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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

“No AI” is too simplistic.

Does that mean no AI assistance at all? How is that possible to detect for if someone uses it for code generation and compiles it to a binary?

Do they mean no AI artwork? Maybe easier to detect, but mostly based on vibes still.

Do they mean no AI features? But why, wouldn’t an adventure game where you can talk naturally to NPCs be kind of cool?

Madness.

How about a filter for “No souless shitty copycat games that are pure cash grabs”. I’m sure Jev can help detect these at scale.

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> “No AI” is too simplistic.

In practice it's serviceable first-pass filter.

Of course it's a different dimension than "is this game worth the time and money?" But so are all the other datapoints meant to help consumers weigh a game purchase decision. They all have false positives and false negatives compared to actual enjoyment. Right now, people are voicing that the AI line is a relevant piece of selection criteria they believe they'd find useful would like to more easily automate.

No amount mental masturbation over false negatives will change that. It'll just make someone look defensive. Because the consumers that don't care to use AI as a selection criteria will just ignore that data point. Similar to how a content rating doesn't enter your head when you're not buying for a child.

What about tools used to make the game? Can they be AI products? What about tools that lint human made code? What if your paint program contains some AI-generated plugins, does that disqualify your game?

What if your music mixer uses an open source library that depends on a math library produced by an author who has an AI image as an avatar on social media?

Anyone who demands purity in all things should have their values questioned. Just look at history for examples of the outcomes of people obsessed with purity.

At some point, the "No AI" filter should just block anything released after 2021. Games made before this are the low background steel.

Yeah, what people want is games that aren’t slop. Defining that is probably impossible. We’ve always had shovelware, but the volume now is unsustainable and only going to get worse.

The problem is that in the context of AI, "slop" has lost its definition.

It originally meant low-quality content that was obviously AI that's trying to be passed off as real.

But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted the term to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality and the intent of its usage. Some of them refer to Expedition 33 (Which scored as one of the greatest games of 2025) as AI slop, despite AI not even being used for the final product, beyond one in-game poster that accidentally shipped with its AI placeholder rather than the hand-made asset.

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