biased headline? calling it an "AI stigma" implies the judgment is unfair.
just say: *"games that are made using AI..." *
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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Damn guess they shoulda paid artists huh
in my experience, a lot of the game devs using AI would normally try to do the art themselves, but think AI is "better" than what they could do... Then they throw together a collage of mismatched art that has no cohesion and call it a day, and get upset when they get called out for it, thinking it's just some anti AI thing.
People love to take shortcuts then hate when people tell them they sacrificed quality to do it.
Im an artist working in games, and I absolutely agree. Lots of people think art in games needs to be "good" without knowing what that actually means. It's a lot more important that your art is coherent. Having coherent shapes and colors can do a lot. For example, just by choosing a color palette alone, you can create art that works pretty well.
Setting up any limitation will automatically create the coherence for a project. And you can go pretty minimalistic, too. Don't understand colors and light? Go black and white or sepia. Don't know about shapes? Use only one or two and design anything around it.
One problem with AI is that it doesn't use limitation as a tool and isn't able to contain detail. An indie developer who is inexperienced in art and able to manage their expectations doesn't have this problem. They can create naturally game art because they only know one way to approach it.
Or they use it to generate placeholder art "so they can get an an ideal on the final product while they're working on gameplay".
Super Mario 64's jumps were figured out with a cube bouncing around in an infinite plane. Their excuse is pure bs, good gameplay is good gameplay
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I love how easily the billionaire sloplords adopt language implying that they are oppressed.
Maybe we should start doing just that
Good idea. I'll tell my special interest magazine to make me more sympathetic.
Billionaires get their branding from CumHammer Brand Management:
Wealthy
Handsome
Fun-loving
Victim
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Could it just be AI itself and how bad it sucks instead of "AI stigma"?
Yep. I've seen indie game devs try to push AI art into their products and it never looks good. There is no cohesive design. It looks like badly done collage work with images in different resolutions sometimes. And if they're that lazy, it usually shows in more ways.
"Data Analyst Finds that 'Lazy Awful Game Stigma' Can Reduce the Number of Reviews a Game Gets by 53% - And the Reviews it Does Get are More Negative"
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"Data analyst finds that "diarrhea stigma" in bakeries can reduce the number of reviews a cake gets by around 53%--and the reviews it does get are more negative."
Stop putting diarrhea in the cake and people will both review them more often and review them more highly.
Ah yes, the stigma against AI, the stigma that is actually pretty well founded given how it's dogshit at anything other than BS-ing. The stigma that's an obvious reaction to shoe horning a hype fueled scam into every fucking thinkable thing. That stigma?
You say stigma I say quality control issues.
who otherwise would have succeeded
Buddy is in his own little assumption fantasy world
Yes, because gamers are ever so slightly more tech savvy than your average project manager. They are fully aware that LLMs and diffusion models are just expensive plagiarism engines at best and slop factories the rest of the time.
"I filled my game with something people find objectionable and people don't like it"
wow amazing
its a stigma now? and not hesitency?, i dont people see it as a taboo. its obnoxious, a plague and polluting to the environment, plus its being weaponized.
weaponized
I want to be clear to the audience that you are not speaking metaphorically.
Maybe because people don’t want their art automated?
Games are ultimately about telling a story, through literal plot narrative or metaphor. I like it when people tell stories. I don't want to be told a story by a damned machine.
Games are ultimately about enjoying something. There's lots of games people play that don't have a story. Or a good one.
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Good
Good
AI slop is the new asset flip. Same stigma, different grift.
and still they refuse to take the hint
It's because big money is backed into a corner, they'd have bailed by now if they could but they're in to deep now, if they pulled out it would collapse everything, buy comoditys, physically if you can.
Here's a great browser extension that searched the steam store pages for the AI declaration and pops up a giant warning when there is one and shows you the text or it.
I apprecite this exists.
That being said, I almost always use the Steam application to browse their storefront, and it doesn't look like it works in that case. I totally get why it doesn't, just pointing it out
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Love to see it
What I'd really like to know is whether this is because of AI use, or merely because they disclosed AI use. I'm sure there are a lot of games on Steam with undisclosed AI use. How do those score?
They tested where AI use is disclosed.
On Steam, if you use AI, and don't disclose, that's literally a breach of contract with Steam.
But you're basically asking for a study on a likely unstudiable thing, at least not directly. What, are you gonna ... ask every game dev team on Steam if they knowingly lied to both Steam and their players?
Its like the question on your taxes that asks if you are currently a felon with an outstanding arrest warrant.
Yeah, you might catch some absolute total morons, probably not anything close to the entire demo you're ostensibly trying to poll.
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It'd be pretty hard to test in a meaningful way, but I'd be curious how big the impact of AI art is on a game's initial perception compared to human-made slop such as asset flips or a lot of the mobile market and compared to human-made ugly games like Cruelty Squad or Don't Stop Girlypop.
Basically, define how much the humanity is important, versus "prettyness", versus dislike of AI for indirect reasons.
I would be willing to bet that the people who were previously doing human made slop like you described are now the ones making the AI slop. They were already doing minimal effort; it makes sense they'd do even less when presented the option.
Or did I misunderstand what you're saying?
I would be willing to bet that the people who were previously doing human made slop like you described are now the ones making the AI slop. They were already doing minimal effort; it makes sense they'd do even less when presented the option.
You're overestimating both how good AI is and how little effort a lot of these developers want to put in.
Generally, AI tools struggle with any type of specialized work and the same extends to game development. From my own testing, AI tends to butcher all but the simplest game coding tasks as a result of the larger and often very disjointed programming involved, and in terms of asset creation, it can create a lot of more generalized assets, but if you need a repeating texture or a texture for a 3d model, things immediately fall apart. That not to say it can't be done, but its a suprising amount of work for what is supposed to be an automation tool, and when compared to the old solution, is it really much better than just buying a premade game, and maybe swapping one or two things?
That said, my question is more that AI is ugly, soulless, and samey, but human art (and """art""") can be too. Do equivalent human works receive similarly lower reviews, or do the additional consequences of AI use actually factor in to people's perceptions, and if so, how much? For example, is a asset flip designed to rip people off going to be reviewed just as badly as a particularly soulless AI game, or AI going to be worse? Similarly, if you have a game with good programming and design, but AI assets, would it preform the same as something ugly in a human way like Cruelty Squad, or would it perform worse? Basically, how much of the negativity is because AI use has a bunch of negative effects, and how much of it is because the results of AI use are bad?
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Current AA, AAA games are operating on subscription models that end up costing the consumer hundreds of dollars. If you're going to save time/money by using AI and not lower the price, a subset of consumers are going to be justifiably pissed. (Presumably less jobs are created due to the use of AI, so the money I pay isn't being reinvested into communities via local payroll, and now unemployed artists, writers, and coders are being a drain on tax based safety nets. That AI is a drain on water and electric infrastructure that may impact me directly if I live in the vicinity of a data center. The implications are larger than people not wanting AI in games.) If the AI elements are bad/game breaking, or if they don't deliver value for price, studios/publishers deserve the hate.
Great to see disclosures of this technology. I think as time goes on, we’ll want to see further degrees of disclosure. AI art shipped as production quality is a misstep for me. However, AI written code feels worth alerting players & consumers about. They are different degrees of concern, environmental impact, and I suspect that we’ll see AI code to become more standardized whereas games with AI art lacking human oversight will continue to receive more negative ratings than the average.
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