This thread is a discussion on whether or not low-effort posts advertising assets that are largely or completely generated by AI should be allowed on this forum.
This thread is NOT:
A space for overly heated debates - keep it civil, please
A proposal that everything made with AI should be banned from this forum
A discussion on whether or not projects created with AI-assistance need to be tagged as such; that discussion already exists here
As you’ve all probably seen by now, there’s been a surge in Resources posts showcasing promoting works that have been largely or completely generated by AI. Most of these have been posted by users with private profiles that have no other engagement with our community. Some of them have added disclaimers to their posts, while others have simply pasted entire sales pitches written by AI.
Where do we draw the line?
While I’m personally against using AI in my own work, I’m by no means trying to argue that AI should be completely banned from this forum. Rather, I’m suggesting that topics advertising paid, freemium, or just extremely low-effort resources and assets that are almost entirely or completely AI-generated posted by these accounts with no other interaction on our forum should be disallowed. This space should exist for people to help other humans and discuss all things Godot and gamedev, not to promote low-quality AI content that bloats our forum in the name of making a quick buck.
It’s pretty amazing when people try and sell obvious AI images when you can find it for essentially free on almost any online resource.
I’m open to tags for ai generated resources that said, I don’t really see why someone that was posting that kind of work would disclose it willingly since it’s viewed pretty negatively on this forum.
Perhaps there could be a “human-made” tag instead, which could then be flagged if misused by someone with AI art. Then we could just assume non"human-made" resource posts were mostly ai?
But your question is impossible to address without at least using arguments that touch on ethics. Like the ethics of selling generated stuff on this forum without making an effort.
I love this idea. Just like in retail terms like “home made” and “hand crafted” triggers associations of quality in most people.
The impact of “AI” resources is very much a question of ethics:
What is the impact of using these resources on your fellow creatives
How much do we value our fellow creatives
What are our mutual responsibilities
What does the flood of slop and anti-human content do to those who’s livelihoods are destroyed by this
Let’s face it: the game field/hobby/industry is nothing without the artists, writers, designers. We (just speaking as myself here, a programmer, and a middling writer, who aren’t a visual artist) need to protect our fellows without whom our part of the work would be meaningless, who are too often ignored or forgotten when the topic of game dev is discussed
Edit: I’ll also use this as another opportunity to promote essential resources as an alternative to the slop, not the least of which is Kenney and OGA
I’m in favor of at least making it much easy to filter GenAI posts, e.g. by limiting ai-generated resources/posts to a dedicated category. A human-made tag sounds fine as well, but it should be clear where the line is drawn.
Just plugging a quick reference to my list of gamedev tools/resources here. This was mostly made before the slop storm and focuses on these kinds of resources.
Great point, I definitely made that a bit too broad. All I meant by that was that I didn’t want this to become another AI topic that turned into an overly heated debate and spiraled out of control.
Not my place to say because im not involved with the running of the forum. But my opinion as a former Godot user is this:
Like anything creative, whats most interesting to me is a level of taste and appropriateness in content rather than who or what created it. I think this forum is too concerned with “who” and “what” created a work rather than the quality of the work.
It seems to me that verbatim slop is more welcome when it is produced by a human and an established community member, than when it is produced by an AI, and tasteful submissions are besides the point. I find tacky boring unplayable games with droll uninteresting stories and mediocre or even terrible art can often be produced by a human, and can even be made popular.
Human developers and artists can improve, take feedback, iterate, and in the future, share knowledge with new artists / developers.
AI can’t really do that, it’s working off of the training data it got (which as far as I know is already running out and they end up using their own output as training by accident, which further degrades quality.)
This is just a personal stance on this, but I prefer interacting with and talking to a human artist, even if their work is “bad” (this is very subjective) because even bad art has something to say. Even bad art has soul and something the human behind it added. AI has none of that, so interacting with something AI made, to me, makes no sense.
Of course interacting with an AI is worse than not interacting at all.
The AI content might be driven by a person with excellent appropriateness and taste … What if one of your founders or someone with a degree in fine art produced some AI “assisted” artwork or software and used an incredible amount of taste to curate and tweak the artwork, overpainted everything and carefully adjusted it, then, would that work still deserve to be filtered as spam or put under an AI tag?
Whether the fine artists output with AI assistance should be allowed on the forum…
The assumptions are that: 1) fine artist is very productive for very little effort, 2) the fine artist is advertising assets that are “largely” generated by AI but that have been tweaked to a level of satisfaction in the opinion of the fine artist.
Yes, that’s the scope that we are talking about here, it’s not about any and all “AI” “art”, it’s not about content people have put genuine effort into