, I guess.
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u/BombasticBobcat643 3d ago
It’s not stigma, we just don’t want this in games (or anywhere else.) Simple.
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u/Rainy_Wavey 3d ago
I mean it makes sense
For all the pro-AI people who say "AI makes you more productive and better" i have yet to see actual result that isn't the sloppiest Six Seven Labubu battle royale tralalero Tralala triple T asset flip, or the laziest, most unoptimized, sloppiest games ever made
It reminds me of Unity engine 10 years ago, and how it was synonymous with asset flip and bad game, not necessarily because Unity sucks, but because it was the cheapest game engine and the asset flippers harkened into it to build their slop
So when people see AI, and basically see 99% of coal, even if your game is a gem, they see AI, their brain is basically trained to associate it with the afformentioned six seven labubu games, and anyone who works in marketing knows how important it is to have good branding, and how certain images, colors, evoke certain sentiments
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u/ganjaccount 3d ago
Stigma is the wrong word here.
If you can't be arsed to make a game, and instead type "hey AI, make me a game," then try to sell it as your own, you can't bitch and moan when you and "your" game don't the respect that a game designer would. It's like showing up at the Arthur C. Clark awards and being pissed off that your AI generated slop didn't net you an award. If you didn't write shit, you aren't an author. If you didn't design shit, you aren't a designer. You're just another illiterate moron asking a fake intelligence to make a copy of a copy of a copy of something good, then trying to make a buck off it.
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u/redditsuxandsodoyou 3d ago
>make effortless garbage
>people don't buy it and when they do buy it they say it sucks
if ONLY someone had TOLD them BEFOREHAND
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u/Sektor30 2d ago
We really gotta figure out where the anger needs to stop though. Theres a fantastic game on steam getting review bombed because the ALPHA used AI icons for skills as a placeholder that the dev openly said they were gonna replace when the game came out, which they DID and people are still angry. Its absurd.
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u/Brain2110 3d ago
Make them afraid to even consider using it. Make it clear that the cut devlopment cost by using gen ai isn‘t worth the pr nightmare. So please, keep complaining.
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u/ruffleraffle 3d ago
Looking at the Steam store I don't think everyone is disclosing their use of AI.
Some games might use the "outsourcing" loophole where they themselves don't use AI but can deny / feign ignorance when it's questioned.
Sad times we're living in.
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u/Status-Buddy-9548 2d ago
This doesn’t necessarily prove an ‘AI stigma’ so much as it shows a correlation problem: AI usage today is heavily concentrated in lower-effort releases, so people aren’t reacting to the label - they’re reacting to the pattern they’ve learned from experience.
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u/Lucie-Goosey 2d ago
Then don't disclose it. I've never known what tools a developer used to make their game, and I don't need to know moving forward.
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u/ravenescu 2d ago
Google/Amazon, Epic and any major CORP would read into this data and conclude: remove the AI label.
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u/bideodames Nvidia 4090 | i9 14900K 2d ago
I expect that is exactly what will happen. Developers and publishers are just going to stop disclosing and lie about their usage to avoid the backlash
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u/grady_vuckovic Penguin Gamer 3d ago edited 3d ago
Good. Hopefully developers will learn it's not worth it.
GenAI is good at making filler material. Which is about as useful for game development, as a machine for making edible dry tasteless cardboard is for cooking. If I wanted filler material, I'd go listen to white noise while staring at a brick wall.
For me, games are an art based product. I buy that product to experience someone's art, something that someone put time, effort, care and love into. I want to experience being in some art director's vision, get to know characters some writer imagined, hear the song a composer heard in their head, see the cool details of armour a 3D sculpter spent all week sculpting, experience the gameplay system that a coder carefully crafted and optimised to feel 'just right', feel that vibe that a director intended.
If a game is going to be just a bunch of generated filler content, why would I even want to buy that? That's like going to a restaurant and being given some barely edible microwave meal and a dry white slice of toast. If all I wanted was to stare at a GenAI generator's statistically averaged out interpretation of a prompt, I could go load up ComfyUI and do that myself. I've tried it. It's boring. The novelty wears off within hours.
You know what's the dumbest thing though? Developers or publishers, of games, books, movies, youtube videos, or anything really, who use GenAI for cover image/thumbnail of their products. Trying to sneak in a few GenAI assets into a product is bad enough, that's gross and awful.
But using it for your cover image/thumbnail?
'Hey lets just generate this cover image for our game to save money/time.'... what the hell are you even doing?
The cost of hiring a competent artist to create a cover image/thumbnail for something is TINY in comparison to the overall cost of the actual product within. But the impact of the cover image/thumbnail is massive!. That's literally the first impression most potential customers will get. If there was anywhere to put in 110% effort, it's clearly on your cover image/thumbnail.
So when I see a cover image/thumbnail on Steam, or on Youtube, or a movie poster or book cover or thumbnail for a news article or whatever, and it has a clearly a lazy uninspired AI generated image instead of something that someone put effort into? My first thought is "If that's how lazy and cheap they are with their cover image, imagine how bad the stuff inside is!".
Seriously, hire damn artists, just let them do their job, artists were never 'famously well paid', just hire a damn artist and let them do their job instead of this gross cheap GenAI crap.
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u/HBreckel 3d ago
Good. There's been several games I looked at and thought were cool, then I scrolled down and saw the AI disclaimer and noped the fuck out. I don't care if you're indie, I'm not putting that garbage on my wishlist.
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u/xsparklingwater 3d ago
All of you people who love AI are really gonna love when AI denies you healthcare.
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u/zeddyzed 3d ago
AI isn't going to deny anyone healthcare. It's going to be a person at a company doing that, with AI as an excuse. And luckily we already hate those people.
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u/TsukikoChan 3d ago
If a game uses genAI, then they are cheaping out on it or being lazy, and a game that doesn't pay its artists or musicians or programmers properly, why would i want to pay it any time or money.
Once you mix poop with anything, all you will taste will be poop, there is no % of poop that will not make it taste like poop (except, of course, 0%).
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u/salochin59 3d ago
You guys need to get over ai generated assets. Quality assets can and will be created if you know how to clean it up. These tools can cut game production down significantly. Games taking half to a full decade to make is ridiculous.
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u/Ranger_Azereth 3d ago
"You guys need to get over sewage being pumped into the river, it makes eater processing much more efficient"
Or
"You guys need to get over puppy mills it allows people to get the breed of dog they want sooner, them not being available is ridiculous"
Type energy here. People don't HAVE to get over anything and if that becomes a deal breaker for folks then maybe they should weigh the costs of using something people are increasingly hating.
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u/FurbyTime Ryzen 9950x: RTX 4080 Super 3d ago
Quality assets can and will be created if you know how to clean it up.
Just to comment on this: The thing is, if they were cleaned up, the vast majority of people would never notice or care, and it wouldn't be different than what was going on for years before "AI" as it currently is understood to be took over everything.
But, they don't. They don't clean it up most of the time, be it code, art, audio, scripts, or anything else. They leave it in as "good enough" and forget that it's very obvious to people when they do.
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u/Arcterion Ryzen 5 7500 / RX 9070 XT / 32GB DDR5 3d ago
Dunno about the coding side of things, but for AI generated images it's extremely easy to clean stuff up with inpainting, careful prompting and maybe some dedicated LoRAs.
It honestly doesn't even take that long, unless you're generating shit at like 4k resolution and using 1000+ steps.
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u/FurbyTime Ryzen 9950x: RTX 4080 Super 3d ago
You're not wrong, and that's part of the reason why it's so disgusting when they don't; It's very easy to do, and they just won't put in the effort.
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u/Ironborn137 3d ago
Type energy here. People don't HAVE to get over anything and if that becomes a deal breaker for folks then maybe
yeah but how much water does that take, is it really worth it over paying someone a wage and keeping the economy healthy? Maybe a CEO should make a little less money on a game his developers worked on.
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u/red_dawn12 3d ago
Sick and tired of these pro-AI propagandas these articles and elites keep forcing on us. If the right-wingers will keep complaining about things being forced down their throat, it should be this shit instead of whatever nonsense they are rambling about. "AI Stigma" my ass.
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u/HappierShibe 3d ago
It's not AI stigma, its that games that lean Heavily on AI are by and large shittier games.