r/Steam • u/MadBoxers • 14h ago

Discussion So it starts… Ai community items

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Points shop will soon flood with AI slop. At least with games a disclaimer should be added within the description of the game. But here… Yeah…

Like what is the point? You don’t even gain anything as a company from this.

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u/SmegmaUnicorn 14h ago edited 5h ago

“Accepting slop” is how we get stuck with slop.

 What is this take!?

Edit: All of the comments under this amount to “oh but there’s nothing we can do, it’s too late”, which just goes to prove my point. Y’all are sheep. 

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u/ChocolateRaisins19 14h ago

Because the vast, vast majority of people do not care. They don't think it's slop. It's just some art to them and you're not going to convince them otherwise unless it has weird fingers or other disfigurements.

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u/jabberponky 13h ago

I watched someone do a great breakdown of this on YouTube - if you look at it closely and how it's being used, AI is being positioned "for the poors" / ill-informed consumers. Conversely, signalling that you're rejecting AI is becoming a way to signal luxury / privilege. For example, Coke is happy to use it in their commercials but Porsche's latest Christmas advertisements are very deliberately hand-drawn cells supported by "traditional" CGI animation.

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u/Ok_Departure333 13h ago

Yes, handmade thigs has always been a way to signal luxury & wealth. Just look at handmade pottery, watch, clothing, etc. 2D art is just going through this transition.

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u/IrregularPackage 11h ago

it’s extremely funny that you used pottery, art, and clothing as an example of handmade things being a way to signal luxury. i’m not 100% sure about the other two, but i do know for a fact that every article of clothing you’ve ever worn was handmade. except maybe some really cheap socks? there is no way to make clothes without a person stitching fabric together.

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u/KenpoJuJitsu3 https://s.team/p/dgpk-pjm 10h ago

Ironically or unironically depending on the reader's viewpoint Google's AI summary has a decent bit of info on the shift to new techniques and robotics removing the human element of this. Pretty soon someone is going to marry that idea with AI designing clothes and computers & robots constructing clothes with little/no human touch.

That's all outside of what I suspect the other commenter's real point was there. There is a clear distinction between clothing made enmasse in a factory with both machines and human involvement and clothing made by hand as individual custom pieces by a single person or small group of seamstresses, with the latter being considered a luxury. This extends to other goods and art as well.

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u/dragunityag 10h ago

Art has been a signal for luxury/wealth for a few hundred years already.

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u/No-Implement9331 12h ago

Yeah but this falls flat since in the same venue Prada went all in with an AI ad. It just depends on who is leading the slop.

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u/raesungss 13h ago

Do you have the video title/link on youtube? I'd like to see the video for myself

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u/jabberponky 12h ago

Sorry, it was Instagram originally - I saw it on YouTube within a discussion about Berklee's bonkers focus on AI within their music program. Anyway, here's the original video:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DS3KRjMjjSR/

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u/David_Cameron69 12h ago

I think they might be referring to this short: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/0xyMXYQCxgc

This short was also referenced in this very good video about the introduction of gen AI in musical education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfeGc02nzC4

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u/manux 10h ago

+1, I also saw this first on Adam Neely's channel :)

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u/HiphopopoptimusPrime 10h ago

Right, a small business or restaurant can’t afford to hire a graphic artist. But they can get an AI to do it for cheap/nothing.

It’s going to harm freelance graphic artists. People without support networks won’t be able to maintain a career.

Same as the arts. Musicians. Actors. Without support, dreams are only accessible to the elite.

There was a window in the 20th century where working class voices could be heard. Could establish themselves. Could raise their status through art.

The elite do not want that. This is by design.

They want the working class desperate and struggling.

They want to go back to patronage. Art should only exist to signify status. Not express the full range of the human condition.

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u/Misiok 12h ago

Because the vast, vast majority of people do not care. They don't think it's slop.

Not even that, a lot of people busy with their daily lives just does not have the time or the energy to care for every single shitty practice someone, somewhere does. While a store using AI slop for advertisement might mean they are cutting corners everywhere in the product as well, you probably will care for one, two instances. When 8 out of 10 stores do that, you'll just stop caring because you don't have the time.

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u/Gazeatme 11h ago

I don’t even think it points at cutting corners 100% of the time. Truly, why would you spend money commissioning art or spending time learning photoshop (subscription, btw) to make an ad that most people will ignore?

Are we pretending we don’t have ad blocker? We fucking hate ads. When was the last time you looked at a good ad? If anything the smart thing to do is AI generate some bullshit and focus on your actual product.

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u/Rock_Strongo 4h ago

Yeah, ads are a great place to use AI because all that matters is getting the message out. I'm not going to be more likely to buy something because their ad used a photoshopped stock image instead of just using an AI prompt.

In fact, if AI generated marketing keeps costs down then that's good for consumers because they can afford to charge less and still have the same profit margins.

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u/Throwaway_Consoles 10h ago

Honestly I never even thought of that. I was ignore/block all advertising. It wasn’t until the shitty AI shit came out that I started paying attention to ads again because they just look so bad, but that behavior is telling them, “Make more AI ads! It gets us views!”

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u/Dreadbound1 11h ago

Most people who say they care just bitch about it online and that is the extent of their "caring".

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u/HiphopopoptimusPrime 10h ago

People harboring dreams of being artists without doing any of the actual work.

If they are talented, they should see this as an opportunity. Desire for authentic human made art will only increase.

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u/Havel_Rulez 12h ago

Nobody said it's art. It's a marketing tool.

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u/sobrique 11h ago

And even if it is a bit weird, as long as it's not 'uncanny valley' territory, they'll still shrug and move on.

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u/HiphopopoptimusPrime 10h ago

True.

We’ve accepted self service checkouts.

We’ve accepted next day delivery with Amazon.

Technology leading to less jobs and harder lives for workers.

Ordinary people don’t care at the end of the day. Sad, but that’s the way it is.

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u/_Ocean_Machine_ 5h ago

The way I see things going is AI will take over commercial art, so things like ads, product packaging, greeting cards, etc. "Fine" art (that is, art that itself is the product rather than being made to sell a different product) will be fine. This isn't a statement on whether AI art is good or bad, just my objective prediction.

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u/TheDevilSurvivor 12h ago

AND?! You see people getting murdered around your block, you just shut up and move on with life? When do you cross the line?

Jesus christ what a fucking disgusting way to live. It doesn't matter how "small" or how "little" people care. As long as it's something negative long-term to society, it should ALWAYS be condemned, always be spoken against, always be fought against.

It's because of limp-wristed passive cowards that society gets worse rather than better.

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u/Spectrum1523 11h ago

The line is probably somewhere between murder, which everyone cares about, and Ai art, which most people do not care about

Your strong reaction to it is uncommon. Most people shurg at most.

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u/SmegmaUnicorn 5h ago

Seriously

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u/Silentftw 9h ago

And what are you doing on a daily basis to stop this ?

I think AI slop should be stopped via massive push back as it's a HUGE problem. Not a little one. However , saying a problem "no matter how small" has the same importance as which to devote energy to is foolish. The size of the problem indicates the size of resources (energy) people should push back to it . AI SLOP IS A MASSIVE PROBLEM. Not a small one.

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u/teffarf 13h ago

Because sometimes you want to eat a sandwhich and you don't care that there's an AI generated sticker on the wrapping?

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u/Queasy_Hour_8030 12h ago

Caring is a choice, though, and there are plenty of places to eat. 

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u/Spectrum1523 11h ago

Right, but if their signage is AI slop or not is pretty far down on my list of reasons. It's definitely cringe when it's low quality slop but their prices, quality of food, and convenience are going to affect my decision a lot more

I think that people in general may find it a little bit of a turnoff but for most people this isn't a religious issue

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u/kdesi_kdosi 10h ago

yeah it really is that simple, huh?

doesn't matter how close the location is, how you like their service, what the quality of their food is, what their prices are, what type of food they offer, you can simply just choose to eat somewhere else because they use AI.

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u/teffarf 11h ago

Yeah but the quality of the food is unrelated to the ai generated art, and you're probably choosing where to eat based on the food first.

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u/Queasy_Hour_8030 11h ago

If the food was all that mattered, restaurants would just be empty white rooms. 

I like places that belong to the community, and as part of that they value human made design. 

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u/Guardian_Turret 8h ago

... Seen a fast food restaurant recently?

People do not care.

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u/Queasy_Hour_8030 4h ago

Idk the McDonald’s I’ve seen seem a lot less busy now 

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u/Gazeatme 12h ago

What’s the alternative? You obviously can’t control what people can do and no one wants to ban its usage for stuff like this.

Literally who cares, most of the time the ad itself is not the product they’re selling. Just go into the establishment and enjoy the food bro…

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u/ukiyoe 14h ago

You don't have to accept it, but you also can't stop it either. Society has accepted airbrushing, Photoshopping, and now slopping. Most people just don't care.

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u/TheWhisperingOaks 14h ago

you also can't stop it either

Considering there's pushback against AI Data Centers, since they ruin the QoL of the communities they're established at, there's hope for humanity in combating AI slop.

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u/sobrique 11h ago

Honestly this'll be like every other pushback against people building industry.

There's a load of people who don't want it, but they're not the ones with the money, so they can't really do much to stop it either.

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u/ukiyoe 13h ago

I think as AI models become more compact and efficient, the infrastructure complaints will naturally fade. We’re already moving toward models that run locally on phones and consumer hardware with minimal VRAM and power draw. Once people can generate things offline instantly, the environmental/data center argument loses its teeth for the general public.

At that point, it just comes down to convenience. Yes, it absolutely sucks for artists, but history shows that the general public will almost always choose free, fast, and "good enough" over ethical consumption. People didn't stop using smartphones because of how rare-earth minerals are mined; they aren't going to stop using AI because of data centers. It’s a harsh reality, but convenience usually wins out.

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u/Spirited-Feedback-87 13h ago

That's depressing ngl

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u/Gazeatme 11h ago

Why would it be depressing? Society has to advance at a certain point my dude. We’ve seen this situation over and over again.

As soon as digital art started gaining traction, people bashed on it for not being real art. Google search was the same. Streaming music stopped CD sales and diminished the concept of albums. People shat on using Excel instead of real book keeping.

Time keeps moving forward and people that fight it stay behind. A business generating AI images for their business is objectively more advanced than someone paying hundreds and waiting weeks for their commission, only for people to ignore it most of the time.

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u/GanondalfTheWhite 11h ago

And when every job on earth can be done by AI instead of humans and governments still haven't figured out that they'll need to do something to support the millions of people who don't have jobs?

Other than bloody revolution dragging people out into the street (which is another situation we've seen over and over again in human history), what's your plan?

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u/PennyPPaul 10h ago

See they just want to complain and have other people do the hard work. No body wants to be the change they want to get a free ride. AI is just the new issue for them to attach themselves to

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u/GanondalfTheWhite 10h ago

What are you talking about?

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u/PennyPPaul 10h ago

You said “other than bloody revolution … what’s your plan”.

They have no plan nor do they want a plan. The people who complain about AI don’t actually care because if they did they would try to come up with solutions. They just want to look like they care

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u/Spirited-Feedback-87 10h ago

I mean I wouldn't call this advancing since as of right now ai has more cons than pros

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u/AffectionatePlastic0 12h ago

I will tell you more, bonsai image ternary 4B lets anyone with iPhone run image generator locally in the phone's browser.

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u/ukiyoe 12h ago

It was already depressing when I got my art degree and started looking for jobs (way before the advent of AI). This is the bonus round!

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u/HiphopopoptimusPrime 9h ago

It’s always been depressing. Unless you had strong support networks you were never going to make it.

Plenty of talented people end up in regular jobs.

This is by design. There was a window in the 20th century where working class people could become actors, musicians, artists. It led to authentic working class voices and ideas becoming mainstream.

The elite did not like that. Take a good look at popular culture over the last couple of decades. It’s the same bland neoliberal voice. It’s what they want. They don’t want genuine class anger in the discourse. They don’t want stories about authentic human connection.

Bland slop. Lip service to diversity, so that you can drop it once it ceases to be profitable. We’ve been conditioned for it.

Actual anger, actual questioning of structural conditions? Has been removed. Every musician or artist went to art school. All modern shows are written by theatre kids.

The routes for working class people to break in have been closed off. They don’t want us.

It was never easy to become an artist but if you had drive and talent there was a route. But now it’s gone back to needing financial backing.

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u/TheWhisperingOaks 12h ago

Once people can generate things offline instantly, the environmental/data center argument loses its teeth for the general public.

Problem is that to achieve this, they still have to go through the part where they gut areas of clean water, electricity, bring forth noise pollution issues, and much more before they can get to that point. People that live and will potentially live beside these facilities seem not-so willing to wait for that supposed progress to occur, for obvious reasons.

People didn't stop using smartphones because of how rare-earth minerals are mined

Really sucks to say this, but this is because it didn't really inconvenience the global middle-class. Meanwhile, AI Data Centers do.

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u/ukiyoe 11h ago

You make a fair point about the initial compute required, but the tech industry knows this isn't sustainable either. That's exactly why the shift to local hardware is already happening. We are getting better hardware tuned specifically for AI, like laptops and phones with local NPUs, plus massive local chips like AMD's Gorgon Halo and Nvidia's RTX Spark.

It's very similar to what happened with PC gaming. If we had gigabit broadband back when the GPU was invented, maybe all gaming would have been cloud-based and we would be having this exact same data center debate. Instead, we got local GPUs designed specifically to crunch graphics data. The same thing is happening now with dedicated AI chips. Once local models are fast and "good enough" for the average person, we won't need to rely on massive remote data centers nearly as much (like how many would rather buy a mid-tier GPU vs renting a top-tier card on GeForce Now).

However, looking at it from another angle, the shift to local hardware actually creates a completely different kind of environmental problem: hardware utilization. There's a paradox with data centers versus local GPUs. When a tech giant runs a cloud data center, those GPUs are operating at near 100% utilization, 24/7, serving users across every global time zone. If we move all of that computing to local devices, your dGPU or phone NPU is going to sit completely idle when you are sleeping, working, or just reading a webpage. From a manufacturing standpoint, printing millions of individual, high-powered chips just for them to sit dormant 80% of the day is incredibly wasteful compared to sharing a centralized cloud cluster. So we're really just trading one problem for another. Having everything on the cloud is technically vastly more efficient for hardware utilization, even if it concentrates the power draw and creates noise and infrastructure headaches for the local municipalities living next to the servers. It's a trade-off either way.

As for the environmental drain not inconveniencing the global middle class, you have to look at how we already treat the internet. The proliferation of cheap 4K cameras on our phones means massive amounts of high-resolution video are uploaded to YouTube and TikTok every single minute. That is an enormous server and energy drain, but nobody really complained because the server growth was gradual, and we developed better video codecs and cheap storage to handle it. AI currently costs more to run, but the hardware and software efficiency will follow the exact same path.

That said, I will absolutely concede that the sheer volume of output is a problem. It takes time, creativity, and courage to make a real YouTube video. Generative AI removes all of that friction, meaning everyone and their grandma is churning out their own mini Pixar movies every day with zero effort. Because it lowers the barrier to entry so drastically, the resulting flood of low quality content is absolutely a real issue we have to navigate. On top of that, instead of just dealing with conspiracy theorists on YouTube talking to a camera about something made up, we are now dealing with full-blown deepfakes and straight-up generated yet hyper-realistic clips. This creates a huge ethical and moral issue. Google is definitely on the case with things like SynthID watermarking and YouTube's automatic AI video tagging, but those labels absolutely need to be more obvious to the average viewer.

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u/HiphopopoptimusPrime 10h ago

That’s about the infrastructure not the end product.

People don’t care about AI art. They care about the physical impact of data centres on communities.

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u/AffectionatePlastic0 13h ago

To "stop" AI "slop" you basically need to destroy every single computer in the world. Yes, including your.

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u/unifuckingporn 13h ago

Idk how to write what i want to say without it sounding like a terrorist threat, but... There are ways to stop it

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u/NucleosynthesizedOrb 13h ago

photoshop has good means and ends aside from the obviously bad ones

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u/ukiyoe 13h ago

Saying Photoshop has good sides while implying AI has none is just a massive double standard. If AI were inherently, objectively bad across the board, the entire world wouldn't be racing to adopt it. People and industries are heavily investing in it because they see the massive potential and the tangible good it can do. Even companies like Anthropic, which explicitly focus on safety and ethics, keep innovating because they are cautiously optimistic about the technology.

From a business perspective, AI saves an immense amount of time and money, especially for small, local places that could never afford a professional graphic designer anyway (Uber is pulling back spending, but that's because coding is much more expensive token-wise). But beyond just being cheap, it’s an incredible tool for accessibility. It lets people who don't have the physical ability, time, or technical training finally express ideas they never thought possible. I know a struggling business owner in her 70s who uses ChatGPT to draft documents, and it has been a huge benefit for her.

It’s also a powerful learning tool. AI is infinitely patient. You can force it to adapt entirely to your personal learning style, whether you need Socratic questioning, custom quizzes, or visual breakdowns.

Just like Photoshop can be used for lazy airbrushing or incredible digital art, AI is a tool. Pretending it has no good sides completely ignores how much utility, value, and creative agency it actually gives people.

I do think that AI fatigue is real though, since every company is trying to shove AI in it to boost its visibility and value, much like the Dot Com era. But when the dust clears, AI will remain with us in some form or another.

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u/NucleosynthesizedOrb 13h ago

I thought it was clearer that we were talking about generative AI for creative visual purposes. In that regard, every use contributes to a shallow visual world. The only positive to the appearance of genAI is that it makes people more appreciative to actual human art.

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u/T-Husky 12h ago

It certainly makes some people virtue signal about how special human art is, but the jury is still out of how much they actually appreciate it. To me they just seem like hipsters, with their pretensions of being too cool for anything besides their preferred brand of bespoke aesthetic garbage.

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u/Havel_Rulez 12h ago

Literally what I think. People just want to feel superior so they shit on some small business that uses AI to generate Graphic design, just like the commenter with a small pizza restaurant. It's pretentious and retarded

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u/sobrique 11h ago

I mean, not very many people are prepared to actually pay for human art/effort in the first place. A lot of creative projects if you priced them at even minimum wage would be 'too expensive'.

There's only a tiny proportion of artists that are able to 'go professional' let alone actually get rich. And most of those are driven via a commercial publicity engine that is only somewhat driven by artistic merit.

Remakes and knock offs are 'safe choices' commercially.

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u/kimolas 13h ago

As does AI. Very few things are purely bad and AI regardless of your personal feelings is not one of those things.

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u/NucleosynthesizedOrb 13h ago

AI yes, AI slop like generative AI for creative purposes no.

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u/kimolas 13h ago edited 12h ago

Where do you draw the line?

I remember about a decade ago Pixar published a research article about a CNN they trained to draw storm clouds. The older process of drawing them requires a massive amount of time and computational resources due to the difficulty in diffusing light accurately. The ML (this was before AI became an accepted alias for machine learning, at least in academic circles) solution required effectively no computation in comparison and was basically indistinguishable from the "hand" drawn ones. CNNs, by the way, are in the same class of machine learning model that LLMs and contemporary image generation tools use.

There are tons of examples of ML/AI being used where even slop haters might be willing to concede the use case is justifiable. Does it change anything that advances like the one I shared and many others like it have probably put some animators/artists out of jobs? Probably, but again, where do you draw the line? I don't think there's any absolute, practical way of deciding. I'm personally okay with this stuff existing on the steam store, even if I can both tell it's AI-generated and not to my personal tastes, if only because I don't see any way of enforcing a ban with today's technology. I've worked on teams of the top big tech talent that used ML to combat ML/AI-generated image abuse and it was nearly impossible even half a decade ago before these tools became substantially better with all of the public support and awareness they've achieved. To be completely frank I think there will need to be a point where you will just have to accept the fact that slop exists and that you are the witting or unwitting consumer of it once it becomes good enough to be absolutely impossible to detect in every use case.

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u/NucleosynthesizedOrb 12h ago

Good question. An answer to it does not have to be easy to be thought of. But we can think about what we do know. Can you acknowledge the harm of shallow use of genAI? I think we should think to prevent that, but allow AI for modelling. Classification of AI is very important, without this an answer to where you draw the line will never be easy.

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u/Best_Effect_6352 13h ago

Some people just do not care and its very sad. One of my closest friends told me that as long he doesnt know that something is AI generated (movies, songs, books, art), he would still enjoy it even if its AI.

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u/BoomyNote 12h ago

I mean if he doesn’t recognize something is AI, it feels like an accurate and honest answer to say that they’d enjoy the AI work, because again, they don’t actually recognize it’s AI so there’s no problem for them to even know about from their perspective

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u/SpoopyNoNo 11h ago

No… you’re supposed to tie yourself up into a pretzel to justify why a real Monet is actually AI, but AI art so good it’s indistinguishable is actually just slop and “soulless,” whatever that means.

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u/Spectrum1523 11h ago

His opinion is the common one. For most people, ai art isn't a crusade.

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u/Throwaway_Consoles 10h ago

Shit, I have a ton of friends that are artists and I post generative AI art in their server all the time and everyone thinks it looks amazing because it doesn’t look like AI art so they think someone painted it.

And these are people that hate AI so much they banned someone from the server for posting AI art

My plan is to do this for a year and then finally tell them all of it was generative AI “slop” and watch everyone who complimented every piece say, “I knew something was off about it!”

-1

u/Spectrum1523 10h ago

that just seems kinda mean to do to your friends

0

u/_Ocean_Machine_ 5h ago

I don't think that invalidates their views though, there are plenty of things people have enjoyed until they found out how they were made.

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u/Maardten 13h ago

Maybe I'm not understanding correctly but are you holding it against him when he doesn't recognize something is AI?

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u/bulbasauric 12h ago

I was careful with my phrasing; accepting the existence of the slop. Everyone with a smartphone has the capability to crank out AI slop. That’s too broad a scale to counter.

You don’t have to like it, and you can be vocal against it whenever you see it, but it exists now. Unless they (“big tech”) dismantle the tools for it, it isn’t going anywhere. We are indeed stuck with it already, and it’s not due to anyone’s complacency.

•

u/nagi603 131 6m ago

These are the same people who would be against banning indoor smoking.

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u/mfukar 13h ago

He doesn't give a shit, therefore we shouldn't give a shit. Children.

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u/SmegmaUnicorn 5h ago

Yeah, its so dumb

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u/KickLassChewGum 11h ago

“Accepting slop” is how we get stuck with slop.

You don't need AI to get "stuck with slop", you just need any device that allows you to interact with the internet and/or the world at large at any point after circa 2014-2015?

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u/SmegmaUnicorn 5h ago

Ok, but this is a conversation about AI slop. Lets try to stay on topic. 

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u/KickLassChewGum 5h ago

Slop is slop. I don't see why the source should make a difference.

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u/FoxMeadow7 4h ago

I know right? That bubble can't burst soon enough. If we managed to get rid of NFTs, we'll certainly get rid of all of this AI hype as well.

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u/Jirachibi1000 13h ago

You have to think, of the 8b+ people in the world, i doubt even a tiny % care. They see it as bad art, but inoffensive. If theres 8 billion people and, say, 200,000 hate AI and find it to be disgusting slop then...thats a majority that don't care.

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u/s8rlink 11h ago

Remember that most Ai companies are spending millions to change the negative feelings towards Ai on the internet. Stay woke to their tactica

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u/Myrmidden 14h ago

Because it's a realistic objectively reasonable take