Personally, I feel it's best to just require participants to be transparent and clearly disclose any AI content they include.
Low-effort garbage can and will exist without AI—we've seen it on-stream for a decade. AI slop is just one way cynical trash can manifest, and so banning the tasteful use of AI, like the examples I gave, seems like gross overreach.
I think there's a bit of a charm to handmade low quality slop.
What's the perspective on asset library/store stuff though? That's kinda in the same vein as unoriginal slop if it's abused. Or should this be asked about in a new thread or should I wait for clarification in some later update to the rules? I probably will be drawing everything myself but just curious.
AI makes it easier to shart out complete slop without even having to steal anything. At-least when you're cobbling slop together out of stock images and asset packs you need to actually go out of your way to find things, with AI you just tell it to generate what you want. People are going to submit crappy slop games anyway, but disallowing the use of AI assets at-least raises the minimum effort a little.
If your entire issue is banning the "tasteful" use of AI (drag-dropping stream jokes that just happen to have been made using ai into the game with no modification whatsoever) then this new version of the rule, "None of the original assets made for your submission can be AI-Generated", should be satisfactory.
If you really just want to AI-generate half of the assets in your submission, this isn't the jam for you.
I wasn't planning to use AI at all—I just thought the rule was a bit draconian. I overlooked Rule 8, though, limiting participants to only self-made assets, which definitely makes the argument that the jam is for showing off personal skills make more sense. The AI rule must've drawn my attention away from it since it would make the AI rule superfluous.
The new rule is definitely better, but it looks like it would still ban new Adobe Enhance stuff, and probably some other innocent things that don't immediately come to mind.
The assets still need to be looked for, not to mention they're at-least made by human people. Those other assets also need to have any licenses or conditions followed, such as payment, attribution, whatever. Plus we're heavily encouraging doing as much yourself as possible. If we completely banned any and all outside assets, it would block the use of stock sound effect, font and texture libraries, a dealbreaker for 99% of people. Seeing as we're allowing teams, people who are missing the skills needed for certain aspects can always team up with people who do have those skills, so really we're giving as little reason to use more than a couple outside assets as possible here.
Now seeing as you supposedly don't plan on using AI in your own submission, I don't see why you insist on wasting both yours and my time nitpicking the asset rules. If "don't use a bunch of AI-generated trash in your game" is too big of an ask for someone, they shouldn't be joining a game jam, they should be watching some tutorials and learning some actual creative skills. I already changed the rule to be more lenient than I'd ideally like, I'm not changing it again.
