Post by Eldwood in this site dont care about AI scam

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You’re assuming that assets from before when the disclosure requirement was added are AI-free. That’s not a safe assumption. Obviously the disclosure requirement was added as a reaction to AI assets that were already there. I’m assuming the opposite: that the makers of AI-free assets jumped at the chance to mark their assets as AI-free, and the makers of AI slop jumped at the opportunity to not mark their assets as AI-generated in order to fool people who assume that no disclosure means no AI.

In the end, it doesn’t matter if the unmarked assets are 1% or 99% AI slop. Either way, they are not safe to use if you want to avoid AI slop in your game, so Itch correctly filters them out if I ask it to filter out AI slop.

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redonihunter25 days ago(+1)

AI made does not mean AI slop. It does not help, if you keep propagating this. It makes people ignore your arguments. Say most of it is slop. That's believeable. But being ai made is not the slop defining attribute.

And there is an argument to be made here, that enough of those projects are not slop, since they obviously are bought (this particular ai "slop" creator has about 500 followers. Five hundred!!! And that is why I confidently say, this ain't slop.)

But those that do sell, inspire too many people to create actual slop with ai and try compete in that market. Evidently be how 2/3 of new assets are ai made. Compared to the old ratio of 1/7 (or even the 1/3 if we use your calculation).

You do not filter out ai, you filter positive for projects that say they are ai free. That is not the same.

One is: show me only projects where the developer claims there is no ai in it.

The other is: show me only projects that do not have the ai generated tag.

The first ai generated assets appeared somehwere in 2020. The slop creators only really got hold of the tools for that in 2022. Before that, it was not low effort to use ai generation tools.

Anyway, Itch should end this grace period already. I did a rough count, and about 5k assets made till 2020 have not filled out the disclosure question. And another 3k in 2021 (with only a handful assets marked as ai generated in those years.)

Those 8k assets will be delisted when the grace period is finally over. So in theory, a customer would see in the information box a definitve yes or no about the ai status. Which failed here, because the customer did not look.

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Eldwood25 days ago(+1)

So far there have been two threads about this particular “creator” by people who didn’t notice that what they bought was labeled as AI-generated, but did notice that it was low-quality slop after it was purchased. Here’s the other one:

https://itch.io/t/6349329/warning-i-purchased-a-pixel-artgame-asset-bundle-from-comshadow-but-the-files-appear-to-be-ai-generated-and-not-game-ready

If you want to make a case for the existence of non-slop AI output, this is not a good example to use.

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redonihunter25 days ago

but did notice that it was low-quality slop
If you want to make a case for the existence of non-slop AI output, this is not a good example to use

If they considered it slop, they would not have bought it in the first place.

So that asset creator is the perfect example for non slop ai. There is a market for this. The account is doing this for 4 years now. And you do not get 500 followers for creating slop.

There are literally hundreds of presumably hobby game developers following to be notified of new "slop" to buy. You seriously think they line up to buy slop?

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Eldwood25 days ago(+2)

If they considered it slop, they would not have bought it in the first place.

Did you actually read the complaints? The “product” looks fine if you don’t look at it closely, but is unusable when you zoom in. It also presents itself as pixel art, so zooming in is the expected use.

How do you think the buyers noticed that it was AI-generated if they didn’t notice the AI disclosure? Because they downloaded it, looked at it, and noticed that it was slop.

And you do not get 500 followers for creating slop.

How many of them do you think are actual humans?

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redonihunter25 days ago

How many of them do you think are actual humans?

Do you want to imply, that those followers are fake?

Did you actually read the complaints?

I did. And it was not complaints about slop. It was complaints about the assets being ai and not knowing before buying. And the other thread complained about a lot of other things as well.

We do have a metric that spells out, that this seller has a lot of customers, so maybe overthink your idea of fake followers.

https://itch.io/game-assets/top-sellers/tag-asset-pack/tag-tileset

1664 assets. No filter. AI assisted and regular assets.

Page one has 3 entrys of the account in question. Customers that are unhappy, because it was "slop", tend not to follow or buy again. And that does not even have anything to do with ai. Regular humans are fully capable of creating sloppy assets. There is even a name for that: asset flip.

How do you think the buyers noticed that it was AI-generated if they didn’t notice the AI disclosure? Because they downloaded it, looked at it, and noticed that it was slop.

That would be interesting to know, yes. But you do not know. You assume. And you also assume that both of those customers looked at the samples on the description page and could not notice it being ai made, but suddenly noticed when seeing the same images without the sample watermark and identified them as ai.

Not only that, you claim they noticed the assets to be slop and would then deduce that it must be ai works, instead of just a sloppy human made literal asset flips.

For all we know there is a readme file in the download that reminds people about the license, where they bought the assets, and that they need to tick the ai asset boxes for a public release on platforms like Steam and Itch.

Look, we both do not like ai. You hate it, and I tolerate it in some hobby games. If we want to convince people that it is a bad idea to use ai for video games, there needs to be reasonable arguments.

Players do not like ai, for various reasons. That should be enough reason for most.

Unfortunately, the customers here are developers and they do seem to buy these things a lot. And if you are a hobby developer that already uses ai in your game, why bother refraining from using more ai assets. You can only mark your game once as ai.

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Eldwood24 days ago(+1)

Page one has 3 entrys of the account in question. Customers that are unhappy, because it was “slop”, tend not to follow or buy again.

People buy, and follow, for any number of reasons. That doesn’t mean that they are all happy customers.

I have followed numerous artists without buying any of their assets. Following doesn’t mean that I am a satisfied customer. It means that I am potentially interested in their future works, not that I have a current need for their current art. It’s entirely possible that I’m following AI resellers right now. Maybe I didn’t check their entire library for AI slop before following. Maybe they started producing AI slop after I followed them. Or maybe I followed them before AI disclosure was added to Itch.

There are also slop developers buying slop assets for their slop games. Once you go slop, you might as well go all in. The reseller in question is offering big enough asset packs for a low enough price that it might actually be cheaper for a slop developer to just buy the asset packs than to waste expensive tokens trying to reproduce them.

And yes, fake accounts also exist. Paid followers also exist. If an “artist” doesn’t have the integrity to produce their own art, why would you expect them to have to integrity to rely on real followers?

I have also paid for AI slop before. Maybe the slop was buried in bundle with non-slop that I actually wanted. Or maybe I was just sloppy and didn’t notice it was slop, like the OP. I’m not blaming anybody but myself, but it’s a thing that happened.

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redonihunter24 days ago

You accused that seller of having fake followers. And now you won't accept the argument why this is not so. By rambling on with claims that do not even support your accusation. You try to paint a picture, how those followers - which you previously implied were bots - would not buy and just follow. What the? You do realize what the top-seller ranking is, do you not? We are not talking about hypothetical things here. That seller does sell and the followers are real.

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Eldwood24 days ago

And now you won’t accept the argument why this is not so.

You haven’t presented an argument, much less a convincing one. You’ve just made an assertion.

The facts:

The reseller appears multiple times on the Top Seller page for the tileset tag.
The reseller has almost 500 followers. There is no evidence to support the hypothesis that there is significant overlap between these followers and the buyers.
In two separate instances buyers have made posts in the community forum expressing buyer’s regret, with one buyer describing the asset as “very poor quality”. Which is AFAIK a new record, even if it doesn’t seem like a lot in absolute terms.

How do you reconcile point 3 with points 1 and 2? I have presented several possibilities. You have simply ignored point 3.

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redonihunter23 days ago

You haven’t presented an argument, much less a convincing one. You’ve just made an assertion.

That's exactly what you did. And your first assertion was to imply that most of the followers were non humans. It's not plausible and I pointed out why it is not plausible.

And now you try to rescue this by asserting how those followers are not actually customers - which is a different claim, btw. You shifted the goal post. I am only arguing that it is normal for creators of popular projects to have many (human) followers.

Of course we cannot prove that a particular follower has bought something, or is a happy customer or a human. But the fact that we cannot prove this, does not prove the opposite. But we do know that the follower metric correlates with success, popularity and sales. This of course does not prove that any particular developer did not fake followers, but the mere theoretical possibilty also does not prove that it is so.

Another ai asset seller on top of those lists has 400 followers and currently a sale that shows how many purchases were made. 845 contributors as of my writing with nearly $ 10k.

There is a market for ai assets. And if there is a market for something, there will be people that follow the "good" creators, instead of the "bad". Those numbers correlate. We do not know the factor, but if one goes up, the other goes up too. One does not get followers just by spamming projects. That's what the slop creators try to do. And that is why they are so annoying.

But this does not mean, that all the creators that use these things create slop. There is no direct causal connection. Just as there is no causal connection of using human made assets and thus your works are automatically not slop. Slop means low effort. The lowest effort is using free assets (no matter if ai or human made).

Maybe it makes you feel better, if you look at the follower counts of human ai asset creators. Those are about 10x as high. And both of the ai sellers are currently high in ranking because they have a discount sale. But they do have a market and it logically follows that they do have real followers because of that.

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