[STEAM] The number of Steam Next Fest games that used gen AI should scare you

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Steam Next Fest was great, but there’s a monster casting a shadow over it that most aren’t talking about. Yeah, It's AI. No, not the cool kind where the robots take over, but the boring kind where they only take our jobs and assets to provide unfathomably crappier game experiences.

If you're wondering just how many Steam Next Fest games have disclosed the usage of generative AI, it's over 500 games. As

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, the precise number is 504 games so far, which totals 17% of the entire catalog —and it gets worse. Steam's policy requires developers using any AI shenanigans to disclose them. Still, most of the time, studios only admit to it after eagle-eyed fans point out strange gameplay elements or textures that seem off. It's only after enough controversy is generated by humans that many of these studios bend the knee and disclose their usage of the dark arts.

So, many games might still be managing to keep their usage of AI under the radar, and those that have already been caught red-handed may be underplaying the percentage of their soul that they've sold to the machine hallucination nexus.

The true danger of Gen AI isn't what many think

While many solo tech bro devs love to take to

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or Bluesky to talk about how fully AI-generated games

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, that's not really what we're scared of, because, well, they absolutely *****, and will continue to do so.

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Unlike the clip above, which offers little beyond its unintentional hilarity, sneaky usage of Gen AI in an indie title is much more dangerous.

The developers of Cloudheim, one of the most successful games in the Steam Next Fest, disclosed resorting to Gen AI to perform "Internal Communication" tasks, so they didn't fire anyone to give their job to AI. Ok, but that also means they didn't hire anyone to perform that job beforehand, and, well, the type of Gen AI used was also making unpaid use of someone's code to serve that purpose, which is also pretty bad.

Other demos from Steam Fest used Gen AI for tasks such as the "creation" of art assets, sometimes of all art in the game, audio assets, translation, code, writing, and marketing assets, so basically all tasks you can think of.

Even if Gen AI doesn't slowly creep into a higher percentage of functions among these small teams while sneaking past the eyes of some players who don't like slop, it's already causing enough damage. Beyond that, even if you only care about the final product and not about the overall health of the industry, you should also care because any instance of Gen AI is yet to result in a better product than anything human-made.

And, if it still needs saying,

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, whether it's disclosed or not, because they either don't agree with such practice or because you can always tell they ***** in a way that a human being wouldn't have sucked. You know, just in case someone in a position of power is reading this and still wondering. If you, too, are interested in filtering out games making use of Gen AI, you should

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