I figure if people can’t be bothered to develop the games then I can’t be bothered to play them either.
I always wondered if I could play Skyrim but with an option to say or ask custom things to NPCs
I think someone made a mod for that because of course they did.
They absolutely did, awhile ago too. It’s the Mantella mod. Used to be a nightmare to set up but now it’s good. Pretty fun talking to characters.
Is it bad that I know what the Mantella is in Elder Scrolls lore?
what I want with AI games: Free conversations with NPCs who react to your actions.
what I don’t want, endless slop
Same, so used as a tool to help textures load better, to make the game function better, great.
If you pay an actor for their voice, why not ai infinite dialogue? Nobody is losing work because a human literally cannot do that job.
without that tech they would have hired a voice actor anyways, or what would be better, get a voice actor, create a character, have him voice a shit ton of lines with different emotions, timber, whispers… fine tune a model in that character, that would make every character sound unique and much less robotic.
what is the appeal of talking to an NPC that uses chatgpt to respond? you would get the same experience talking to a cat or a houseplant
instead of writing pages of dialogue, write a lot of back story, personality, interests, knowledge, info they have, quests they have to share, sample of how they talk…
fine tune models… this way each character would sound unique, rather than standard chat gpt.
a good prototype would be about a village with about a dozen of NPCs.
no thanks
another use, draw assets for a age of empires like game. then generate a diffusion model on them. now you can make rows of houses and non of them will be identical and all will fit in the art style.
same things with textures, no more repeating textures.
I don’t know if you have heard about the game AI2U: With You 'Til The End that’s basically a Escape the room game where a Girl kidnapped you and you need to escape. You can talk to the AI girl about any bullshit, interact and show them items in your inventory etc. If you make them upset they will maybe kill you, or they can like you so much that they will help you escape. I had a lot of fun with this game.
thanks, looks like a cool concept
I wonder if games with UGC report they have AI content. (Games that allow for outside assets and code)
Are algorithms the same as AI?
Oooohhh Grooosssssss! It’s gonna fucking overtake the real content so fast, now. jfc, how do we even sort them out if the “creators” don’t follow the disclosure rules?
You need to train your ability to spot AI.
AI art has a very distinctive style. Weird shadows, impossible architecture, and having a blatantly incorrect number of fingers are dead giveaways.
AI text tends to talk at you rather than with you. It has difficulty remembering context, so it tends to forget what you said 10 lines ago.
How about we figure out a better way to detect and sort it so I don’t have to waste time making judgements?
You’re assuming that the detector can be trusted. The detector could be someone who is being paid to mislead you on purpose.
If AI presence really matters to you, you need to trust your own two eyes for this sort of thing. Offloading that work to someone else is a considerable risk.
And to be honest, detecting AI is pretty fast once you’re able to spot it. I can spot the typical variants of AI art in just a few seconds.
I’m not assuming anything, I’m saying we should make something happen.
The halting problem makes that somewhat impossible to make. Detectors have a notable weakness with detecting themselves.
Read reviews. Examine promotional materials. Discuss with friends.
So at the end of the day we all have to go digging through muck. Horrible.
It doesn’t take very long to look at ratings. If it’s crap it’ll have crap ratings.
A lot of great games get middling reviews, but I’m expected to parse whether or not something contains slop by a glance?
I mean that’s exactly how it’s always worked. What’s the difference just because the AI exists
No, theres a fucking difference, mate. AI has empowered the worst people to make shit they otherwise couldn’t have, and it has degraded the works of anyone with some level of skill.
I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it’s no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated “artwork.” IMO it’s no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren’t just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn’t capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.
Steam should combat shovelware whether it’s AI slop or human slop
The way that valves AI tag works is kind of a problem.
There is no subtlety to it at all, if you use AI in any capacity during the development of the game you need to declare it via that tag yet all the tag then does is say “AI in this game”, but there’s a big difference between having the AI develop the entire story or produce all of the artwork, and having AI write boilerplate camera controls for a farming simulator.
What? It shows up as a footer under the description, and inside is the game developer’s description of how they used AI. Look at Stellaris for example, I remember they claim to use it minimally (in very vague words), but they certainly get to say their piece.
I agree that having more degrees of usage would be useful, but erring on the side of caution and declaring any AI use as a first step is better than doing nothing.
Okay so there is this whole arguement going on about The Altars how apparently a tiny piece of background art has AI generated text in it. Personally I feel that’s absolutely fine, as otherwise it would have just been Lorem Ipsum, and really doesn’t need to be declared but technically, under the strictest interpretation of that tag, it should be declared even though you can’t even see it unless you zoom in.
I would very much like valved actually come up with a concrete policy rather than a vague one-line statement.
With how many games are released on Steam, how can AI be quantified and enforced?
E.g. Does using Intellisense need to be declared?
Would syntax highlighting?
Does using copilot to code count as “made with AI” too?
Of course, that’s why we need better guidelines. It’s like beauty ads that have to declare they used Photoshop. Every photo is edited if you don’t make it clear what you mean
Why should something not be disclosed just because its common?
It builds indifference to the disclaimer when it’s too general. The California cancer label is a good example.
But its not too general. Steam allows you to give a description of the use of AI
The problem is you end up with the tag nonetheless.
The description doesn’t apply to the label, no matter how much explanation you provide you’re still going to devalue your game with the AI label so why would any developer admit to that?
The whole thing is just mind numbingly stupid.
Whoever thought this up needs to get out more and actually experience the human condition.
I didn’t say that. It should be more specific to have any meaning to the consumer.
But it has meaning to some consumers. Not everyone can tell that an image has been majorly edited or created using a program created to replicate pictures
You mean the idea that if wasn’t created completely by people? It matters to you that some unpaid intern wasn’t forced to work overtime writing the most boring bullshit scaffolding code?
That kind of behavior should be disclosed too
Because it becomes meaningless noise instead of useful information.
Even if it is ignored by a lot of people, its better than not knowing at all
Okay great so I’ll use AI to develop every aspect of my game and then just not declare it. After all, there’s no enforcement so why wouldn’t I do that?
The problem is the tag has literally no reason to exist, no one would admit to using AI even if they did so what the bloody hell was the point?
It’s like you didn’t even bother to read the Wikipedia article because it explains exactly why this sort of thing doesn’t work
Wouldnt the thing described in the wikipedia article not apply because of the description steam allows you to give and because 20% is not that high of a percentage?
Wouldnt the article linked on the post contradict your argument that there is no reason to add a way to disclose AI use because nobody is going to do that? There are a lot of games that admit to the use of AI
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a disclosure, but an uncertain threshold that might be as low as “a developer accepted a copilot completion suggestion one time” isn’t useful. You just end up with a prop65 situation where it’s slapped on everything and basically meaningless.
Steam allows you to describe the use of AI
Also, if you know you are making a game for steam, why not just ignore the copilot suggestion? I dont think it will increase the time to make a game by that much time
Because I don’t think anybody actually cares that much if you use small pieces of AI code. What people don’t want is everything being AI produced.
Right now though the AI tag is been applied to both scenarios with no distinction.
But there is a difference
Steam allows you to describe how you used AI
Does it as far as I can tell if you have the tag you have the tag. There’s no description next to it that says this guy used AI but only for irrelevant background stuff
Yeah, I suspect the AI tag should apply to even more games then.
Hence the problem
I think the biggest problem is that steam is like 80+% shovelware and it’s no surprise that a lot of those are using a bunch of AI generated “artwork.” IMO it’s no worse than a shitty asset flip and as others have pointed out, there are a lot of really cool things you could do with generative AI in game dev that aren’t just slapping shitty pictures all over your product, and this doesn’t capture the nuance. I would also assume that this number is lower than reality since it relies on tagging, and nobody is accurately tagging shitty scam games with less than a hundred downloads.
Honestly, maybe I’m an old fart, but I refuse to knowingly buy games if they use AI instead of paying talented people to create works of art.
What if talented artists use AI to enhance their original work?
If you’re AI upscaling a low resolution texture or something I can see that. But if I want a computer to rip off somebody else’s work and regurgitate a story based on some amalgamation of its questionably sourced training data, I can do that on my own for free.
An interesting use case for me in programming has been prototyping. Stuff I otherwise wouldn’t have the time to experiment with suddenly becomes something feasible. And then, based on what I learnt while having the AI build the prototype, I can build the actual thing I want to build. So far, it has worked out pretty nicely for me.
Well that’s the problem isn’t it it depends entirely on what the AI is being used for. The truth is we don’t know because Steam doesn’t tell us.
deleted by creator
That’s their fault. They decided on ambiguous definition of AI.
I have an acquaintance who is a lead Dev at an Indie studio where he is developing and training an NPC behaviour engine with thousands of responses and actions. Think fallout or mass effect response wheel, where 2-4 dialogue choices have 2-4 outcomes, but instead you can tell the NPC anything and it will have a different response. Or it will do different things whether you hand it a book, give it book, throw a potion at it or cast a healing spell on it or hug it. It could also change tactics if you tried to snipe it vs if you went at it melee. All of these are trained and accounted for and made in a way where it can be built into any game using a certain engine. And this is just aimed at generic npcs, not companions.
So if this is what disclosure of the use of generative AI means, I’m not against it. I think there is nuance to what can be done with it. Using final art assets? It’s theft. Writing? Theft. NPC behaviour? Definitely not.
Strange to not qualify the last one as theft. If it’s out putting code, it’s from the same kind of training set. If it’s out putting character responses, they’re from that same literary training data.
Open-source training texts intended for pairing with your intended style of output have been around for far longer than OpenAI has been grifting data from the entire Internet and collected book works. It came across like that’s what they’re using, not some shit off HuffingFarce that was built off of AO3 and Harry Potter.
I read a story recently about how a graphic designer realized they couldn’t compete anymore unless they used generative AI, because everybody else was. What they described wasn’t generating an image and then using that directly. They said that they used it during the time when they’re mocking up their idea.
They used to go out and take photographs to use as a basis for their sketches, especially for backgrounds. So it would be a real thing that they either found or set up, then take pictures. Then, the pictures would be used as a template for the art.
But with generative AI, all of that preliminary work can be done in seconds by feeding it a prompt.
When you think about it in these terms, it’s unlikely that many non-indie games going forward will be made without the use of any generative AI.
Similarly, it’s likely that it will be used extensively for quality checking text.
When you add in the crazy pressure that game developers are under, it’s likely that they’ll use generative AI much more extensively, even if their company forbids it. But the companies just want to make money. They’ll use it as much as they think they can get away with, because it’s cheaper.
What I dread is a game lengthening dialog using AI. Some folks mistake quantity for quality, and make their games unbeatingly tedious. Just like games that lean heavily on procedurally generated content.
Funnily enough, I’m excited for new dialog in video games using generative AI. It would be nice for random NPCs to not have the same 3 recorded voicelines, but to actually change what they say based on what’s happening around them.
But that’s obviously a limited use for AI. It should definitely not be used to lengthen the game and clutter up storylines as you’re kinda describing.
How many of the ~6,818 titles now disclosing generative AI use were already on Steam in 2024?
I.E. are a lot of these just games that had already been released, updating their disclosure statements based on Valve’s new rules?
The article says 1/5 games released this year use it. I’m not sure if ~34,000 games have released on Steam in the last year
It is a little insane how many games release on any given day. On July 15, 2025, 150 “titles” (of which 78 are actual games, not demos or DLC) were added to the Steam store. I would guess that their data includes all titles, but even just 78 real games on what should be a slower-than-average random Tuesday could totally contribute to 34,000 games released in a year.
Yeah, that’s why I’d like some more insight.
The initial headline doesn’t exactly pass a sniff test… It’s possible, but unlikely.
If ~34,000 were added in the last year, that means over 25% of Steam’s library of ~114,000 was added in the last year…
If only 1/5 of those were using generative AI, why was there such a massive increase over the last year?
Has Steam made it easier for cash grabs, or… it just doesn’t make a lot of sense without more information
That thumbnail’s got some hand body horror going on.
I would charge extra to do her manicure.
Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it’s driven by real creative intent and doesn’t result in something that looks low quality. But it’s not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is accurate. You’re also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don’t have fine control over because you can’t do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.
What exactly does this mean?
If you use an LLM to help with the code does that count? Or is this just about writing and art assets?
I’m also wondering if using AI to make concept art / placeholder text and then replacing it later counts?
Yes
