Only works for publishers or developers who have a page.

The scammers producing slop clones don’t (or would just have a different one for each game), so they can’t be filtered.

It also gatekeeps non-Americans, I assume; I had to puzzle out the meaning and while the name Gateway does ring a bell (I probably saw it on some ad or CRT monitor at some point) I’d have never associated it with the cow and box emojis. 🤷‍♂️

They have two options: fix it fast or die.

A store overrun by slop will quickly lose its customers, and with them any developers offering actual games.

Once the ball starts rolling it’ll become a vicious cycle, and once enough developers and customers have left there’ll be no coming back. And it certainly looks like the ball is picking up speed.

At least two of them, apparently, one with even the same exact name 🤮 (how is that allowed?).

Game’s not my cup of tea, but I tagged both clones as slop (can’t report them because none of the reasons would apply, as this kind of cloning is still legal), not that it’ll do any good.

Least Vave could do is add “blatant slop clone” to the reasons to report a game.

They aren’t letting slop roll over them

And yet it rolls.

A lot of developers have already pulled their demos from Steam for fear of them being cloned.

Either Valve takes a stance against slop clones, or they’re going to alienate indie devs (and probably the big ones too), and with them a lot of their customers.

Valve have to decide if they want Steam to be a thriving games store or an abandoned slop repository.

And “making no decision” is choosing the latter.

Not possible.

Think photocopy of a photocopy, or JPEG of a JPEG.

You start getting artifacts, and the model collapses.

Of course, though, they’ve already poisoned the well, and at this point it’s impossible for them to sieve out any remaining non-LLM-generated content. They started watermarking too late, and couldn’t recognise other slop machines’ watermarks anyway.

Model collapse is inevitable and already ongoing (search “thousand whys" on Amazon, for instance, or read up on Elias Thorne, lighthouse keeper), and will only get worse.

In a few years it will be impossible to train a working up-to-date model. Maybe it already is, hence this article, as a preemptive justification for why newer models won’t be able to generate code using language features introduced after 2026.

Dada as in Idi Amin Dada, I assume?

I mean, it fits, what with the human rights abuses and whatnot…

🎈📌

it shouldn’t be that impactful negatively that AI is being used

Doesn’t it invalidate the GPL? Open source licenses depend on copyright, and LLM-generated code isn’t copyrightable.

(Also, it can’t be proven not to contain plagiarised proprietary code, in fact it’s quite likely that it does; between this, the testing / review burden, and the mental decay of developers that use LLMs instead of coding, this pretty much kills open source projects, in several different ways to make sure they stay dead…)

As much as I hate the ongoing “AI” scam, and as many hours as I’ve wasted on Bethesda’s games (or on modding them), in Bethesda’s case (especially modern Bethesda) I actually believe the slop machine might actually be an improvement.

At least the code for the unofficial patches will be in its training set, which is a start…

Not really… “AI journalist” might refer to a plain old astroturfing spambot, or to one piloting a reverse centaur, but it’s still the same old spambot when it comes to it, and it’ll still be spewing the same worthless slop, so the distinction is mostly moot, merely making the latter option a bit more tragic.

Replace the AI tool with a calculator. You’d get the same results.

Correct. I used to be able to calculate square roots in my head, then they let us use calculators the next school year, and soon I was no longer able to do so.

The problem is that what calculators due to math LLMs do to thinking in general, causing much deeper and extensive damage to the brain.

Also, calculators are good at maths. They produce correct results.

LLMs aren’t good at thinking (or even capable of doing it at all), they’re very good at putting the most statistically likely (given the texts they were trained on) word in front of a sequence of words. They don’t necessarily produce correct results, they produce results that wouldn’t look out of place in their training set (unless you’re an expert in whatever the text is about, in which case it’s often absolute bullshit that sounds correct to a layman).

We’re replacing working brains with autocomplete engines that (if they were capable of caring about anything, which they’re not) couldn’t care less about the correctness of their output, just that it looks correct.

And it remains to be seen if the people injured by this will ever be able to recover anything close to normal brain function. Personally, I doubt it. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

We’ll have massive recessions, sure.

Worse than the last couple ones.

Inflation above 10%.

But not hyperinflation like in the USA.

We’ll have to bail out the banks that fell for the scam, but not the scammers themselves.

And it might be a good opportunity to finish decoupling from the USA economy, companies, and policies.

It might take a decade or a decade and a half, but we will recover.

The USA on the other hand will suffer the full brunt of the crash, while being already economically, diplomatically, socially, politically, and morally bankrupt, and infected with the most actively incompetent and outright malicious government in its history, a government whose priorities won’t be to save the country but to exploit the situation, or to take the money and run if that proves impossible.

It would almost certainly have been doomed anyway, but this will be the last nail in the coffin and precipitate the collapse.

They can and they will.

If you’re in the USA you’d better be getting ready to burn stacks of hundred trillion dollar notes to stay warm.

It was considered unethical when Harlow did it to monkeys, but I guess it must be fine when parents do it to their own children, regardless of the ensuing panic disorders… 🤷