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Comment by freeone3000 | Hacker News Reader

There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.

This is what people are mad about, taken from the front page of nextfest: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5106420/Leverage_Real_Est... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5155900/Ages_TD_Demo/?cur... https://store.steampowered.com/app/5200920/BATTLE_PARTS__POW... https://store.steampowered.com/app/4609270/Naval_Supremacy/?...

These are, as a whole, poorly-balanced, poorly-implemented, and in some cases poorly-conceived. The art is terrible, but the code is also terrible, and the games are not fun. Not only are we lacking authorial intent, we’re lacking any amount of basic quality. Everything from the code to the store page is AI-generated, and it makes it not only be unfun, it robs you of the usual markers of a low-effort cash-grab asset flip (eg, Stock Car Store Simulator)

And there are a lot this year

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So what people are really complaining about is the lack of an approval or curation process on Steam’s end. AI is exposing the problem by making it worse.

This is like seeing someone get mugged and saying clothes lack stab resistance. The mugger simply exposes the problem.

What? The onus is not on me to wear stab proof clothing, the onus is on society to create a world where the floor is high enough that mugging isn't worth it.

Valve is just as much of a victim.

Valve takes a 30% cut and makes eye watering profits. I don't feel it's fair to characterize them as a victim for having to put in some effort to mention a basic standard of quality on their platform.

Valve is a business but they're also a brand. It doesn't help their brand to be bombarded by slop created by a third party. The initial money is a trifle compared to how many refunds they'll have to dish out. It's like a brute force attack, AI is doing it to a lot of industries and fields including mathematics.

I really want to see how this plays out. The impossibility to identify AI work and thus keep users happy, vs profitability and steam actually trying to make things work.

How are they a victim? People aren't going to leave Steam over this. Valve will continue making money regardless from these sales, just as they don't care that they got children addicted to gambling because it also made them money.

How?

Valve is getting bombarded by slop too.

They have the money and the margins to do something about it. How about a review process?

As with most app stores, Steam does not aspire to be a curated collection of "good" apps, and discovery features have never been sufficient as substitutes for traditional marketing mechanisms.

AI undoubtedly hurts slop hurts small independent developers who rely more on Steam placement and internal reviews than traditional marketing more than it hurts Steam itself, so if I were a small independent developer, I'd be looking elsewhere for solutions, treating Steam more like larger publishers do, primarily as a distribution mechanism rather than a marketing tool.

Slop makes it harder to find good games, both in terms of discoverability and customers being less willing to take a chance on purchasing an indie game, resulting in fewer purchases and less income to Valve. Slop games also mean an increase in customers asking for game refunds.

Yes, and Valve has the money and control of the marketplace to do something about it.

They've got a solid return policy, if you've played less then 2 hours they'll refund. They can probably derive a ratio to mint a hiristic and bobs your uncle.

When Valve had a strict curation process, many years ago, there were widespread complaints about indie games being kept out.

Yes, abuse of a system with some reliance on trust does expose the reliance on trust.

I still stand behind what I said back when they moved to direct publishing. Fee to get on Steam is too cheap. I think it is 100 dollars. Should have been five or ten times of that. And even then I suppose that would have slowed things only a bit.

How genuine indie devs from 3rd world are supposed to release their products then? It places many people in disadvantage to wealthier countries.

Use some other marketplace. Offer some type of pre-order campaign. In the end that is not so many copies to sell via other ways if you have something good on your hands.

> There appears to be a lot of calls for nuance here.

I see no calls for nuance, just calls for Valve to reduce slop visibility or to provide a simple way to ignore slop. A filter for games made with AI is probably all that most players want. Perhaps some folks would find value in more distinctions (say, separate tags for AI art assets vs AI code), but right now Steam Next Fest is drowning.

“Here” being HN - curse of an early comment, the “both sides” and “you can’t really tell” got downvotes fast

I think your reply and the op are actually saying the same thing. The is almost 0 chance for a game to be 100% handmade. Even I would want to, I would still use llm to generate tests.

I think the nuance is always there. The disagreement seems to be the semantics.

We are not saying the same thing. I said something completely different.

As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop. Slop has always existed in video games, it’s just faster to create now. So, so much faster.

I think you might be in a bubble if you think that most people don't hate AI. A lot of people hate it with a passion.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/712751/americans-cool-toward.as...

39% of people think it does more harm than good, compared to 9% who think it does more good than harm. Now 52% are equivocal, but as you can see, dislike of AI is much more common than like of AI.

Most people only see the slop. They don't have informed opinions. 1 in 5 American adults is functionally illiterate, and they are supposed to have a valid opinion about the usefulness of AI in contexts they can't see?

Most people hate what they (incorrectly) think AI is.

Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell. They see a ton of AI slop everywhere and they think that AI is harmful because it turned every site and every platform and every type of human expression they’ve experienced into endless piles of AI slop. Can you blame them? Are they even wrong?

>Telling people to ignore the evidence of their eyes is a hard sell.

Yes, I agree. It took science to prove that life doesn't arise from rotting meat. But the fact that populations (even in developed countries) are rapidly getting less and less educated indicates that people are less and less likely to have the critical thinking skills to understand when their eyes are not adequate instruments of observation.

Also AI slop exists, certainly; people aren't wrong to hate AI slop, but you have to agree that slop isn't the entirety of AI.

You might be missing the point here. Drug discovery and math proof generation are not being sold on steam nextfest.

thats funny, because you are moving the goalposts in the argument i made, which is that people who say they hate AI don't know what AI is and think it is only slop, yet you readily agree that AI is more than slop.

Somehow I feel like you don't bring this up whenever the general public gets polled and agrees on some other topic with your opinion.

Not even bothering to fight on the original topic and instead retreating to meta-analysis titled "Everyone is stupid anyway, I am the one who's truly informed" doesn't make for a very convincing argument.

Oh, well good thing you feel and assume how I think and debate. Perhaps your invented picture of me is not accurate?

You might not like it, but that doesn't make my argument inaccurate. Every discussion I've had about the topic, anti-AI folks are willing to acknowledge exactly 0 benefits of AI. That is just dumb, because benefits do exist, and it prevents a rational discussion and analysis of costs and benefits.

When a side in a debate cannot or will not acknowledge the strengths of the other side's position, they aren't having an informed argument; they are ranting. (This is also the chief issue with contemporary electoral politics globally, imo. People arguing from principles rather than facts.)

Finally, I don't claim to be the only one who is informed; where did I say that? I didn't even claim that anti-ai people are stupid. I do claim that most anti-ai people are uninformed and this is because in my experience, they are unwilling to acknowledge any benefit of AI. Further, I propose a mechanism for their uninformed opinions: because slop is highly visible, whereas benefits are mostly invisible. As examples, take drug discovery and deeper understanding of maths: do you honestly expect a population where 1 in 5 adults is functionally illiterate and the literacy and numeracy scores of our youth continue to plummet will value those things that are literally not things that can be seen (and rely on very advanced degrees to understand), versus the prevalent and highly visible slop that exists?

Get real.

Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"

While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.

Same as when I got annoyed that library I wanted to use turns out does not check any of the boxes it claims to check, because its pure untested slop. I would have no issues with it being AI if it worked because I used it to make my own versio of that library that in fact works as advertised.

> While I hate nightmarish ai slop pictures some restaurants use and some very ugly banners some street vendors use, I recognize some some AI generated assets are pretty neat.

So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.

> Well, poll does not distinguish between "I hate AI slop" and "I hate any use of AI"

Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?

> So you don't think it does more harm than good, and think something else instead.

I don't think it does more harm than good. Maybe I'm biased because it's been very good for me and the people around me.

> Isn't the criticism rather that the poll distinguishes between you and the people polled?

No. The argument being made in this thread is that people hate AI slop (people just hate slop), rather than AI in general. This poll was linked as evidence that people hate AI. My argument is that the poll is flawed and does nothing to counter the point being made in this thread about slop vs. AI.

As for Steam...ever since they opened up who can publish and how publishing works, there been _a lot_ of slop pre-AI. I'd rather have more interesting and more controvesial filters. People will get surprised how few recent games aren't going to be filtered by "No AI"

A lot = most?

I agree with "alot", but i doubt most "hate". Hate is a strong word/emotion that gets thrown around easily for sensationalist or propaganda purposes. Is this an "appeal to hate" argument?

Most people have more going on in their lives than to have chance to hate abstract things.

For most people AI are search results in "human" speech presentation. Or slightly more sophisticated customer service bot. Or the latest form of personalized clipart generator for their group chats.

For most people experiencing AI is not (yet) beyond the experience clash of going from nokia 3310 to a multicamera, ig/fb/doomscroll filled iPhone. Are they seeing much more "slop" in their doomscroll than in 2021? I'd argue not. Social media has been filled with low quality engagement triggering slop way before chatgpt.

I hate so called "AI" and so do most people I know. Slop is in category of its own tho.

> As always, MOST people don’t hate AI, they hate slop.

That isn't true. AI is overwhelmingly used to create slop, not useful or interesting things. Therefore people hate AI in large part because it is synonymous with slop.

absolutely wild that HN juuust clips the visibility of the referral code appended to all of your links

well played honestly

That's not what that is, nor does Steam have an affiliate program that would enable the parent commenter to make money from referral links.

i think you mean its not a conventional affiliate code, it is still a referral code, there is no hard requirement for a referral code to make money for the referrer, but yes this is indeed a mechanism that steam has and steam tracks these referral IDs

theres an explanation on steamgifts about the referral codes from 6 years ago, explaining the mechanism, and how it tracks the click as a +1 without any sort of purchase a requirement past that, with enough +1's the curator gains more weight over other curators for recommending games, which could be leveraged indirectly by a curator to accept sponsorships to advertise or promote

https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/3Y4jr/curatorclanid

the link includes a nice way to catch these too with ublock filter

steampowered.com/*?curator_clanid=$document,important

But why are they mad? Why do they ever encounter such games? I interact with Steam daily and before AI vibecoding there were plenty of garbage games out there.

I have no reason to seek them out. The only reason I would ever encounter "Leverage Real Estate Simulator" is because people are "outraged" about it.

Who cares about steam entries for bad games? Who is it hurting?

This is taken from the front page of nextfest.

Many shoppers browse nextfest to find cool new indie games. These are being crowded out by AI slop.

What a reasonable answer to a ridiculous question — I wish I was more like you, honestly. Most often I would reply something snarky or passive aggressive. Off-topic, sorry.

They're not mad? They ask for a filter to specifically make sure that they don't see the AI slop.

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