Players and creators alike dislike AI-created games, but digital storefronts are ill-equipped for the avalanche of slop that threatens to tank discoverability and turn away consumers

There is currently a concerted and not-so-subtle campaign underway to try to manufacture consent for the use of AI in game development.

At its core, this is about presenting AI as a fait accompli. Every week or so we get a new report making dubious claims about almost every development studio already using AI. The message to developers is "you'll be left behind if you don't use it too"; to players, it's "this is already done and there's no turning back". Consume like good little consumers. Shut up and eat your slop.

This is, of course, a microcosm of broader efforts by tech giants to convince the world of the inevitability of AI permeating every facet of life and work. It follows the same playbook and rests on the same foundation of dubiously conflating many different tools and systems, including deep learning models that predate LLMs by many years, under the single banner of "AI usage".

In game development, that can mean all manner of rhetorical sleight of hand. Anything from programmers using Copilot autocompletions, to 2D artists using a background removal tool in Photoshop, to a project manager using the meeting summary tool in Zoom, can all end up counted as a tick in a box and a "studio that's using AI".

A good rule of thumb is that when someone pops up every five minutes to dramatically insist something is a fait accompli , that's a pretty sure sign that it's precisely the opposite.

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