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.
Dear Steam,
Please put a filter tool in so that we, the player, can choose to filter out AI slop.
Thank you.
They should just surface the reviews more prominently, and let me buy a Steam Frame. The last part is key.
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
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.
The issue is when a game is announced but not released, and a slop idiot cucks his way into a shitty copy and releases it under a very similar name. Needle in a Haystack Simulator is the real game, unreleased still i think, and someone made and is actively selling AI garbage Needle In A Haystack.
Thats blatant copyright infringement or something. It should not be allowed. All it does is confuse people who hear about it from a friend and look it up without knowing the actual name, buy it, and dislike it when they very much could have enjoyed the real game.
Itd be like if i saw a trailer for Dark Souls and made a game called Darksouls that kinda looks like it and takes story beats from the trailer.
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.
Allowing it is encouraging it. Allowing it on the platform means you can earn a non-zero amount of money by creating one, and then tank sales of the actual game while destroying the planet.
Youve also laid out exactly why steam should be taking action: indie devs who havent released their game yet likely dont have the money to fight in copyright court.
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
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.
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.
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
I can’t believe the sentiment in the comments here.
…Y’all think spammers are going to label themselves as “AI generated” if that’s detrimental? They will not, and it’s not something that can be objectively detected.
Getting customers to moderate this is self defeating, as the whole point of spam is to get in front of buyers’ eyeballs.
Valve needs to hire staff to cull this junk, they can afford to, but they don’t want to. That’s the crux of the issue.
There’s also a practical element, where Steam is not in a position to vet every game and developer. They could have the community do it, but that then opens up a whole bunch of abuse risks.
There’s also an argument that it wouldn’t stop some of the issues in the article. Where do you draw the line with asset flip, or AI generated? If the developer used AI to make placeholders in the early access of a game, and then swapped it with removed it later on, is the game still AI generated? What if they used assets that were unknowingly AI generated, like stock sound effects?
Or if someone is ESL and used a translator that turned out to be AI powered/they just write with a similar style.
It also won’t stop people doing it.maliciously. if you’re threatening to clone someone’s game off a demo, and release it before they do, you’re probably not going to stop because you need to put a little “AI generated” flag on your game, if the rest of it didn’t stop you.
Well, I’m not advocating for LLM assisted game development to be banned, or those with a but if diffusion. That’s what the tag is supposed to be for.
I’m strictly talking spam and clones. Clearly dysfunctional games, misleadingly advertised.
Valve makes $billions in revenue every year. If they make 30% off every developer’s sales, I think they can afford to apply some basic vetting to each one.
Indeed, cloners will find ways to flood the market, because that’s the effective way.
As someone who likes to discuss about solutions, time is something the cloners do not have. They are always trying to clone the currently trending things, so they cannot wait for three months or so for the trend to die out.
I would say a mandatory 3 month period of closed beta would help cull many bad actors, with strict requirements as what would suffice. Valve could in the meanwhile scan in case the assets are stolen from another games listed in their store.
Assets can be packed or otherwise obfuscated in all sorts of ways.
I’m less certain about the “3 month forced waiting period” thing… it sounds like a good idea on the surface, but I just wonder how it might affect small devs. Also, some spammers would still immediately schedule a listing for a clone and then vibecode it over the three months.
The 3 months won’t hurt developers. The time flies when you’re actually developing the game or managing Valve bureaucracy. :D
I didn’t really go to specifics in my previous comment. That would require making assumptions and make the comment too long to read. I’m sure you have an assumption as to why the idea would hurt indie developers. I’m happy just making a surface level assumption about using time to our advantage.
That might be true but it still seems like it might significantly hampers the trend chasing clone effect. Its not stopping the cloners from making the clones but throwing them off of the trend rhythm and making the clone less able to skim money from people. A legit dev will likely have to take into account the waiting period but that can just be part of their dev cycle now. Or maybe if your studio is partnered with an already established publisher, you can just release the game no waiting. I know that sucks for fully independent devs but there are extremely indie friendly publishers out there like Devolver Digital.
The 3 month period is not really effective if you can avoid it in any way. Which is why it needs to be strict, like not using a publisher to speed it up, but having the 3 month period for each different game. And that replaceable placeholders do not count for the 3 months by strictly requiring the game to have something that would reset the timer, like changing the genre tags or the name of the game.
I’d be behind spot-checking at the very least. I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
If you get caught, you get perma-banned from Steam.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
With all due respect, this is exactly what I am talking about.
I feel like Valve is trustworthy enough that most devs should be able to open-source their code to Valve.
Enforcing posting code source isn’t viable for many reasons. But one is that spammers are going to hide the vibecoding anyway; this would only catch relatively innocent coding assistants from earnest devs.
It wouldn’t catch anything malicious.
Then put a little thingie showing how many years a dev has existed (so people can put their AI-detector thinking caps on when they see a dev that’s existed for 3 months putting out a fully polished game).
And again, the point of spamming is to get eyeballs in front of customers. It doesn’t matter if 99% reject it as obvious garbage; if just a few people buy it on chance, it’s worth the minimal effort for the spammer, and it encourages other spammers to come.
…And that would be catastrophic to new devs, anyway. How is anyone new supposed to enter the space and publish their labor of love if everyone assumes new devs are malicious?
Sorry if this comes off as thorny, I feel like commenters here are contorting themselves to excuse a giant corporation.
This is Valve’s storefront. They make mountains of cash from it.
It is their job to filter spam, they need to spend money to do it, and they don’t want to. There is no way around it.
It’s not thorny to me, but then I’m used to polite disagreement where I’ve found many would turn hostile, so perhaps your padding at the end was a good plan - even if not necessary for me personally.
You raise good points, but it’s one of those “Don’t let the Perfect be the enemy of the Good” things. No system can catch 100% of these problems that you correctly point out. At least, none that I can imagine nor that you propose.
Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect the vast majority of consumers simply do not care if a game was developed with AI.
All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Right now, Valve is the “best” video game distributor - apart from maybe GoG. I hope GoG dethrones them as the only reasons Valve is “better” are Linux support and market dominance (ergo convenience), and perhaps the AI craze will be the wedge issue that GoG takes a firm stance against, at which point they’d be in a good spot to take over.
Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.
These are storefronts, run by corporations. I don’t care if Valve is percieved as “good” or not, I care about the current and future transactional services they will offer me, and how they will affect the market as a whole.
And this is bad. Its toxic for game devs, bad for me as a shopper, and unhealthy for the future of gaming.
Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte. They are not people, they do not get passes.
The mindset of loyalty and “thrones” and “who is nicer” is exactly the sort of anthropomorphic mindset they want you in. Its the goal of advertising. They want you loyal to their storefront, so at some point, it becomes an irrational factor that influences your shopping choices… Hence this comment section.
All that to say: I agree they should be doing more, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Indeed.
But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are. They would be skewering them if this was some other strorefront doing the exact same thing.
Again, I emphasize: you are talking about this as if picking a team.
Yeah, I mean, gotta buy video games from someone. Valve’s one of the least shitty corporations by far, so they get my money.
Vavle do not deserve excuses and hand-waving just because one thinks they are a ‘lesser evil’ in some other context; every service should get criticized a-la-carte.
Why don’t you think I’m open to a-la-carte criticism? I’ve expressed plainly that it’s valid. Do you want me to fight you about it or something?
They are not people, they do not get passes.
I would say people don’t get passes either; I could quote Stannis the Mannis, but I won’t.
But I’m not going to apologize for Valve in the same breath eather, and I am appaled so many commenters here are.
Are you ranting with me or at me here? I never “apologized” for them.
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?
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.
Because if they don’t they get banned which makes their shoveling harder.
This is the exact same attitude they had to the deluge of unity store asset flips (well they actually tried to blame unity for that, but I digress)
Steam gets their money either way.
And that’s what Lord GabeN needs to buy another super yacht for himself, and more Aston Martins for his son to race.
I am starting to think that having hard technical or imposed market limits might be a good thing, or at least the lesser of two evils.
It you had to build a game on before the era of cheap middleware engines, there was a natural barrier to entry. The Nintendo seal of approval used to mean something at least even if the game was still trash.
But now, you can flood the space with minimal barrier to entry and we are being flooded with junk. But those that control the access and making big money off this so they turn a blind eye.
A few months back, there was a reddit post for my local town, it was about self publishing their new game on Steam. Anyway, about a dozen others posted links to their projects all releasing within the next few months, all of them copies or low effort projects. This is a single town, in a single country, that is releasing potentially dozens, possible hundreds of games a year. The market is flooded because we have made it so easy to pump this junk out and there is little interest in putting even vague restrictions on it.
The crash is coming and we will all know why it happened.
It’s been coming for a long time. Steam always had a slop problem since the greenlight days.
The reason so much shit got onto the platform was by exploiting the trading card system, and Valve allowed it.
Eventually Valve realised they could get more money by just skipping the vote, and allowing people to just pay to get their games on the platform.
Pretty much. They already had this tendency, it is just accelerating and now the technology has kicked it into turbo.
No need to be gatekeepers, just let me blacklist entire genres, publishers and studios.
You can. Add tags/genres to your ignored list, and you won’t see any games marked with them.
The tag system has been so badly abused that you can’t do this without collateral damage though. It’s not fit for purpose. I have mixed feelings about Valve curating games… but I think they should absolutely curate the tags.
Valve should have staff manually play through 144k games to make sure all the tags are accurate?
Yes, they can afford to ensure the quality of their systems.
What you’re asking for is not trivial. Just for the backlog, assuming a single scant hour per game, is 70 new full-time positions before getting into the organizational and administrative overhead. That’s the absolute bare minimum to load up and investigate a game and categorize it and it only works for things that are clearly defined from the very beginning. Realistically there’s no way they can sift through all the assets and code in that time for, as an example, signs of AI use even if they had full access to the developer’s work files. What you’re asking for is more like a full week audit on average.
I’m pretty sure they can afford it. But I’d be happy for the tag system to continue being meaningless if they would just hoist genre out into a separate system curated only by Valve.
Been blocking EA games for years.
Individually, or is there a blocking feature I’m unaware of?
You can click on either the publisher or developer and there’s a setting to not recommend anything by them. IIRC it’s in a gear wheel in the top right of the developer/publisher page
Only works for publishers or developers who have a page.
The scammers producing slop clones don’t (or would just have a different one for each game), so they can’t be filtered.
That is good to know, thanks!
Thank you! Greatly appreciated!
As far as I can tell, you can only add about 10 tags to the ignore list. That’s way too few for me.
Walmart sells a ton of shit I think is stupid. Sometimes I see it in the store. It really doesn’t bother me, I go to the aisle for what I want, consider the options, pick one and buy it.
I’m staunchly against smoking. Cigarettes are sold in many stores, but the packs all have warning labels on them making it very easy for me to make sure I never accidentally buy cigarettes. So far, it’s been pretty easy to avoid.
I don’t need to talk to the clerk when I walk in and ask them to hide all the products I hate, as long as everything is labeled and I can buy what I intend to buy, it’s really not a problem. It’s a store.
That’s not the issue here. They are free to have whatever games they want in the store, I don’t care.
The issue is: if you have a recommendation system in place (like the Discovery Queue, which I use and have found great games on), you’d better let me customize it so I don’t recommended yet another hentai puzzle instead of a nice boomer shooter. Just this. I just want some control on what I’m being recommended.
Account settings > Store preferences > uncheck “Adult Only Sexual Content”
Thanks, but it only solves part of the issue.
That wouldn’t solve the issue of you’re fine with hentai games, just not the puzzle ones.
That hurts Valve’s bottom line.
Never going to happen
It’s not unheard of Valve going things that hurt its’ bottom line.
Family sharing, for instance. I can use the same instance of The Talos Principle 2 that my kid uses instead having two copies.
That kind of touch makes me a happy customer, with way too many games on my “one day I’ll play this” list.
People pay to put a game on Steam.
The more games being sold on Steam, the more money valve gets.
- 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?
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
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey Valve, could you use AI to port all of your own old Intel versions of Mac games to Apple Silicon?
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.
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.
I think filtering is the best thing they could give us as customers. They already have AI disclosures, but I don’t think we have the ability to filter for AI right now.
This is like the Wii shovelware era on steroids.
