We’re living through times where the use of AI to create works of culture feels as repulsive as it can sometimes feel inevitable. Everywhere we turn we’re being presented with numbers showing<a href="https://howtomarketagame.com/2026/10/21/how-sloppy-is-the-october-2026-steam-next-fest/?ref=aftermath.site” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>just how many games are being made making extensive use of the technology, how they’re crowding out marketplaces and the realisation that seemingly every game,at some point, has generated an image or asked a machine for help.
‘We support the work of those who are trying to limit the harm generative AI is doing to videogames and our world, and apologise that Big Walk’s LLM usage may not meet their standards’
AftermathLuke Plunkett
Despite just linking to the Big Walk drama, I don’t want to talk about that game here, because the manner of its use and the nature of its discourse isn’t really what this blog (which I’d started jotting notes down for before the IGF stuff even happened) is about. Instead, I want to talk about the games that are very clearly making extensive use of AI-generated assets but failing to disclose it.
For all its shortfalls in terms of scope and enforcement, Steam has an AI disclosure policy,and after a January 2026 rewrite it’s very clear: if there’s anything in your game that is “consumed by players”, like visuals, sound and writing, then you need to disclose it. There are many reasons for this: There’s legal uncertainty over the ownership and copyright status of AI-generated works, for example, but mostly there’s also the fact a very large number ofpeople simply hate that shit and do not want to see it in their video games.
Yet despite this policy, the number of games appearing on Steam–in my personal recommendations especially–that are just so obviously using a ton of AI-generated imagery and failing to disclose it is getting out of control. As someone who plays a lot of strategy and management games I’m feeling particularly overwhelmed. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been recommended a game in the last few months, installed it, started playing and only thenencountered just the most blatant slop. Napoleonic officers with buttons all over the place, space miners with piss filters and nonsensical goggles on their helmets, cityscape illustrations with buildings that morph into each other and can’t hold their shape, all of it nightmarish to behold, noneof it disclosed.
There’s a deception here that is maddening. If you are using AI to generate content in your video game, and you feel it is a useful tool that helps make a better game and is the future of development, why don’t you just mention it? Aren’t you proud of your cost-cutting, your time-saving, the visual and audio benefits it’s bringing to your release? If you’re actively punching words into the Autocorrect With Delusions Of Grandeur Machine to get some “nice” loading screen images, then putting those into the game expecting players to lap them up, you should be excited to give credit where it’s due!
The answer of course is because these studios know that it sucks, they know people hate it for many and serious reasons and don’t want to be called on it. They are collectively hoping that they can pass this stuff off and nobody will notice, that they can have their cake and eat it too, receive all of the plaudits and none of the blowback.
Those disclosures are there precisely so I can exercise my preferences as a consumer to not give my time and money to projects that are making wilful and repeated use of a technology that is already having serious environmental, creative, societal, economic andcognitive effects. Getting them shoved in my face regardless, and having to comb through so many store pages and even the first few hours of playtime just to find whether a studio has been truthful or not is exhausting, and is placing a burden on me that I do not want or should not have to bear.
It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue
AftermathLuke Plunkett
For all the talk on AI’s prevalence and inevitability, a huge number of gamers hate this shit, will make purchasing decisions based on that hatred and deserve to be fully informed.I’ve written twice now aboutmajor games that I had been enjoying until the point I found AI-generated stuff in them, not because those relatively minor discoveries somehow changed my experience with the game itself, but because I do not want to support that, and do not want to play games that have made use of it.
Like, as far as my own purchasing and playing habits go, I think this kind of obfuscation is worse than just plain ol’ AI slop games. Those at least you can see a mile coming and can safely ignore. It’s the games that try to hide it, that go out of their way to deceive the market, that are really pissing me off.
While platforms could be doing more to help here–Valve actually enforcing its own AI guidelines would be a start–ultimately this is an issue of trust. One where I, someone who does not want to support the use of this technology with either my time or money, should be able to make that choice fully and with all the information I need. Otherwise I’m essentially being lied to, and that sucks.
