I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it's no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated "artwork." IMO it's no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren't just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn't capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.

Steam should combat shovelware whether it's AI slop or human slop

The way that valves AI tag works is kind of a problem.

There is no subtlety to it at all, if you use AI in any capacity during the development of the game you need to declare it via that tag yet all the tag then does is say "AI in this game", but there's a big difference between having the AI develop the entire story or produce all of the artwork, and having AI write boilerplate camera controls for a farming simulator.

I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it's no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated "artwork." IMO it's no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren't just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn't capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.

I have an acquaintance who is a lead Dev at an Indie studio where he is developing and training an NPC behaviour engine with thousands of responses and actions. Think fallout or mass effect response wheel, where 2-4 dialogue choices have 2-4 outcomes, but instead you can tell the NPC anything and it will have a different response. Or it will do different things whether you hand it a book, give it book, throw a potion at it or cast a healing spell on it or hug it. It could also change tactics if you tried to snipe it vs if you went at it melee. All of these are trained and accounted for and made in a way where it can be built into any game using a certain engine. And this is just aimed at generic npcs, not companions.

So if this is what disclosure of the use of generative AI means, I'm not against it. I think there is nuance to what can be done with it. Using final art assets? It's theft. Writing? Theft. NPC behaviour? Definitely not.

Honestly, maybe I'm an old fart, but I refuse to knowingly buy games if they use AI instead of paying talented people to create works of art.

There's a simple solution to the case of AI use in game development. It should be in the background, not the foreground, and it should replace grunt work, not professional work.

I read a story recently about how a graphic designer realized they couldn't compete anymore unless they used generative AI, because everybody else was. What they described wasn't generating an image and then using that directly. They said that they used it during the time when they're mocking up their idea.

They used to go out and take photographs to use as a basis for their sketches, especially for backgrounds. So it would be a real thing that they either found or set up, then take pictures. Then, the pictures would be used as a template for the art.

But with generative AI, all of that preliminary work can be done in seconds by feeding it a prompt.

When you think about it in these terms, it's unlikely that many non-indie games going forward will be made without the use of any generative AI.

Similarly, it's likely that it will be used extensively for quality checking text.

When you add in the crazy pressure that game developers are under, it's likely that they'll use generative AI much more extensively, even if their company forbids it. But the companies just want to make money. They'll use it as much as they think they can get away with, because it's cheaper.

How many of the ~6,818 titles now disclosing generative AI use were already on Steam in 2024?

I.E. are a lot of these just games that had already been released, updating their disclosure statements based on Valve's new rules?

The article says 1/5 games released this year use it. I'm not sure if ~34,000 games have released on Steam in the last year

Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it's driven by real creative intent and doesn't result in something that looks low quality. But it's not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. "A picture is worth a thousand words" is accurate. You're also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don't have fine control over because you can't do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.