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A touch of AI is all it takes to trigger backlash, as a promising new indie falls afoul of slop skeptics (www.pcgamer.com)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [M] to c/gaming@beehaw.org
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Vapor World: Over The Mind is a Soulslike Metroidvania with an evocative, painterly art style reminiscent of Lies of P and the narrative platformers of Playdead. According to Korean studio Alive Inc, the game had 100,000 wishlists just before its early access launch on August 19, mostly on the strength of a demo available since January 2025.

But what should have been a triumphant early access launch went pear shaped very quickly. At launch, few talked about the quite distinctive worldbuilding or the parry-heavy combat. Instead, all focus was trained entirely on something absent from the popular demo: very obvious AI use.

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[–] 35 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

It’s not the AI itself I hate, it’s the laziness and the shoddy quality it churns out. Ten years ago, mistakes like these wouldn't have stood a chance in a human artist's work, so why are they suddenly acceptable just because it's AI? Does nobody bother with quality control anymore?

If your budget is tight and you want to scrimp, fine, that's understandable but you should at least make an effort to hide how cheap you're being.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

    Personally I have major ethical objections to the way that the vast majority of generative AI is done today, so I'm pretty much against it regardless of the hypothetical perceived quality of the end result.

    The ends really don't justify the means, and I want to support the human beings working hard to make authentic media in the future.

    I don't want to play someone's lazy and exploitative AI slop game any more than I want to look at someone's slop art or listen to slop music.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 weeks ago*

    There's a fictional world in which these machine learning techniques are developed on submissions that are volunteered, rollout is socially and politically responsible, control and means of production are democratised, and development is guided by public interest.

    Unfortunately we don't live in that world and I think given the one we live in it's actually completely reasonable to find the outputs repulsive.

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  • [+] -10 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

    Human use in jobs requires keeping a human alive, which is in and of itself terrible for the environment.

    Some of them are really bad at it too, have you seen the work my 11 year old puts out? It's garbage. He can't even get 100% of his math questions correct, and don't even get me started on how poor his spelling is. He's had 11 years to get better and it still sucks. Do you know how many resources he's consumed in that training period? What if he never gets good at it?

    The entire argument AI being bad is based on an assumption that humans are somehow good. Objectively that is wrong. Only subjectively is there any argument for that.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 weeks ago

    You should hate the AI itself as well. Fed on stolen IP, uses more power than a city (and all the carbon emissions that comes with being powered by unregulated gas plants), and being pushed by all tech oligarchs in order to take away owning personal computers so they can profit off of serfs having to subscribe to everything while stealing all of their data in the process.

    Then comes all the stupid shit AI does instead of what it was claimed to be able to do. But the underlying premise should be enough to make you hate the LLM AIs themselves.

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