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:
If you want to make a case for the existence of non-slop AI output, this is not a good example to use.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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:
How do you reconcile point 3 with points 1 and 2? I have presented several possibilities. You have simply ignored point 3.
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.
Your claims were:
I took issue with the third claim in particular, because:
Do people use fake accounts to boost their popularity? Absolutely. Did this particular reseller use fake accounts to boost their popularity? I have no way of knowing, and neither do you. I raised it as a possibility, and I still think it’s plausible, but I never claimed it as a definite truth. So I also presented other possibilities. Including the possibility that the popularity is real, and some people just really like this slop. That wouldn’t make it non-slop, it would just make it popular slop.
I raised it as a possibility, and I still think it’s plausible
That's not raising a possibilty. That's a baseless accusation.
Including the possibility that the popularity is real
I must have missed that. You did your best to explain ways how they would be not real.
Popularity can be faked, and is faked all the time.
We talking about Itch projects here. I have seen someone here who I saw how the popularity was faked. It was done by simple f4f and might not be seen as fake. But this did not result in sales in that example. It might have resulted in short term popularity, I did not check that.
So I am fully aware that there is empty popularity that does not translate into sales. And that is why I cited actual sale figures. Because those are not easily faked or explained away. On that bundle sale I linked for that other developer are 800 buyers and 400 followers. Those followers are not the empty kind. There are no indicators, as we can see factual sales happening with more than twice that number.
This particular AI output clearly is slop. I mean, just look at it
Then I can tell by the pixels? That what you mean?
That asset creator is so sloppy that there are even updates for the slop. It is pixel art. What am I supposed to see? There is only circumstancial hints that it is made with help of gen ai. I can tell for a lot of images and bigger character images, that they have the ai look. But something with so few pixels is very hard to tell. I do not see consistency problems that would hint at ai or other signs. So what in the images clearly tells you that this is ai?
We do not know how much hand edited those assets are. That the developer does updates for some of those packs tells me, that this is not 1-pass ai slop. There are iterations. Refinement. Combined with the many followers in comparison to other ai asset creators, yes, that is not the slop type of ai creator. There is one asset from 2024 and if you dig, you can find that in 2025 there were also assets released that are now removed. Unless you now claim that the asset pack from 2024 is a blatant lie and also gen ai created, we can assume that this person knows how create such assets manually.
AI in the hands of someone skilled in both ai and the craft the ai should do, can do wonders. My best guess is, that after initial tests that dev migrated to an ai assisted workflow and does this now fulltime.
The ai slop I see is when people not skilled in one or often both of those skills release projects.
