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Okay, that was a read. What is the threshold for "AI code?"
- Hey AI agent, write me a "Hello World" in gdscript!
- Agent: `print("Hello World!")`
Oh, whoops, one line of AI generated code ended up in my game. I highly doubt that automatically makes it slop. Before anyone laughs, what if I ask my agent how to call a signal? What if it's not my agent, but an auto-generated answer embedded in my search engine, and now I'm contaminated with the exact information I wanted from a source someone will hate me for being honest about spotting out the corner of my eye (or front and center for half the if you use the G-search giant).

Now, if I were delegating entire systems and shaders for my agent to write, then sure, that would make for a greater chance of slop if I didn't understand it line-by-line.

Oh, get this gripe! As I understand the tags, I could prompt an AI to generate a slop game concept, then abstain from using AI output in my game proper. See, I was doing some research recently, and I saw something about how AI used at the beginning of the creative process produce more AI-like results --even when completed by a human-- than compared to an AI following up on a human's creative session. Yet the more damaging and likely to produce slop is the one we aren't going to stigmatize.

I'm quickly developing the philosophy that "Art is worth the time you put into it." If a knowledgeable artist spends a week on an AI image, massaging ControlNet into submission to produce a premium picture that means something to him and his audience, I would be more likely to value that above the aftermath of an afternoon throwing darts at a canvas with paint balloons tacked on.

Again: what is the threshold for "AI code?"

To paraphrase. Use your best judgement.

You are a coder. You should be capable of recognising if you use ai code or not.

And if you are one of those "vibe coders", yeah, that's ai coding at the fullest.

Prompting search to give you the textbook example of a function you want to use and adapting that result in your code, is not, imho, even if the result was generated by an ai. But if you ask the ai to write the functions with your parameters and copy the result, it is.

AI does not make a game slop. It's the human that releases a slop game. And there are plenty of human made slop games too. It's just that the slop game creators can make a lot of these with ai in a short time. Itch is self publishing which means that there is no publisher that would block low effort slop. In theory the quality guidelines would deny indexing for slop. But distinguishing an amateur game from professional slop ain't easy.

AI does not make a game slop. It’s the human that releases a slop game. And there are plenty of human made slop games too. It’s just that the slop game creators can make a lot of these with ai in a short time. Itch is self publishing which means that there is no publisher that would block low effort slop. In theory the quality guidelines would deny indexing for slop. But distinguishing an amateur game from professional slop ain’t easy.

You are going to to lose that culture war. In ten years, using “slop” as anything other than a derogatory term for AI output is going to be like using “gay” in its previous sense of “happy” instead of “homosexual”. Oh, the word will still be applied to human works, but the subtext is going to be “you are less than human for creating something this bad”.

I have doubts. Slop just means low quality or effort, or even waste. And it has a lot of meanings outside of software reinforcing that meaning. Not the least sloppy. Slop even is a dish. It was always a derogatory term for all sorts of things.

In some languages they seem to have used slop as a term for ai slop as a loan word. Who knows how that term will evolve in those languages.

Speaking of words, it's been a while since I heard the term shovelware. Something I would currently call slop.