We know what actual persecution looks like; I’m not going to name real-world events, but there’s a stark difference between being mad on a forum, and real physical harm perpetrated on a daily basis out in the real world. I will agree that there are people lashing out hard because they (for the most part justifiably) see ‘AI’ as it’s being used, encouraged (and controlled) by big-tech as an existential threat.
I’m generally on the side of rejecting its use for anything with monetary value attached to it, unless and until its ‘disruptive’ nature is dispensed with. I’m certainly disappointed with anyone that takes the award seriously enough to brigade in either direction (I’m fairly certain that once it was obvious what rogue supporters were doing, it wasn’t hard for other people to leap to a defence of wastelines themselves, Streisand Effect and all that) but if it was gotten away with before, of course it would be done again.
I think a ‘community award’ is a decent enough idea, but it’s not the only thing that the forum tech complicates. So yeah. Yes to limiting to TL1, with a proviso that polling is locked for 7 days after submission, so anyone that did play it can actually vote. I think the long-term answer is to host the games with a system that unlocks voting if a user is registered as at least downloading the finalists, but that’s probably a ways off.
Yes also, to reworked allowances for punishing brigading, provided there is direct evidence people aren’t even bothering to play at least one of the games. If there is no punishment, there is no incentive to play fair in the future. Maybe consider having an external vote host that’s better-equipped to stop any further attempts to undermine, with links to the voting platform gated behind TL1 with a key to prevent linkjacking.
Last thoughts; if a game made with ‘AI’ has a competitive advantage by virtue of allowing the dev to make more in a limited amount of time, then having it compete with a game that doesn’t use it is always going to be unfair, but I am unconvinced that it is an advantage, given the amount of bugs and mistakes I remember seeing in early builds of wastelines. Yes, it allows some impressive stuff with personnel limitations, but if you’re building on bad code, eventually you will hit a brick wall and have to fix all the unverified slop and if your images are all generated, you will be spending time and money cleaning them all up and re-generating bad images to get your golden sample.
That last bit (money) is probably the important one, so yeah. I’m down with banning commercial AI in games, period. Anything else imho is up to discretion around impacts. It’s a tech with too much of a capacity to distort reality for it to be financed indirectly by the userbase. I don’t think a full ban fixes everything, as accusations will still be made (see, previous conversations) about x person or y person using AI-generated whatevers. Just dispense with the most distortive shit and clamp down on people being Dumb.