I do hope you understand that addressing symptoms (attempts to game the vote) without addressing root causes (the underlying dislike of AI assets and development tools) is going to simply mean that a different approach is going to be used next time for the same purpose.
There is a significant contingent of people on this forum who view any usage of AI in the development of a game as inherently disqualifying, and they will continue to act against the usage of AI in games posted here every opportunity they get until there is a clear stance taken from the administration/ownership regarding their stance on AI.
You need to put an end to the debate on the forum here, by either explicitly disallowing AI games or explicitly disallowing attacks on games for using AI. In addition to the voting becoming political instead of actually reflecting preference of the games being put forward, the developer of Second Helpings was run off the site over allegations of AI “vibe coding” (which they denied, but could not prove - because how can you prove a negative?). This is only going to continue to escalate further without some clear intervention from the people in charge.
If you don’t ban AI games, the people who want AI games banned are going to use whatever avenues they can to pursue alternative routes to punish people for making games using AI content. And it doesn’t make for a better development environment, it makes for a more toxic one due to what equals out to witch-hunting. I’ll state right now that I question the long-term viability of AI games, since none of the AI assets can be copyrighted in the United States due to current case-law and so a “vibe-coded” game with AI art assets could literally be copied and resold wholesale and there is no viable recourse for the developer (as all the assets were technically built using a machine which cannot create copyrightable content). But at this point I don’t exactly care about that. I care about the fact that there is an ongoing angry dispute over the use of AI on this site that boils over every three months or so like clockwork and results in people leaving each and every time.
Handle the root cause. Answer the basic AI question, either by banning the use of AI in games or banning the criticism of games for using AI. The half-measures are only pushing users to do things they shouldn’t because they feel as if their concerns are being ignored.