itch.io

And that’s effectively what Luigi is doing: searching the training data for bits and pieces to combine into a new image

If this would be so, I want to remind you, that you already established in your view that the search & decide effort Mario put into it, would qualify as "effort". You are now only haggling who is worse at searching and thus has to put more hours into it.

And that can turn out either way, so you cannot pin any slop attribute to a work because of AI alone. Because if you insist on that, we can put any dev that uses google or even the Itch browse search catalogue to find assets, into the same category and call their works slop. After all, they only put the same amount of effort into the game as those ai users - which makes it slop according to your logic.

Take any non-AI game. Use AI to add features to it. The new game obviously took more effort than the original game

You got it! I wish I had thought of that. Much simpler. Thank you. 

You have proven that gen AI stuff in a game, is not the key factor in recognising slop or ai slop.

Please do not continue a debate over value free low effort classification. It is not relevant. People do not dislike AI, because it is efficient and needs less work for some tasks. Oh, some purists might, like the people that scoff at devs that use a premade game engine, instead of coding their own. But in general, the users do not care about such things.

They do however care about dehumanzing previously human only things like creating art. Or that most AI output looks bland and uninteresting. Mass produced, uninspired and forgettable. Or they are oversaturated with seeing AI everywhere and are just sick of it. There is youtube videos and books on amazon made by AI. wtf. No one needs that. And no one needs or wants the dribble some AI puts out as a game.

I do not care about some hobby devs fine tuning or enabling their game with help of AI. But I do care about the flood of mostly AI made games. You can clearly see their slop nature by the sheer amount of published projects. Games are not a mechanical excercise, like creating assets might be. Or creating a textbook function in code. You could task a painter to paint portraits and if all you want is a somewhat accurate representation of the depicted scene, you can easily switch to a photographer that does this is in a second.

And that is what happened in history with oil on canvas painters. But we do not want only function in our recreational activity. We want more. We want to appreciate the game as a game. Not it's function of passing time. And for me that includes a human that made this with effort. And by that I mean thought put into it, and not merely directing a prompt or using less efficient tools.

There is tons of free human made games. There is simply no need for mindless ai generated content. It is not people needing individual portrait pics for their walls. On a bigger scale, the ai just does not solve a problem for the indie game sector, like there not being enough indie games. On an individual scale it might help a hobby dev create their dream games or help struggling devs to compensate for the things missing in their 1 person dev team.