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”.