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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.
Billionaires get their branding from CumHammer Brand Management:
Wealthy
Handsome
Fun-loving
Victim
Maybe we should start doing just that
Good idea. I'll tell my special interest magazine to make me more sympathetic.
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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"
I think the way you phrased it misses the point. It simply does not matter whether AI "art" is good or bad, in a technical sense.
Until AI is an actual person, and can make art reflecting its subjective experience (which would no doubt be very interesting) ; AI "art" is just nothing.
There is no meaning, no story behind it, no other mind to connect with. It was made by a philosophical zombie, a thing that possesses enough appearance of consciousness to seem aware, but no actual subjectivity.
AI "art" could be technically irreproachable, ie "good" and it would still be equivalent to nothing. Even a blank canvas made by a human means worlds more than our current AI could ever make.
And I personally don't believe AI will ever be a person. But on that, sensible minds may differ.
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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.
"I filled my game with something people find objectionable and people don't like it"
wow amazing
When Valve updated the policy for games published on Steam to include disclosure of Ai usage in the games, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney responded in the public that this should not be done and just hurts the industry. It would generate unneeded backslash, as everyone will use Ai in development, according to Tim. Fast forward to today, turns out Epic plans on integrating Ai tools into Unreal Engine 5.
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.
Good
Good
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?
Oh, right. The poison. The poison for Kuzco, the poison chosen especially to kill Kuzco, Kuzco's poison. That poison?
It's so weird how far self-censoring has gone. Now they're altering quotes because of this perception that it will be caught by the AI moderation...
I'm fine with AI use in the back end, nobody really codes without something along the lines of copilot or claude anymore anyway. But any art related asset (in terms of the writing, visuals or audio) needs to be human made.
If you're comfortable leaving what should be deliberate artistic choices to some logic machine, i'm not interested in putting time the world you're building.
I'm fine with AI use in the back end, nobody really codes without something along the lines of copilot or claude anymore anyway.
Well that's just straight up untrue. My org did an AI pilot to see if it was something we wanted to invest in and it ended up coming back with reduced productivity among devs (largely due to a massive increase in debugging time because of the slop output from the AI). Our devs write good code, faster, without the AI involved.
It's mostly in management where we've seen productivity increases, because of how many emails they are writing on the average day and for transcription of meetings.
Heck, it is objectively measured by a LLM adjacent seller like Faros AI.
The more LLM code in your company, the slower delivery and more bugs that you likely find on production.
Literally data is at 60% of daily tasks being LLM assisted, the throughput is (every value is an average) 500% slower, company delivers 10% less and the bug rate is +50% per PR and +250% production incidents.
At 40% of daily task being LLM assisted the bug rate was +9% vs pre-LLM.
That's what's crazy.
Some indie dev was like, "Yeah I used AI to help me learn Godot" and suddenly there's a dozen negative reviews about how his game uses AI.
Nuance is a word that doesn't exist in some people's dictionary, unfortunately.
biased headline? calling it an "AI stigma" implies the judgment is unfair.
just say: *"games that are made using AI..." *
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.
You say stigma I say quality control issues.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with AI games being bad.
AI slop is the new asset flip. Same stigma, different grift.
who otherwise would have succeeded
Buddy is in his own little assumption fantasy world
Maybe because people don’t want their art automated?
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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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.
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?
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Love to see it
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this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2026
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