I think the real problem is some creators making bad quality games just to make money, even though they aren’t into that fetish, but I don’t think the AI is the real reason.
Surely, AI made it much easier for creators to make games just for money, but it also made creators which makes good games can make a game without additional work or spending.
I think the reason most people hate AI so much is the first reason. But banning won’t solve these issues, they will still get up with games only to make amounts of money, even without AI. Only good creators who don’t have enough bills will be disadvantaged.
If it needs a solution, wouldn’t it be great to make a condition to make profit (like after N months after the first demo release), instead of banning the AI?
The strongest opponents of AI here are arguing on ethical or moral terms as well as the detrimental impacts to the creative expression of devs / artists putting in their own hard work, no matter their skill level. So it’s definitely not just about money, even if that’s the “obvious” angle for the recent trend of enshittification here.
I’ve been on this website for about 2 years and this is the first time I have visited the feedback page. Damn.
I would just like to bring up on a slightly separate note are some ideas to help promote higher quality content. Whether these ideas are possible due to Discourse’s limitations, I don’t know. But here they are anyway:
Sort threads by ‘Hot/Trending/etc’ - Some sort of sorting by number of replies per time period or something similar will mostly weed out the slop, and also the very popular games which most people have played anyway (and can already be sorted by most views/replies). Yes this can run the risk of controversial threads being promoted, but other than that story of rose game and a few instances of poorly-hidden scams, low quality games generally have low engagement, as people will mute the thread or ignore it and move on.
Sort threads by most recent update - Probably the most realistic implementation is sorting by most recent OP edit of their post. This is prone to being abused, as bad actors could just change a character in their post to appear at the top of the page with this filter, but I think it’s worth a shot if Discourse allows more elaborate filtering
As others have said, separating games that have some element of AI is fair. But other than AI images, accusing someone of using AI to make their games if they don’t admit it is hard to prove
It turned out the “game” he linked to was not listed on Itch, and the one visible on his page was the “demo” with all of the stolen assets, selling for $5. It was completely unchanged, and this was truly one of those “barely abiding by the rules but only just” while still trying to scam his nonsensical game and while fighting everyone with his ChatGPT replies.
Thank you Weight Gaming team!!! He was definitely the most important issue brought up from this thread. So genuinely very happy and relieved to see action taken.
Genuinely, thank you guys for listening and taking action. Incredibly happy to see that this thread has led to somewhere productive, despite how heated it’s gotten at certain points.
I saw the distaste on AI stuff, but what are everyone’s thoughts on someone making line art, but using AI to do the coloring and shading? I’d imagine that’s also distasteful?
I’ll also agree with the fact that the massive amount of entirely AI based games is incredibly off putting. There’s also a certain issue where mass producing AI based games to flood the main page with basically the same image generation and chat bots is probably scaring off a lot of great talent who put in a ton of hours with coding, creating art, music… things that take more skill and intricacy than typing a prompt and tweaking it to get “what you want”.
I am going to try my best not to respond in my standard matter of fact manner here so please bear with me if I am a bit off.
First, I want to thank you all for giving me your feedback here. Things have been out of whack for a while, and I would be lying if I didn’t say I dropped the ball here. It’s been hard just keeping up with keeping everything going and I just kind of lost touch and I am sorry for that.
A lot of really good points were made by a lot of people who I know only want to see us bring the site back on track. I can’t say I will have an answer for all of them, but I do want to give each one the attention it deserves. I tried my best to keep up with this thread, but I want to take a few days to really read it over and make sure I have all the concerns in line, then I plan on making a post to discuss each one further one by one.
I know talk is cheap though, so I do want to back it with some action that the admin team and I do agree with.
We will be archiving the chat bot category in general games and marking them as off topic for the site. I think at the time we allowed them as they were being used more for text adventures or DMs at the time, but I largely agree with what has been said. They don’t quite fit the site and need to be cleaned up. I will make a post announcing it tomorrow and then we will begin archiving it.
We have locked and hidden The Story Of Rose post and banned Gojicks as some of you have already seen. While I did attempt to address this in private, we’ve never quite had a situation like this before and things sadly fell short. The long and short of it is I just made a bad call there and I own that. I don’t want to get into it here but I plan on making a post detailing what happened and what we will be doing to try to stop that in the future. For right now I can only ask that you all forgive me for taking so long to take action on it.
Work and life is a bit crazy for me atm so I hope you all will be patient with me being a bit slow here, but I do promise I will do all I can to address these concerns as soon as I can.
Also, I am locking the thread here. Since I think everyone has said their peace by this point, I just want to make sure that this response does not get buried. If you have any other concerns, feel free to bring them up when we make the posts or make another post here in the feedback category if you don’t want to wait.
Thank you all again for caring enough to take the time to give us all this feedback.