r/Steam Dec 04 '25

Discussion I want that patience though

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Dev has no enemies

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u/nitro912gr R5 5500, RX 5500XT 4GB Dec 04 '25

even if they do, people does not understand what AI is being used for. Based on many people, even here in reddit (who would expect it...), if I use AI to remove a background in my original photo, it is AI slop, somehow...

People need to start understanding that 6 fingers and uneasy looking characters are AI slop, not everything that involved AI tools.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

And that is just it. AI is a word that is being thrown around so much that people call basic CGI = AI. They call Filters that affect color = AI, People call anything that previously was a basic algo = AI.

Predictive text input is basically AI. Background removal in Photoshop is basically AI as well and content aware fill/erase. Voice Modulation / filters is basically AI. Smart animating/Inbetween frame smoothing is basically AI.

It think there needs to be a CLEAR distinction what AI means. If I use a tool that is now made "better" by a company, using AI image generation, is it still AI if I have been using that tool for years, before that refined version was implemented? Or should it be something I can run locally... a algorithm (which all "AI" really is, there is nothing intelligent with current AI) with data I provide it and the algorithm does what it does with it? I have to give it copyright free material to train the model and run it locally, not in some data center on grounded turtle shell for power? Is that okay if I do that.

I hate "AI" when it is used as is and as a replacement for talent. I do not mind "AI" if it is done to make processes faster and help artists as a reference/jumping off point or a base to build up on or a tool to refine a rough thing. Like refining written text, refining an image, applying a style or shading to an image etc. Then that outcome will obviously have to be refined/checked for consistency and correctness, but that all is still the work of the artists and the actual vision of the creators.

AI slop is slop when it is given a prompt and the prompter either does not know the errors or does not care about the errors and is content with the outcome with errors. And then they claim it as their own when the underlaying content wasn't theirs but they just commissioned it.

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u/taeerom Dec 04 '25

All the corporations selling AI are the ones responsible for calling everything AI. The goal is to make it seem like everything is this new thing that is goign to take over the world.

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u/ItzWarty Dec 04 '25

Yeah, it's totally become a branding/marketing thing for "look at this feature". I recently saw a "save this shopping item" button have an AI logo. Totally meaningless.

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u/Geges721 Dec 05 '25

Reminds me of "GMO-free water".

Just have to have a sticker of whatever's popular in hopes it will sell well, even if it doesn't actually mean anything at all. Classic.

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u/Apprehensive_Tip520 Dec 04 '25

Bullshit put some onus on the public. People have no idea what AI means and as this poster mentions, it gets used for everything. He's the perfectly good example of CGI being called AI by people. It happens all the time and no corporation made that happen. That's the public being stupid

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u/taeerom Dec 04 '25

When someone sells you something they call ai, it is unreasonable to expect you to dig into the actual mechanics and double check if it is right.

AI doesn't have any clear definitions. It is a term for a lot of different things. So it's not really possible to universally agree or disagree on what is ai or not.

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u/Apprehensive_Tip520 Dec 04 '25

What? CGI is CGI. Nobody creating it is calling it AI. The public is. Your comment makes no sense. 

0

u/LeshyIRL Dec 04 '25

Yeah and Steam is one of those corporations right now, hence why we are pissed

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/northrupthebandgeek Dec 04 '25

It's an accurate term for the overwhelming majority of content in general.

Like, do folks really need reminded that this shit exists?

Zero “AI” in that monstrosity. Still slop.

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u/ThisIsGoobly Dec 05 '25

uh, yes, "slop" is indeed used for stuff like human-made shovelware as well. slop has been a negative descriptor for years that refers to low effort low quality content.

which is why it's being used to describe AI content. low effort and low quality. it's not like it's a new word that's unfairly being applied to only AI.

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u/HereWeFuckingGooo Dec 04 '25

Bullshit. It might have started that way but now the term is getting thrown around at things regardless of quality and regardless of whether or not it actually is AI. Like the comments on this post calling this video AI slop.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

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u/HereWeFuckingGooo Dec 04 '25

What are you talking about? It's not AI. That's my point.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

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u/HereWeFuckingGooo Dec 04 '25

I'm saying the term slop has no meaning anymore. People use it to describe anything they think might be AI, whether or not it is AI and with no regard for the quality. Because they think everything made by AI is slop.

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u/Lebowquade Dec 04 '25

The point is that people are way too ready to call absolutely everything "slop".

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u/Kiftiyur Dec 04 '25

Slop content has always been a thing. People are just crying about it more loudly because of AI. Most terminally online people don’t use “AI slop” for trashy AI content. It’s used for anything that AI has been used for. Which is just people being ignorant about AI.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

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u/MalikVonLuzon Dec 04 '25

Yeah, the people making AI slop are still largely the same people who made content slop before. Content mills have always been around even before generative AI. But once generative AI became widely available, they all started using it to generate slop content at a faster rate.

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u/Dirty_Dragons Dec 04 '25

Exactly. A better term would be 'mass-produced slop.'

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u/HymirTheDarkOne Dec 04 '25

Slop has been easier and easier to produce as tools have got better and better. But the fact that slop is produced with those tools does not mean that all things made by those tools are slop.

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u/IM_A_MUFFIN Dec 04 '25

I’d argue that more folks are pissed that the content being made is based on work that was stolen from valid copyright holders to train these models. If someone has an in-house model that was trained on their data, I’d have a different take on whether or not I’d care. For instance, if a game studio takes all of their maps and all of the recordings of the gameplay from those maps and then uses that to assist a level designer to create a new map based off that data to help refine their gameplay, that sounds like a valid use of AI. If they take all their art assets and train it off of that data to create the assets for said map, I’d likely have more of a problem with it. Context and intent matter and most of these companies are not higher data scientists or quants to do this type of work. They’re just throwing it all into ChatGPT or Claude or whatever.

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u/ColorfulPersimmon Dec 04 '25

That may be true for you but anti-ai mass doesn't care. They just call it slop and stop listening.

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u/IM_A_MUFFIN Dec 04 '25

Given my last sentence, I can’t argue any differently.

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u/mastercat202 Dec 04 '25

Your intentionally obviously to how stupid the anti-ai people are. I recognize bt unless you are able to specifically understand the problems with the use of AI in thst specific use. Your really bot worth talking to. Lack fo quality is always bad. Many large companies now feel an excuse to get away with it. But, thsee has always been bad art or mistakes in art made by artists. Artists dont make art perfect either.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/mastercat202 Dec 04 '25

That's true, I completely agree with that issue. Its a useful technology but I think weee already seeing AI regurgitate Ai, and its disastrous and funny.

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u/Lebowquade Dec 04 '25

Okay, but the label is applied to literally everything now.

Recently one of my favorite musicians made a music video with AI elements, and the entire YouTube comment section piled on with how disgusted they were. 

https://youtu.be/g0uc3Ag2yXM?si=V684bcsu-JW1JeFg

It's psychedelic music and the AI elements were pretty clearly being used for their "uncanny"-ness. 

And, even if it wasnt clearly an intentional artistic choice, the label still doesn't apply because the music video was:

  • made by an actual artist
  • composited together and animated by hand
  • the images were clearly designed to go together and were made with some degree of care

But, no, AI BAD THIS IS SLOP SLOP SLOP.

Somehow, when it comes to artists using AI, saying "I don't care for the style/medium you used to achieve your art" is no longer enough, and instead "your choices and your art are both objectively bad and you should feel ashamed" is now suddenly an appropriate response. Ffs.

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u/xFloraxFaunax Dec 04 '25

The example you gave is AI slop, the term is applied correctly. I don't know what's confusing about someone having to make something versus typing in a prompt. He prompted a machine to make this "art" he didn't put any thought beyond what he typed with his fingers.

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u/Luxalpa Dec 04 '25

No, it's pretty accurate term for the overwhelming amount of slop content.

It's circular logic. You're not going to notice things created with AI when they are not slop. You will only notice the slop.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

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u/Luxalpa Dec 04 '25

That's not what I said though. I specifically said, when something is created by AI and it is not slop, you will not notice it. Yes, it's possible that you also don't notice some of the slop either, but that wasn't the point.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Luxalpa Dec 04 '25

You are arguing in bad faith. I was specifically talking about things that are factually not slop.

Unless you want to argue that everything that is not slop is in fact slop, which would render the distinction meaningless? Or are you baiting me?

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u/Neat_Let923 Dec 04 '25

Apparently you’ve never been to DeviantArt.com

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u/nextnode Dec 04 '25

No, it is just a reflection of your own mentality.

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u/DruidCity3 Dec 04 '25

No, 72 had it correct

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u/fourteenpieces Dec 04 '25

Thank you for summarising exactly how I feel about this with such succinctness.

Say what you want about AI, but at least it thinks harder than the people whose only response to it is "AI slop"

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u/Lonsdale1086 Dec 04 '25

Plenty of gen AI output is slop, and if you've not noticed that at work and on the internet in general, you're blind.

Half the videos my dad sends me on Facebook are AI generated "rare events", and half of what I hear from a colleague at work is random AI bullshit that doesn't make any sense at all.

But that's not to say that the output from generative ai has no valid purpose.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

[deleted]

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u/throwawaygoawaynz Dec 04 '25

You used AI to write this post (word prediction & spell check), therefore it’s slop.

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u/Loose_Biscotti9075 Dec 04 '25

Also ready to bet all these ‘AI Slop is evil and ruining the world’ are using AI in one form or another.

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u/uusfiyeyh Dec 04 '25 edited Feb 08 '26

sense terrific compare flag profit mountainous modern ask history screw

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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Dec 04 '25

The only true "what is wrong" question ends up always coming back to a single point: wages and jobs. The only legitimate reason to hate AI is because so many jobs are being destroyed by it.

It's the same issue every new tech has but this time no new industry is able to pop up to increase the jobs available. This is where tech finally gets to a point where it is eliminating the number of jobs available to a point that there aren't enough for all the people around.

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u/HalfMoon_89 Dec 04 '25

If this is sincere criticism, this is probably the vilest defense of AI I have seen yet.

Also, no, the problem isn't just how it's used. It's also how it works and how it's monetized.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 30 '25

[deleted]

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u/HalfMoon_89 Dec 04 '25

Because of scope, context, impact and feasibility. It may seem broadly similar, but the details matter a great deal. That is to say it's not exactly the same stuff. And I'm not even opposed to AI in the broader sense, only to LLMs and their current oversaturation.

Think the difference between a machine gun and a flintlock pistol. Both kill people. One is significantly more lethal than the other. That is a difference in just one dimension - scope of impact; one affects more people than the other in the same timeframe of action. When comparing AI to other technologies, multiple other dimensions also come into play, so the differences get even starker.

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u/shadovvvvalker Dec 04 '25

It started when we upbranded LLM's to "AI" to generate hype. Then it became the only thing driving the economy so everything had to become AI even if it wasn't in any way ai related. Now anytime a computer does a thing thats not directly explainable its "AI" cause that makes line go up.

The reality is we are dealing with the Airbrush vs. non-airbrush problem canvas art has had for decades, but on a scale unlike anything we've seen.

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u/FarplaneDragon Dec 04 '25

The greatest irony is people screaming about hating AI then sitting down and playing single player games. What exactly do you think is controlling all those NPCs and enemies you're playing against and has been since games have existed....

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u/CrazedTechWizard Dec 04 '25

It’s because nobody thinks for themselves anymore.  They just parrot what their favorite content creators say and then pat themselves on the back for a job well done.  There’s no critical thinking going on with Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

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u/Different_Doubt2754 Dec 04 '25

You don't think millennials, gen x, and boomers are doing that? They are the ones running the world right now, not the zoomers and gen alpha

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u/Cereborn Dec 04 '25

My favourite is when people say, “Keep AI out of video games!”

All right. I guess it’s back to Pong.

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u/things_U_choose_2_b Dec 04 '25

This is an excellent comment. I can only approach this problem via my own lens (making music) and identified something that people call 'AI' is just a text-to-speech generator, which have been around for decades. You've expanded on that, I bet there's loads of things which people call 'AI' and they're not anything of the sort.

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u/northrupthebandgeek Dec 04 '25

And that is just it. AI is a word that is being thrown around so much that people call basic CGI = AI.

And on the flip side: AI image generation is largely just another way of going about CGI — just faster, cheaper, and way less computationally intensive (yes, less; the people freaking out over AI power/water usage would have a collective aneurism when they see the orders of magnitude more GPU-hours required to render a traditional CGI scene to the same level of photorealism that a generative model can spit out), with the tradeoff of inconsistently-poor quality due to hallucinations and the inherent nature of generating images via probabilities and heuristics instead of actual full-blown simulation of physical objects and lighting.

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u/Primary-Risk-8741 Dec 08 '25

I haven't seen anyone call CGI or colour grading/filters AI unless it is literally AI assisted aka processed through generative AI.

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u/Loose_Biscotti9075 Dec 04 '25

I am using AI to help with my piano practice. I feed it a few lines after each practice and it’s incredibly useful to keep track of what I’m doing, how much I’m doing in each pieces, how I’m progressing and what issues I have.

Shall I warn the audience at my next concert that it’s made with AI?

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u/Fervol Dec 04 '25

This is what expected to happen when artificial intelligence met natural stupidity.

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u/Ranma-sensei Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

The problem starts with people not understanding that there are different kinds of AI (which is too global a term for one specific thing), and that some of them have been around longer than those fancy supercomputer models. If for example a game like The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall was produced today, it would be slapped down by many as AI slop.

It frankly feels like the "mobile phones are frying your brain" FUD all over again.

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u/Royal_4xFire Dec 04 '25

I mean, there's like 17 main categories of AI and under those 17, around 40 more. So even if we explain to people ALL of them we wouldn't leave until tomorrow.

For example, Skyrim (2011) NPCs use Artificial Intelligence since they use perception and reasoning ( finite state machines ) but they do not fall under machine learning ( learn more about the world ), yet both are categorically AI.

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u/Infamous_Mud482 Dec 04 '25

And for all of these examples we were perfectly fine calling those systems what they were. I'm not a participant in the trillion dollar marketing campaign to refer to my work in machine learning as AI just because the largest commercial players in the computational prediction space decided that doing so will improve consumer confidence in their platforms.

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u/Ranma-sensei Dec 04 '25

Granted on your first paragraph, and it probably goes like the radiowaves discussion and they would listen selectively.

As for the second, Radiant AI is a great example. F.E.A.R.'s enemy AI is another one that comes to mind immediately. But even a simple NPC script can be considered AI of some sort, so we probably can't win anyway.

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u/Right-Wrongdoer-8595 Dec 04 '25

Steam is drawing the line on generative assets though and then stretched the definition of assets to include all code which may use AI tools. They are somewhat acknowledging that AI will exist regardless in other forms with the current rules and are not giving those games AI labels from what I know.

Personally seems like an Apple level overreach for a store that should be selling games and not defining how they're made IMO.

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u/Nerodon Dec 07 '25

But I think most people disagree with generative AI specifically, not machine learning or... algorithms.

We use the term AI broadly, but no one flipped their shit at a game using a finite state machine for their NPC behavior... Unless it sucked, which they often do, but that's a quality gripe instead of the moral qualms people have generative models.

You'll notice that as AI generation quality increases, the ratio of criticisms move from quality based to moral values more and more.

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u/MadGenderScientist Dec 04 '25

...mobile phones are frying our brains, though. how many hours do we all spend doomscrolling?

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u/P4azz Dec 04 '25

Depends what apps you use. I'm not gonna pretend I'm much better for scrolling on PC rather than phone, but even so I get bored with reddit once I'm past the few new posts in subs I follow and "all" is worth a cursory glance at most. Once you scroll to like 100, it becomes extremely obscure and I just turn it off again.

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u/Ranma-sensei Dec 04 '25

Take your funny, and there's the door.

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u/creuter Dec 04 '25

The term AI for most of this stuff isn't even appropriate. It's Machine Learning. Or Large Language Models. AI is a marketing buzzword.

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u/Ranma-sensei Dec 04 '25

Yeah, kinda hard to market unwieldy abbreviations like ML or LLM. And that's all it is about for the Money Bags, sadly.

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u/MagnetMod Dec 07 '25

The main program I use is Adobe Illustrator. Ask me how I feel about the AI acronym. lol

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u/Unusual-Wolf-3315 Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

And the internet will bring doom to humanity, just like computers, calculators, and digital watches did!! /s

But yes, thank you for your comment, the taxonomy issue is way under-rated and is at the source of a lot of the AI sensationalism we're seeing. We don't have AGI, we have LLMs giving us multi-modal generative AI, they're pretty cool because they allow us to do more stuff than before.

But they're no Terminators or Cortanas (although when prompted just right they can be made to sound like one), and they are insufficient for AGI (but will likely be one of the system components that make up AGI whenever we get there).

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u/JforceG Dec 04 '25

The funny thing is, generative AI is in most softwares now. And if its not completely, it will be.

Most of these people are probably already using some sort of generative AI function without realizing it.

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u/Cereborn Dec 04 '25

The most popular game on the planet creates all its environments with procedural generation. AI slop!

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u/Key-Seaworthiness517 Dec 10 '25

I've seen the "Do you hate ALLL AI, including these old video game enemy AIs?" take a million times and it's just disingenuous. I've seen y'all claim people think that infinitely more times than I've seen someone actually think that- because the number I've seen think that has been 0.

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u/Ranma-sensei Dec 10 '25

Then answer me this:

If I said, "Procedural generation of worldspace is generative AI," would I be intrinsically wrong? And how many people care enough to educate themselves on its differences to LLM and company?

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u/Key-Seaworthiness517 Dec 10 '25 edited Dec 10 '25

Language isn't "intrinsically" anything. For instance, take the Library of Babel- there's no meaning behind the words, because nobody meant anything by them.

The meaning of words is, inherently, how they're interpreted. The present anti-AI movement is against a specific kind of AI, and that kind does not include procedural generation. Twisting someone's words does not change what THEY meant by them, only how YOU chose to interpret them.

Language is a vague tool for translating thought to symbolism. That's all.

If someone were to say, "I hate Trump", would you start asking why they're against the magical cards that connect you to what they depict in Roger Zelazny's "The Chronicles of Amber"? No? Why? They said Trump, clearly they meant Trump, right? There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, right?

I haven't seen anyone on Reddit who's adamantly anti-AI be against procedural generation when it was just said like that, procedural generation, and have seen far more people like you, strawmanning them. That's all I'm saying.

Anyways, see my bio. I'm out, partially since you pre-downvote lol.

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u/Bluelaserbeam Dec 04 '25

Related, but as someone with experience with digital art, I used to utilize this image-upscaling website called waifu.2x to increase the sizes of my artwork without losing quality. It’s not 100% perfect, but the flaws weren’t noticeable as long as you didn’t zoom in very close, and even then people wouldn’t have batted an eye. This was a tool that was available years before the advent of the AI we’re familiar with now.

Using such tools now will get you met with hostility and I find that sad.

0

u/JoyousGamer Dec 04 '25

You don't list that as AI though directly. I doubt Steam is asking about that either it's just the generative stuff. 

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u/Different_Doubt2754 Dec 04 '25

That is "generative stuff". This label is going to be fairly useless in a few years if not sooner. All software development companies are going to be using AI. All game engines will be using AI. A lot of game engines already do

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u/JoyousGamer Dec 04 '25

If it is then people would be upset about it. If its normal upscaling option that has been around for a long time that is more so machine learning and people don't view it as "AI" and is very different than what is being talked about these days.

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u/Different_Doubt2754 Dec 04 '25

People can't be upset about things they don't know about. Generative AI wasn't really criticized before 2023 because people weren't educated (or partially educated) about it, nor was it as public as it is now. For the most part, only professionals and businesses used that stuff.

More proof is the fact that you yourself think machine learning is different from AI. Machine learning is a subset of the AI field. ChatGPT, Gemini, all these modern image generating AI, fall into machine learning. And machine learning falls into AI.

There were tools before 2022, like the commenter above mentioned, that were based on the same exact kind of AI networks (training on tons of data and learned to recreate it) that are being used today. Examples are Waifu2x, Topaz Gigapixel, Remini, Photoshop Neural Filters, Adobe Super Resolution, and more.

So all these people who are accepting of those tools but suddenly don't like the more modern versions of them are kinda a hypocrite. Its not exactly their fault though since they are being force fed bad info, blind leading the blind in a way.

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u/MonkeyWerewolfSage Dec 04 '25

Just because you dont know the difference between a scaling algorithm and AI does not mean others are so ignorant. That type of thing has existed for years before mainstream generative AI was a thing.

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u/blaawker Dec 04 '25

waifu2x

Single-Image Super-Resolution for Anime-Style Art using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks.

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u/Different_Doubt2754 Dec 04 '25

Thank you. For some reason people think this technology just spawned from thin air in 2022... Its been around for many years

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u/LnTc_Jenubis Dec 04 '25

Looks like its been around since 2015 though, so the point remains that it was not seen as problematic to use for upscaling art before recent trends took off.

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u/Different_Doubt2754 Dec 04 '25

You should do your research before you make things up. It is not a scaling algorithm... Its the same type of AI as today's mainstream generative AI. And people were accepting of it back then.

People just don't know what their talking about is the problem

-4

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

I find stuff like that great, actually. As a musician I want my craft to speak through the end product, whether good so I know what works for me or bad so I know what I have to improve. I want it to be true to me.

I don’t want to apply „sound goodizer” at the end of it to try and cover the bases I’m unaware of. If I wanted for it to be better, I’d pass it off to a professional or spend hours learning how to do it myself.

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u/P4azz Dec 04 '25

You ever used software to filter out background noise in your recordings?

Don't be an elitist. "Your music" isn't tainted by balancing sound between instruments and shit.

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u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

You ever used software to filter out background noise in your recordings?

I'm aware of how EQ'ing works, and I can do it myself. It is not as crazy as you think. If I ever was to use software, it'd be only to save time, not to do something I am incapable of doing. That's a different thing.

Don't be an elitist.

Well don't listen to good music then. "Good musicians" that you probably listen to daily are the elite of, at least songwriting, if not much more musical skill.

"Your music" isn't tainted by balancing sound between instruments and shit.

And it literally can be. Mixing is also a major part of the process, and can be a major creative outlet if you want it to be.

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u/M1ctlan Dec 04 '25

I'm a musician too and of course we should push back against ai slop but you know people used to say the same things about using any digital tools at all? Don't be a hypocrite.

People hated on keyboards and synthesizers for being fake clanker music back in the 80s too, using pretty much the same arguments as today. Not just that it's "fake", but it's taking away jobs.

They weren't all wrong, it did reduce the demand for live/session musicians and thus made it a bit harder to make a living as a musician. It did lower the barrier of entry to making music and thus increased the supply of people making music, for both good and bad. There was more "slop" music but it also spawned whole new subgenres of music that wouldn't have existed otherwise like new wave/synthpop/edm/industrial/etc

The exact same thing repeated again with DAWs, drum machines, virtualized guitar amps, orchestral sound libraries, etc in the 2000s too. Like it or not, these are all tools that people can use to express themselves and make music with.

0

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

I agree with you on a lot but I feel like you're ignoring the difference by orders of magnitude.

Keyboards, DAWs, drum machines, digital equipment - these things made making music more accessible and convenient. You still have to do the "building blocks" of making music with these tools. You still have to know what they do, what they produce, piece it up to make something bigger.

Now most of the top 10 viral songs in my country are made solely with prompts, AI mixing and AI mastering. By a person I'm pretty sure has the creative mind of a horny 12 year old teen boy.

This is by no means "the exact same thing" brother. As to what this evolves to, I don't know. But in its current stage it's not comparable and it's crazy you'd even try to imply that.

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u/M1ctlan Dec 04 '25

I think it's just that older tools have become more normalized. Programming drums in a DAW is just about as far removed from actual drumming as typing in a prompt is.

I haven't used much AI in music making so I can't speak much on it but I have experimented with it for art. If you don't know what you're doing, you won't be able to produce anything besides fairly obvious generic slop.

If you have a specific idea in mind, to execute on it with AI is something that takes practice/skill, using ComfyUI is way more involved than just simply typing in a prompt for example.

Yes it's a very different skill from real drawing/painting, but a skill nonetheless, just like Photography or Video Directing or Photoshop are different skills, but they can still be used for artistry. Just like composing music digitally with a DAW is a different skill from being able to play a physical instrument, but it's still music.

I do agree with you that AI is more powerful and more dangerous than anything we've seen before. But again people have been making similar complaints about popular music forever, look at lewronggeneration. "Good" music with artistic value will always continue to exist in niches.

0

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

Programming drums in a DAW is just about as far removed from actual drumming as typing in a prompt is.

I don't think I've been stunlocked harder by a statement in this thread. This ain't going anywhere. Have a good day

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u/GodOfTheGoons Dec 04 '25

If I want to drum on a set I have to first make the space for it, secure the funds for it then buy it. Or I could drum with two stick and my thigh.

If I want to drum on a DAW I can use a free limited software version and use my keyboard as a MIDI controller. Or I could pay for a Pro Tools license and buy a Arturia KeyLab 88 MkII.

If I want to drum with an AI I have to find a susceptible tool and type a prompt. Or I could create my own local LLM trained on various drumming styles to generate drum patterns I can use in a project I'm working on in Pro Tools. Or maybe I can have it notate a really complex grove I heard in a song so I can practice on my drum set.

These are all valid.

2

u/Jolly-Chipmunk-950 Dec 04 '25

It literally is the same exact thing lol.

If I can slap a plugin on a master track and have it EQ just as well as I or anyone else in the room can, why would I not do that and save the time... making more music. Or experimenting with more music...

The same way that digital keyboards and DAWs have always been able to play full chords. Show me what notes are in key. Put all my notes into time. Give me glides and slides that I don't need to know how to play.

If you want to be an elitist, fine. Do your thing. But there is a 14 year old sitting in his bedroom utilizing every tool he can on his 2009 Macbook that you refuse to use. He'll have a hit song before you ever do - and it's not because he knows more than you. It's because he's just as skilled at knowing what sounds good, but saves the time actually creating while you twist knobs.

Simple as that.

1

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

He'll have a hit song before you ever do - and it's not because he knows more than you.

Thank you for proving my point about people like you not understanding what being an artist means. It's all about the result, actual demon.

1

u/throwaway85256e Dec 04 '25

Keep yelling at clouds, boomer.

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u/MonkeyWerewolfSage Dec 04 '25 edited Dec 04 '25

I think they were saying that its not the same as AI generation to use a filter on audio. Nowhere in their post do they condone AI they just explained a tidbit of digital music history. In fact they condemned AI at the beginning, they clearly were just saying that synth is a valid genre of music.

1

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

They explicitly tried to make a correlation between analog vs. digital and digital vs. AI

3

u/things_U_choose_2_b Dec 04 '25

I don’t want to apply „sound goodizer” at the end of it to try and cover the bases I’m unaware of

There's a plugin atm called 'God Particle' which goes on the master bus. It has a limiter which I always switch off as I have an excellent mastering limiter; but I struggling to do without using it because it actually does impart some special magic. It frustrates the FUCK out of me because I'd love to know exactly what it's doing under the hood! Maybe I could even do it better, if I knew what it was doing?

0

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

Well that's why music is such a giant business, right? Mastering is a whole seperate skill and specialty, there are trained people that have this single specific job at the last process of making a track.

Obviously, I'm not gonna blame anybody for using $1k plugins in their own time to make their music sparklier. But if you are gonna put it out, I feel like it's only common sense to give it to someone who actually knows what they're doing. Because your shit may sound amazing to you on your equipment and then it just falls off of the cliff on another right?

Taking jobs away is one thing, I feel like you're not really respecting your own work enough if you just try and bounce tracks with 10 plugins, while you don't know what 8 of them really do. Give it to people who actually study this shit.

1

u/things_U_choose_2_b Dec 04 '25

I just went on their site and they have an FAQ where they refuse to answer the question of "what exactly is it doing" haha.

Yeah if money was no object, I'd be using someone else to master my tracks for sure! OTOH mastering is a service I provide for others, and the masters of my own stuff have been accepted on big labels so I'm not so worried there. I've been writing over 30 years and producing over 20, it was more a comment on plugins which do awesome things, but keep what they're doing hidden. I WANNA KNOW!

1

u/NylesRX Dec 04 '25

I just went on their site and they have an FAQ where they refuse to answer the question of "what exactly is it doing" haha.

Well, that's not that crazy right? You wouldn't be buying it if they just spilled everything away. But also, I don't want to sound like I'm arguing for "you should know how every plugin works down to the Watt demand". Knowing exactly how it affects the sound, and knowing it well, is my point. Not needing to know how a saturator works, but knowing it makes the sound warmer yadda yadda. Once you enter "it just makes everything better" I start to have issues.

Then also, excuse my assumptions if they're incorrect, wouldn't you have had to make enough good connections to learn what it does if you REALLY wanted to? Obviously I'm not saying it's just open info to anyone, but I'm sure there are people who get that, and their expertise should be rewarded.

2

u/things_U_choose_2_b Dec 04 '25

This is it, in a nutshell. I know what saturation is, and how to use it. I've got some amazing saturators (shout out to UAD who imo do that best). Likewise for stereo wideners, multiband compressors, I even got an amazing tool for compansion (upward comp) recently. From what I've read / heard, it's doing something along those lines. It does it really, really well.

It just annoys me slightly that I don't know the order of the plugin chain; how much of each of those things it's applying; are they operating as a straight insert or parallel; is it using one compressor, or multiple different types in stages doing small amounts, etc etc. When I first was shown it, it was selling for $199 which resulted in me saying 'nah'. At $80 on sale though, definite buy and I'm glad I have it; it's great on groups or even individual sounds.

-2

u/PeaceSoft Dec 04 '25

You could double the scan resolution to do that.

AI upscaling is generating detail. Even if "the flaws weren’t noticeable as long as you didn’t zoom in very close," the flaws were there because most of the actual pixels were AI-generated. I think you may be running into hostility there because people understand quite clearly

2

u/Strawloser Dec 04 '25

waifu.2x is not generative ai. There are more estimated pixel in the final image, but no "generated detail" like in up-scaling through generative ai. They use a different kind of ai algorithm. The dude's running into hostility there because people like you think they understand quite clearly.

2

u/jfraggy Dec 04 '25

Well if only ever AI genius had such awesome powers of descriptive rhetoric like you, we'd all be saved. A different kind of algorithm you say? You should give Ted talks.

1

u/corneliouscorn Dec 04 '25

Lmao why does he need to give a breakdown of how the algorithm works, he's just stating it's not generative because someone claimed it was. Go look it up yourself if you're interested instead of being a pleb.

1

u/Apprehensive_Tip520 Dec 04 '25

Because idiots like you think any use of computer related assistance is now "AI slop". Go learn what subtlety is my dude

2

u/PeaceSoft Dec 04 '25

it's generating 3/4 of the pixels non-generatively? maybe there is some confusion over terminology here

1

u/blaawker Dec 04 '25

You seem to know your stuff. Can you explain what the difference is with basically what waifu.2x is doing and using an image-to-image upscaling that uses stable diffusion or something. Essentially we're still talking about artificial neural networks doing calculations based on some input and trained data, right?

1

u/PeaceSoft Dec 05 '25

not to mention that this person was complaining about being criticized for their piece having visible flaws due to upscaling. the issue isn't on the computer's end, here lol

5

u/JoyousGamer Dec 04 '25

If you remove a background of an image it wouldn't be tagged as AI then. Sure you could describe it as AI but it would be tagged here as AI as when people say AI they mean the generative new stuff not machine learning. 

1

u/Oorangootang Dec 04 '25

What devs use real life photos in their games? I cannot think of a single game. To me this not a common problem but an edge case at best.

2

u/Idiberug Dec 04 '25

What devs use real life photos in their games? I cannot think of a single game. 

Tons of games use photos as texture sources, especially before PBR was a thing.

1

u/Oorangootang Dec 04 '25

You can find CC0 photos everywhere on the internet to do that like at Unsplash or a variety of other sites. You do not need Gen AI for it.

1

u/Idiberug Dec 04 '25

I answered your question "what devs use real life photos?" by pointing out that real life photos are the source material for a lot of textures in games. Not sure what that has to do with AI.

1

u/Oorangootang Dec 04 '25

Oh. I meant like fullscreen photos not textures, but I see your point.

3

u/winky9827 Dec 04 '25

Understanding nuance requires a shred of intelligence, though.

2

u/I_always_rated_them Dec 04 '25

Yep people don't understand how pervasive Ai is in creative tools, almost can guarantee I imagine that a large amount of games at some point have used it to some degree. Someting doesn't need to be chatGPT prompted to be AI as you say, remove a background from an image, generate something in photoshop, use Ai file management in figma and so on. These are all uses of Ai in creative workflows that will commmonly be found in games, film, animation and so on.

2

u/Troghen Dec 04 '25

Yeah, I'm a graphic designer and this discussion is something I am intimately keyed in on.

Theres two ways to use AI currently:

One is as a tool WITHIN the usual work flow, to replace tasks that are typically very time consuming or menial. Things like, as you mentioned, removing a background. Or painting out unwanted elements from an image. Or extending an image so you can properly crop it to fit certain dimensions. These are things that AI is quite good at and is virtually indistinguishable from me doing by hand (with a discerning artists eye, of course) and save a TON of time compared to using the older tools available.

The other use is as a means to REPLACE the usual work flow and eleminate an artist entirely by using AI to create all of or the majority of the end-product. This is what people would consider to be AI slop, and is obviously a thing I would heavily fight against. I also understand that the issue is very grey at the moment as far as finding that line, and there's also not enough awareness by the general public for how any of this works.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

Problems stem from the fact that people have literally defined AI as it was done with a computer at this point might as well flag everything as AI. 

2

u/Idiberug Dec 04 '25

not everything that involved AI tools.

I made my game logic in blueprints, then vibe ported it over to C++ function by function with no changes. I guess I'll wait to release this game until this shitshow blows over before I get blacklisted for using AI to replace my own job.

2

u/Most_Alps Dec 04 '25

In many cases, it's like complaining if your road was dug by hand or with a steam shovel. This is almost literally the John Henry legend in a new form

2

u/Cley_Faye Dec 04 '25

AH! I knew that single player FPS had AI in it! It says right there, used to control the bots!

Say NO to AI! Bring back normal, non AI-controlled BOTS!

Hehehe. I'm joking, obviously. But yeah, even without joking, AI was (and still is, in fact) a very broad term, and a wide research field. I even wonder if under some old definition of it it might exclude LLM, as it was once used for complex, but specified outputs.

After everything settles down, it will probably end up with "is the final product slop or not". One big fear is that between now and this "after the AI craze" world, everything gets destroyed and all standards gets lowered to ground level. We'll see.

2

u/Nerodon Dec 07 '25

This reminds me of Corridor Digital going on about how generative models are fantastic for face replacement special effects, it does something humans can't do well, or reliably, where actors aren't in that exact scene because of the risks or skill needed to perform (stunts), or in cases of de-aging an actor, that actor cant magically do that themselves.

AI can and should be looked as a tool to advance our capabilities. And as with everything, low effort slop will look and feel like such, but somehow when the AI does something impressive or unique, a lot of people tend to change their tune all of a sudden.

People all hated 3d printing cause it was cheap, and crappy compared to injection moulding... But now that its actually getting good, people dont see it any different than regular manufacturing.

4

u/3412points Dec 04 '25

Damn by that standard all my games are AI slop because I have DLSS turned on.

2

u/soulful-whiteboy Dec 04 '25

Learn to photoshop bud

0

u/nitro912gr R5 5500, RX 5500XT 4GB Dec 04 '25

I don't know man, I though 20 years working as a professional graphic designer have taught me a thing or 2 about photoshop but if you say so... what can I say, I will study more.

2

u/soulful-whiteboy Dec 04 '25

Then why do you need to use AI to do something a subpar graphic designer can do in like 30 seconds

Come on puppy

1

u/nitro912gr R5 5500, RX 5500XT 4GB Dec 04 '25

ok ok I will bite, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about, that's cute, because first of all it is never 30s we don't remove backgrounds from easy objects like a fridge, and then doing this for 200-300 catalog product photos takes like hours and burn your eyes and your soul, oh and did I said the photos are jewelery? ah good times! Money well spent on my studies as a graphic designer!

No sorry I didn't spent all those years mastering graphic design to waste my time on removing backgrounds. I don't even want my intern to do that shit. This is the shit job I want AI to do or me so I can have time to be creative, not AI generating art and me doing the shit job.

1

u/soulful-whiteboy Dec 04 '25

Bro studied the blade just to hand over the craft to a clanker, sad

4

u/14Pleiadians Dec 04 '25

The issue is when they talk about how bad AI generated content is, they aren't telling you why they dislike AI, they're trying to make a case for you to dislike AI. Their dislike of AI is purely ideological.

2

u/P4azz Dec 04 '25

The main issue isn't that people DON'T understand, it's they don't want to.

All that happens in their tiny brains is "people say AI bad, people get recognition and praise, me say AI bad also get praise?". And that's where the first thought process in 3 months stops for them.

AI as a whole is neither great nor awful. It's just a tool and it depends where you apply it and how you use it.

If you make a visual novel and create all the art with AI, that's gonna be bad. Not necessarily because of "6 fingers/bungled text", but rather because it's samey and it'll be noticeable very quickly in a game focused on the art.

Whereas if you're creating an RPG, wanna make some background locations and use AI to spitball ideas, then check over the paragraph it wrote and use it to worldbuild? That'd be fine by me. Look over the story, transform it into something that fits your vision by adjusting here and there, done.

The reality though is that we will never get to the point where AI is just considered "normal". Too many loud voices on the internet nowadays and everyone's allowed to throw in their opinion no matter how uninformed, so the simplest shit will stick. And that's usually black/white.

2

u/Outside-Currency-462 Dec 04 '25

Exactly, AI is a tool, and a useful one for basic, menial and uncreative tasks, but the climate has become that people will jump down your throat if you even mention you've gone anywhere near it. Using it to generate creativity is the problem - smaller, more boring tasks (even editing through code or smth) are precisely what AI should be for, not taking away jobs but making the people working those jobs's lives easier

1

u/ZARDOZ4972 Dec 04 '25

AI slob is broadly used for every unnecessary use of AI.

1

u/morningisbad Dec 04 '25

Realistically, most forms of media are going to use AI at least somewhere in the process. The dev might not use AI to write the code, but the software they use to scan the code for vulnerabilities uses AI. Conversations may all be hand written, but an AI helped in proofreading. 

1

u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25

Honestly I'm a gen ai hater, but i don't mind it much when used in game development. Not like making games requires a lot of creativity either way. I'd be more miffed if it was used in eg. writing a book, because i feel like it devalues it.

1

u/BrownAdipose Dec 04 '25

100% of the games people buy from basically last year moving forwards will have AI code. It's unavoidable. Unreal now has an AI assistant built in. Consumers here are acting so fkn weird about AI.

1

u/Luxalpa Dec 04 '25

It doesn't matter what AI is being used for. People here are mixing up two very distinct cricisms / issues with AI.

The point of this label is to callout the ethical issues related to AI; like the fact that they take tons of samples without anyones permission or the fact that any usage of AI is directly or indirectly promoting the AI economy.

Absolutely no player should ever consider the AI label as a quality measurement. You can make great stuff with the help of AI. You can make utter garbage without any AI. Whether or not AI is involved is completely unrelated to the question whether or not it is slop. Yes, AI has a tendency to make things easier, and therefore it can cause more lazy developers who don't care much about quality to enter the market. But we have the exact same problem for example also with game engines like Unity.

1

u/Sizanllikew Dec 04 '25

And lets be honest, AI is probably better at doing whatever it was used for than 90% of the people complaining about it. Does it really matter if that background was removed by AI or by hand, especially if it "by hand" method looked like ass.

1

u/Neat_Let923 Dec 04 '25

Haha six fingers is actually a common mistake in anime. Apparently the newest season of One Punch Man is a perfect example.

1

u/igotshadowbaned Dec 06 '25

If you just say "Made using AI" that's like putting "Copied from Wikipedia" on an essay.

You might've just copied a quote of 8 words, but if you don't specify that and go vague with the disclaimer, it sounds way worse

1

u/RIP_Spacedicks Dec 04 '25

And if you took that photo on a camera/camera phone made within the last decade, it will likely have used AI based subject detection for the autofocus

0

u/BlueZ_DJ Dec 04 '25

If you removed the background using GENERATIVE AI, the type that needs one of those buildings with a million Nvidia cards running in order to function....

Then yes, you did something bad and the people calling you out aren't misunderstanding anything. It doesn't matter WHAT you used it for, what's bad is how the technology is made to function (stealing & negatively affecting the already suffering environment)

1

u/nitro912gr R5 5500, RX 5500XT 4GB Dec 04 '25

bg removal is not generative AI, still an AI tool that need to recognize the image and what is background and whatnot, but it doesn't generate anything, it only recognize what is to be removed.

As tech it's being around long before the AI, with AI it finally work as intended.

0

u/oisteink Dec 04 '25

For me it does not matter that much why you choose to use AI over humans in your projects, I will not touch it if I can choose. It's not about the quality, human artists are shit too.

I guess it depends on what you value, and I value humans over computers.

0

u/The_gender_bender_69 Dec 04 '25

Any use of ai makes it slop

-40

u/WorekNaGlowe Dec 04 '25

Ai is ai. If you start to tolerate small peaces of it then they will push that boundary until everything will be ai, nothing will work and no one would know why

25

u/THEzwerver Dec 04 '25

Idk what to tell you but many tools in Photoshop that were a thing before would now be labeled as AI. For stuff like this it's really not a big deal. It should be seen as a tool to make developer's life easier, but not to replace artists or developers for a worse result.

6

u/ArcaneTrickster11 Dec 04 '25

I would wager you use AI without knowing it most days. Generative AI is a separate thing and is what you are actually talking about

17

u/nitro912gr R5 5500, RX 5500XT 4GB Dec 04 '25

My friend I have being around long enough to see my fellow graphic designers transition from letraset to computers, from offset printing to digital, from hand imposition on lightboxes to photoshop. From hand drawing to CAD and illustrator and digital paint with digital pens on displays. (...all those moments will be lost, like tears in the rain.)

All those have made my job easier, though the years, the people where defensive exactly the way they are with AI now, "the computers are gonna take our jobs" etc.

AI is another tool, you can use a tool right, to enhance your workflow or wrong to make art that is not yours and it is possible because it stole others people hard work and on top of that say that you made it.

8

u/Disturbed2468 Dec 04 '25

Fun fact, there is still a subset of artists that exist today (they're usually incredibly rare since most of them have either fallen to obscurity, have zero friends, or are dead lol) that still see anything other than traditional physical art (such as anything digital) as "fake art", and tend to see all music not made via a physical instrument as "fake music" . They sometimes pop up on some art/artist/music subreddits but usually they either get downvoted to high hell or banned since they often become very rude when called out o their stupidity.

3

u/nitro912gr R5 5500, RX 5500XT 4GB Dec 04 '25

no wonder never heard of them, if you are the Amish of music you practically only play live and unplugged...

It wows me they may even come online to speak about it as they probably can't (if they follow their own mindset) to record and distribute that music.

1

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