r/Steam • • Sep 13 '26

Fluff Player Accuses Indie Game of Using AI Voice Acting

Post image

A player criticized the voice acting of one of the heroines in the indie game Luminary, assuming that the voice had been generated by AI.

The developer jumped into the review to explain that the voice actually belongs to his wife, who was trying her hand at voice acting for the first time.

34.7k Upvotes

2.0k comments sorted by

3.3k

u/OneArmedWolf1851 Sep 13 '26

Damn I feel bad for her. She tried her best :(

What's the game called?

1.3k

u/Rodruby Sep 13 '26

Luminary, it's in text under image

409

u/OneArmedWolf1851 Sep 13 '26

I appreciate it, I'll check it out. My bad, I forgot to check there lmao.

242

u/Taolan13 Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

i recognize several assets and animations shown in preview content from asset stores, but that doesn't mean there's not a real solid game behind it.

edit for clarity:

I am not denigrating the game for using asset store stuff. I am just commenting on recognizable, widely used assets.

194

u/OneArmedWolf1851 Sep 13 '26

For sure. If it's just a husband and wife and maybe a couple friends working on this, I personally don't mind if they've bought some pre-made assets as long as the game is good and it's not purely an asset flip.

100

u/beruon Sep 13 '26

Hell there are great games with basically zero self-made assets! You can build a great story with just prebuilt pieces imho.

44

u/CrescentShade Sep 13 '26

Vampire Survivors being a great example iirc

18

u/StormerSage https://s.team/p/hnck-ngk Sep 14 '26

Yep, the characters that have legacy sprites came from an asset pack used in the first demo I think.

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u/wlphoenix Sep 14 '26

RPG Maker was a huge market for this. There were tons of games that had interesting stories while using default assets.

Of course there were games that also took the engine way beyond this, with impressively custom triggers and coding + all customer assets.

At the end of the day, it's important to judge games for what it actually is as opposed to... well, anything else

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u/TSKyanite Sep 13 '26

While it has its own art team now, Phasmophobia was pretty much just purchased assets at first, and while it's had its issues, it's still a pretty good game

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u/WispTheWanderer1 Sep 13 '26

Looks at Getting Over It

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u/Taolan13 Sep 13 '26

ive never seen an asset flip with a reasonable roadmap, they're usually pump and dump

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u/Responsible-Donut283 Sep 13 '26

Not in indie lol. Not everyone has time to be making all the art for their game.

25

u/Taolan13 Sep 13 '26

I don't think you understand the point of my comment.

Asset flips tend to be one-and-done games that get posted and the dev never touches them again.

This game has an actual roadmap on its steam page showing development plans, with even a 'stretch goal' if EA goes well enough for them.

I don't have anything against them for using assets, I was just commenting on recognizing some of them in particular some of the animations as very common assets.

If the game does well enough, they could reinvest some of that into less commonly used assets that might fit their target theme better.

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u/fat_kaiju Sep 13 '26

If someone made me cookies using a store-bought cookie cutter I wouldn't hold it against them.

So I see no reason to judge a game for using pre-made assets.

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u/howd_he_get_here Sep 13 '26

Yeah I prefer those real bakers who smith their own cookie cutters /s

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u/WackyRacketeer Sep 13 '26

I like to think that a certain percentage of people will forget to check the text, and a comment like yours is helpful as well.

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u/OneArmedWolf1851 Sep 13 '26

Thanks, yeah, sometimes I check the text under a post and sometimes I just forget haha.

6

u/Soatok Sep 13 '26

The text doesn't seem to show up on Old Reddit, and I refuse to use New Reddit.

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u/AeneasVII Sep 13 '26

Report back on the voice acting. This guy better not be married to an LLM

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u/MintySkyhawk Sep 13 '26

Years ago, I called to schedule an appointment and the receptionist gave her intro spiel and her customer service voice sounded so much like one of those robotic/pre-recorded phone trees that I just ignored what she said and loudly replied "Speak to a human" or something along those lines. She was pretty confused and I felt like an idiot.

35

u/Stavvystav Sep 13 '26

You'd be surprised how often you'll start to sound robotic when you deal with the same questions / give the same spiel. Eventually it IS just rattled off unless you try to vary it up and keep it fresh. I've been on both sides, it happens. Just apologize and move on it they're actually human and not an ever 'bettering' AI.

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u/OneArmedWolf1851 Sep 13 '26

Hahahaha that's actually hilarious.

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u/ArokLazarus Sep 14 '26

I did voice acting for a mod one time. I was so bad other modders modded my voice out lmao

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u/Character_Glove_7977 Sep 13 '26

Right?!?! Can you imagine being the wife just like

“Hey… wtf, I tried my best man”

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u/Molly_Matters Sep 13 '26

Hopefully her husband never allows this thread to be seen.

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Sep 13 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/theycmeroll Sep 13 '26

Wonder what they would say about the VA in PS1 era games lol.

106

u/DymondHands Sep 14 '26

Looking at YOU, Resident Evil 1!

92

u/ThePhysicistIsIn Sep 14 '26

Wooooah! This hall is DANGEROUS!

Take this weapon. It's very powerful. ESPECIALLY against LIVING THINGS!

37

u/Thunder_Child19 Sep 14 '26

STOP! Don't OPEN that DOOR!

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u/ThePhysicistIsIn Sep 14 '26

Looks like he was eaten by a crow or something.

OH my GAWD!

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u/yadasellsavonmate Sep 14 '26

Mate, you joke but in a few years you'll legit have people calling older games "ai slop".  🤣

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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '26

As someone who makes YouTube videos I’ve been accused of AI script and voiceover. No that’s just my voice.

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u/Eggpeace Sep 14 '26

It is worse. With the effect of getting ai tags the accusations can currently be used as weapons. Out of spite. Or out of blackmail. I fear that that will come to be more and more oftrn

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u/Hot_Option3684 Sep 14 '26

Yeah I'm honestly starting to get so annoyed at people who accuse everything off being ai that it's made me care less about genai since I'm more bothered by those annoying people :/

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u/IveFailedMyself Sep 13 '26

They know better, they just don't care. They would rather bully people.

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u/StopReadingMyUser Sep 13 '26

"It's AI" is just the new "it's photoshop" tool for people to pedestal themselves with so they can feel smarter.

They probably see it as a 50/50 chance they come out looking good and that's good enough odds for them.

31

u/Hammerofsuperiority Sep 13 '26

And "It's photoshop" used to be new "it's a photograph".

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u/Ok-Leg-person Sep 14 '26

The opportunity to fearlessly express moral righteousness really brings out the ugliest parts of humanity.

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u/tpar24 Sep 13 '26

I feel this hard.  I’m a filmmaker and spent three years of my life and money to make a indie feature film.  I posted a trailer in a relevant sub and the only response was

“is this made with AI?”

It hurt my soul.

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u/[deleted] Sep 14 '26 edited Sep 14 '26

[deleted]

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u/FarplaneDragon Sep 14 '26

If it makes you feel better, I've noticed on a look of new stuff idiots are just going around spamming "Does this use AI?" on literally everything in existence whether there's any signs of it using it, and even on stuff that already discloses it. They're in too much of a rush to be "right' and be the first one to call it out to care about anything else and realize how exhausting they're being to everyone else.

20

u/PumpkinPieIsGreat Sep 14 '26

That's so true. People run their mouths without thinking, constantly.

Even the rushing thing. I see "first" on a YouTube video and it's like... ok? So? Where is the discussion? Who cares? How is that helpful? I dunno man, people annoy me so much 😂

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u/PumpkinPieIsGreat Sep 14 '26

That's awful. I'm so sorry.

I wonder if it has got a psychology term, or a trope name. 🤔 I bet people losing weight these days are automatically assumed to be on ozempic, or someone making any kind of art people assume it came from internet instructions, YouTube pinterest etc.

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u/EchoKipKipKip Sep 14 '26

I follow Trevor Carlee and his Lego-style adaptations of shows and movie scenes and in everything he posts he has to have an AI disclaimer say he made everything in Blender and no AI was used.

A depressing amount of comments are still, "Is this AI?"

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8.0k

u/Xeadriel Sep 13 '26

Man this AI witch hunt is going too far

6.2k

u/Igzyx Sep 13 '26

Most of them are like this...

1.6k

u/MaeBeaInTheWoods Sep 13 '26

I literally just had this happen to me. It's annoying as hell how idiotic people can be while trying to brigade against AI.

507

u/nietzkore Sep 13 '26

I had it happen to me a few weeks ago. An account I've been using for 14 years, and suddenly my comments must be AI-gen.

It was just listing out where the month names come from, because people constantly think that July and August were shoved in the middle of the year by conceited emperors, when months named after 5/6 were renamed after their deaths, and the two added months are at the start of the year (Jan/Feb).

I typed it up, and this guy is sure it's AI because of "the bad grammar and syntax." Like I haven't been doing this five times longer than your account age.

386

u/pumpkil Sep 13 '26

I typed it up, and this guy is sure it's AI because of "the bad grammar and syntax."

Jesus people are so dumb, AI is explicitly very good at those thing. Sorry you had to deal with that.

38

u/Major_Arm_6032 Sep 13 '26

I remember looking at antiai art subs and people claiming something was AI because "a human would never make that error", when humans can indeed make such an error (think things like the neck is too long, or the bavkground was a bit lazy).

So at times they cannot even decide which party (AI or human) is the one meant to be perfect.

13

u/deadoon Sep 13 '26

It's like nobody has seen the (borderline) body horror of Jojo's.

227

u/somersetyellow Sep 13 '26

a lot of the most vocal anti-AI people are some of the most poorly equipped to deal with its actual implications.

...which is probably what the billionaires/countries/etc driving all this want anyway. Confused people screaming at the wrong trees is always a plus. So long as it doesn't start a forest fire...

71

u/Suitable-Name Sep 13 '26

Funniest thing... it needs so much energy... but at least people CAN do something productive with it.

Then there is crypto... nobody gives a shit about the energy consumption of this anymore. And while there are still people praising the good things of it... what did we get after 15 years and the energy consumption of a small country?

Not a single use-case that hit the broad public. Yet burning massive amounts of energy

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u/Canadiancookie https://s.team/p/hnrt-bfk Sep 13 '26

The use case is transactions for illegal stuff, plus scams

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u/ActiveChairs Sep 13 '26

The use case for crypto is people gambling on a fiat market in third world countries so they can siphon off a few dollars from US investors if they get their timings right and the speculation doesn't drop out entirely.

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u/Renamis Sep 13 '26

And drugs, bribery, and money laundering.

There is a small aside for legitimate trade you have reasons not to track, but that will always be done with a stable coin.

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u/stormdelta Sep 13 '26

the energy consumption of this anymore

Because it fell apart and wasn't actually adopted at any serious scale except for fraud. Unlike AI, cryptocurrency is really only good at one thing: black market transactions. Obviously black market includes plenty of things that aren't unethical just illegal, but it's inherently very niche. The supposed commercial applications don't really exist in the form claimed without invalidating the premise of the tech.

Funniest thing... it needs so much energy... but at least people CAN do something productive with it.

If there's one solid prediction I feel safe making about it, it's that it will become faster and more efficient. The energy use can definitely be reduced, especially once the costs stop getting subsidized by the hype bubble. Many companies are already realizing they don't need the expensive, highest resource usage models.

I see the energy use as a red herring - a distraction from the more serious harms of misuse that need regulatory action ASAP.

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u/Suitable-Name Sep 13 '26

Absolutely, that's what I'm trying to say. They come up with data centers are bad when we had the same shit going on with crypto for years and still have going. Even the GPU shortage we had because of crypto. Everyone forgot it already.

Nobody cries about the energy consumption of crypto today. But even if a lot AI usage is just used for crap. There is more energy consumtion in AI usage that has a value, than energy consumption in cryptos.

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u/Renamis Sep 13 '26

How about those NFTs? I still remember certain game devs swearing it was the future of gaming, and being able to take skins across games or something.

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u/stormdelta Sep 13 '26

being able to take skins across games or something.

Something that neither required NFTs nor made any sense from almost any angle regardless. The reason games don't do this is practical/IP-related, not any technological barrier, and NFTs don't actually help with the majority of the practical (let alone creative) reasons games don't do this.

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u/ThePhysicistIsIn Sep 13 '26

These are people who wanted to turn things they’d have already/would want anyway into speculative assets thinking they’d somehow benefit from that

They are not deep thinkers

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u/ThePhysicistIsIn Sep 13 '26

That was a particularly stupid timeline.

Like, okay, now there is a token that equates idk a spongebob squarepant skin, that you can take from game to game.

How did people think that was going to work? How would game #2 know how to render the skin, unless a dev sat down and made that asset? And then, why the heck would they do that for free, for an asset someone else is selling?

“They will need to to stay popular” they’d tell me. Okay, but like, there are thousands of games. The amount of work involved to make 1 asset compatible with thousands of games/thousands of games compatible with your one game, approaches infinity. For no payoff.

Just idiots not looking further than “the rule of cool”, wanting the world to be like Ready Player One. Wanting to “earn to play”, not realizing the basic economics involved. If people are paying you to play, where is the money coming in from? If it’s from other players, why would they keep playing if they need to spend money to do it? And how do you think you’ll be one of the lucky top 5% of whatever who makes a net profit?

Still, i’m glad Axiom Infinity tried it so we could see it to its predictable conclusion.

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u/MetaFlight Sep 13 '26

Crypto appealed to people's selfishness and paranoia (get rich with pump and dumps, hide your income and consumption) while a.i. helps reveal no idea is purely unique and that our media is sloppy because people want slop.

Of course Americans hate a.i. more than crypto.

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u/Yarwi1 Sep 13 '26

I think a lot of these people don't even understand *why* they don't like AI. Which honestly might be part of why they get so up in arms about it. And why there's so many bad arguments like: oh no, the water usage! When there are *much* better arguments, which also explain why they have such an instinctual aversion to it, too.

The kind of people to take a more reasoned approach (which honestly applies to most controversial topics), don't usually react that way. And obviously are then also the people who would be more receptive to understanding they might be wrong, instead of finding reasons to support what they already think.

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u/Suitable-Name Sep 13 '26

It's just parrots parroting what they heard from others. They have no idea. That's it.

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u/Yarwi1 Sep 14 '26

Sure, yeah. They just use arguments they heard and found convincing. In that sense, most of us do that. You and me included. We do tend to repeat arguments that we find convincing. I wouldn't say that's necessarily bad in and of itself.

I think what's bad about it is that they haven't really thought about why they dislike it in the first place. Here this would yield what I think is a much better argument against widespread usage of AI.

What I think this shows again, is that how you arrive at an answer is extremely important. Unfortunately, everyone has that tendency to seek arguments to just confirm their initial bias. You have to actively try to avoid that all the time, i.e., question your own convictions. Otherwise you are really easy to manipulate by people giving you what seem to you like reasonable arguments.

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u/Neon_Camouflage Sep 13 '26

I think a lot of these people don't even understand why they don't like AI.

Because it's a morally superior position they can claim while not needing to actually put in any effort.

Same reason the environmental impacts of the meat industry have been well documented for decades but basically none of them are vegans even while wielding environmental concerns like a bludgeon.

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u/Yarwi1 Sep 13 '26

Because it's a morally superior position they can claim while not needing to actually put in any effort.

But that is not why they dislike it. That's what I mean. Yes, it is also that, but even if there was 0 environmental impact, people would still dislike it. But that has more to do with what AI *is*.

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u/feral_fenrir Sep 13 '26

That dude's actual quote is:

If was more the bad grammar and syntax.

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u/MaikeruGo Sep 13 '26

I typed it up, and this guy is sure it's AI because of "the bad grammar and syntax."

I've been accused of being AI for the opposite reason; using semicolons, em dashes, and just punctuation as a whole. This would even be with me sometimes omitting spaces between letters and punctuation, you know, stuff that AI just doesn't do.

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u/du5tball Sep 13 '26

Most people can't even get grammar or spelling, never mind punctuation right, how the fuck are they supposed to know what is or isn't AI? If it looks like it uses spelling, grammar and punctuation better than they do, surely it must be AI.

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u/Tysiliogogogoch Sep 14 '26

I once got accused of being an AI bot because someone tried to downvote me but then the downvote supposedly got "cancelled out" so therefore I was obviously a bot...?

I don't know, it didn't really make much sense to me. I think some people are just seeing bots and AI boogeyman wherever they look.

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u/nietzkore Sep 13 '26

I think the worst of what I wrote was run-on sentences, and one spot where I was going to put more and stopped, but left the end of the paragraph hanging. I was trying to keep it compact.

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u/oldark Sep 13 '26

I had someone trying to tell me I needed to flag my blender work as Ai because on stream I googled a shortcut key I forgot and the Ai overview gave me the answer

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u/Isariamkia Sep 13 '26

You wrote more than 1 paragraph and included punctuation. Some people's brains have simply melted because of GPT and friends.

My boss and his boss, both use GPT everyday. They don't even write anything anymore and we work a customer service job, so we write dozens of mails every day. And then, when we have meetings and they take notes, they make a shitton of grammar mistakes.

And they wonder why I refuse to use GPT to help with my mails. No, thank you. It's scary how fast people can "unlearn" a language.

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u/vanguard1256 Sep 13 '26

The most impressed I’ve been with ai is that it was able to read my shitty cursive.

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u/Amazing_Yak66 Sep 13 '26

It's nothing to do with AI, it's just the new version of reddit brain

If they disagree with your statement/point instead of at least putting the effort into a logical fallacy like a strawman, ad hominem or putting the burden on proof on you, they can just dismiss you as AI and move on

It's more laziness than anything else

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u/EliteACEz Sep 13 '26

likewise. I'm just treating the baseless AI comments as any other internet troll at this point and ignoring them. Showing evidence that it isn't (like PSD files for logos) doesn't matter to these people, they just double down every time.

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u/Gothrait_PK Sep 13 '26

Similar experience on my end. I just started blocking people that are stupid enough to believe they can always call out what is and is not AI.

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u/creepyposta Sep 13 '26

I get accused of using AI all the time because I was an English major, love to prattle on and know how to make an emdash appear (type dash twice btw) so immediately I am an AI bot with a 7 year old account and a normal amount of karma for an account that is 7 years old.

People are dumb.

6

u/eduo Sep 14 '26

I tend to write longer texts for who knows what reason and that always triggers some people into deeming it must be AI.

I refuse to dumb down sentences because lazy people have found a way to complain about them that doesn’t make them feel illiterate.

AI also writes much better than I do so I’ve started choosing to take it as praise.

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u/NarcoReus Sep 13 '26

It's the new r/nothingeverhappens.

People trying to look like the smartest guy in the room. 

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u/fightmaxmaster Sep 13 '26

I got accused of using AI because a comment I wrote used italics. Ultimately a lot of people can't string a sentence together, so when faced with anything comprehensible they assume it's witchcraft.

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u/Hangry-Feline2489 Sep 13 '26

Or using the Oxford comma, semi colons or dashes... 

Ive been accused so often. 

Sorry for reading things more complex and older (with older and more formal grammar) than Harry Potter, dumb fucks. 

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u/Rock_Strongo Sep 14 '26

The amount of times I have taken the time to research something, write my thoughts, and include copy/pasted quotes from various sources only to be met with: "Thanks ChatGPT"

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u/Nunwithabadhabit Sep 13 '26

Happened to me last week. I responded "Cool story bro" and he never replied 

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u/hexregeneration Sep 13 '26

I have a very distinct voice and got accused of being AI the other day when I said something in a video game. It was a little annoying sitting there and smugly being told my own voice is actually AI.

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u/TheFlyingBogey Sep 13 '26

What annoys me about it is they leave absolutely no room for discussion, it's an all or nothing stance with no openness to nuance.

I myself am quite against the use of AI in creative works, myself. That's my opinion, I don't like pictures, sound, video or anything of that caliber to be generated by an LLM.

I also work in IT, and my life has gotten a hell of a lot easier using certain agents to built reports and summaries from tough notes so I can spend more time doing my job instead of writing up documents. I check everything, I give everything a human twice over, and I can stress less about my job.

But these folks will tell you I'm a monster.

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u/Tipsy_Gamer Sep 13 '26

It's happened to me a couple times, too.

Like apparently my comment was written too well??

These mofos forget that AI is meant to mimic how people actually write ffs.

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u/Hytyt Sep 14 '26

I've had to change how I phrase things. I'm autistic, and apparently some of the things I say sound like AI

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u/SecretGoal7504 Sep 13 '26

Anyone who loves delphox can't be AI :)

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u/jiblit Sep 13 '26

Here is my experience with idiots who think just because they don't like something it has to be AI

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u/Bocote Sep 13 '26

I've been accused of copying a comment that was written 5 hours after mine, so I'm not surprised.

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u/recoilx Sep 14 '26

and I've been accused of copying a comment that was written 14 hours after mine, so I'm not surprised.

(sorry, I'll show myself out...)

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u/JalapenoPopPoop Sep 13 '26

I've had to tell so many people the having a prescribed, pre-programmed response where they accuse anything they don't like of being AI/a bot is far more of botlike behavior than someone simply saying something they don't agree with

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u/GravityBright Sep 14 '26

I can only assume that Lil_Brown_Bat got on an alt account to downvote you again.

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u/KyeeLim Sep 14 '26

there will be gonna be 1 day where people argue that a book from the 1876 is AI and refuse to acknowledge their faults

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u/gamemaster257 Sep 13 '26

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u/DiggDejected Sep 13 '26

Are those the Burger King Kids from the 90s?

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u/UnsureAndUnqualified Sep 13 '26

I can understand why the OP thought it was AI, one of the wheelchair wheels (girl on left, back wheel) doesn't have spokes. But that could just as well be an oversight by the artist, so who cares.

But damn, they are an ass, no matter if they had good reason or not.

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u/lauriys Sep 14 '26

every comment chain in this thread as well as the one you linked is fucking deranged holy fuck

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u/Sleep_Raider Sep 13 '26

Did you cross out your own name

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u/Igzyx Sep 13 '26

Yeah I was just trying to censor their name only... But my ocpd kicked in lol.

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u/Redeformed Sep 13 '26

His overcurrent protection device kicked in

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u/HenriettaSnacks Sep 13 '26

Not the ocean city police department kicking down their door? 

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u/MayorWolf Sep 13 '26

It's ridiculous because they're pissed about AI supposedly killing the reasoned thinking of people, but then refuse to be reasonable. All the anger is projection of their own insecurities imo.

The internet has always been so full of sloppy content because humans make sloppy content. If AI wasn't around at all, we would still be seeing sloppy content because it is what it is.

The witch hunt is just so ridiculous.

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u/vandalxxi Sep 13 '26

And when they actually state a reason it's literally just, "iTs So ObVi0uS"

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u/IveFailedMyself Sep 13 '26

I think even in the reddit guidelines it's stated that this sort of behavior is not okay.

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u/Xeadriel Sep 13 '26

Literal retard

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u/bserikstad Sep 13 '26

3/4 of Reddit users.

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u/Rally_SSS Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

3/4 of human Reddit users, because IMO 3/4 of all Reddit users are already bots bought by corpos/politicians to push different topics...

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u/Yingletofthecorn Sep 13 '26

What gets me is people are taking all the wrong things as a sign of AI. “This hand is drawn weird, the perspective is a little off, this voice delivery sounds stilted…” like any little imperfection is seen as a sign of AI when ironically a lot of those imperfections are signs of authenticity. This inadvertently establishes AI as “the standard” where if your work isn’t at least as “perfect” looking as AI then you might as well have just used AI instead, which means if you’re still a beginner then you are discouraged from sharing your work. 

What makes me suspect AI is when it looks too perfect. Even when it obviously fucks up it does so in a way that’s got this fake sheen of “perfection” on it. I see it and I feel my precious orgone energy being drained from me and sent to the demiurge and that’s how I recognize AI. 

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u/LordCamelslayer Sep 13 '26

I once saw some people claim that a kangaroo was AI because it stood on its tail to kick something.

People are already unbelievably fucking stupid anyway, and now people are blaming anything they don't understand on AI.

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u/ForensicPathology Sep 13 '26

This is what annoys me lately.  People who apparently just joined the internet in the last 12 months and never saw JPG artifacts or terribly upscaled images.  No, just because someone took their 800x600 image and saved it as 1024x768 doesn't mean those weird pixels are AI.

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u/Samus_Maximus Sep 14 '26

For real, and also how everyone seems to have forgotten that Photoshop was ever a thing... Like people have been making 'shopped memes and bullshit in varying levels of quality for the last decade and a half at least, and now all that occurs to them is AI

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u/madawg Sep 13 '26

I think both angles are valid, depending on the model, prompting, application, etc.

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u/OtakuMage Sep 13 '26

Witch hunts always do. Accuse and punish first, ask questions later.

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u/Odin_Headhunter Sep 13 '26

Then refute the answers and move on.

You forgot that important part.

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u/greencrusader13 Sep 13 '26

Also that the target’s evidence is circumstantial and irrelevant, while the witch hunt’s evidence is iron-clad and irrefutable. 

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u/-LaughingMan-0D Sep 13 '26

Evidence: vibes.

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u/MilleChaton Sep 13 '26

There are two problems with witch hunts. First, many won't care about refutations. Their mind is made up too early in the process. Second, the level of people accusing can be far too many to refute (and can lead to the first group going "he doth protest too much").

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u/C0d3M3chan1c Sep 13 '26

I think a big part of the problem is that we’ve collapsed an enormous spectrum of tools and workflows into the single label “AI”.

I’m absolutely in favor of properly disclosing AI use. People should be able to know what they’re buying and how something was made. But at the same time, we need a much better understanding of what “using AI” can actually mean. Right now a lot of the conversation seems to assume:

AI was involved = the creator typed a prompt, did no work, learned nothing, and let a machine make the thing for them.

And that just isn’t necessarily true.

There’s obviously AI slop, including cases where someone replaces most of the creative process with generation. But there’s also a huge middle ground where AI is used to automate repetitive work, assist with iteration, analyze something, generate intermediate data, clean things up, prototype faster, or improve an existing workflow while the actual creative decisions and skills remain with the developer or artist.

Game development already has a long history of tools doing this. We don’t think procedural generation, mocap, Photoshop, code completion, retargeting, or an engine doing physics means the developer “did nothing”. They move the level at which the human is working.

AI can be the same kind of force multiplier.

That’s why I think disclosure matters, but so does nuance. “Made with AI” by itself tells you surprisingly little about how much human work, skill or authorship actually went into something.

And situations like this one, where a beginner human voice actor gets accused of being AI simply because their performance sounds unusual, are a pretty good example of where the current witch-hunt mentality can lead.

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u/Silver-Bread4668 Sep 13 '26

I’m absolutely in favor of properly disclosing AI use.

In principle, I agree. But it's kind of like labeling food "Organic".

It doesn't necessarily mean it's better or worse for you and it creates a whole secondary stigma behind things that is largely based in bullshit.

Properly disclosed AI use would be good but people are just so fucking stupid.

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u/MilleChaton Sep 13 '26

There is also a matter how how much AI use counts.

Person A has an AI write their paper for them.

Person B writes the paper themself, but has AI make suggestions that they blindly implement.

Person C writes the paper themself, but has AI point out areas it would rewrite and why, but without making a suggestion of the new text. They consider each suggestion in isolation and rewrite the ones they agree with themselves.

All 3 used AI, but they are very different levels of AI usage.

A didn't do the work. B did the work, but the level of AI rewriting could leave them doing the bare minimum and passing off largely AI written stuff as their own. Still a plagiarism problem if this was school work. C doesn't use any AI writing, only AI review. No plagiarism and the only case where I would be okay if they didn't say they used AI to write it.

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u/ToXiiCBULLET Sep 13 '26

exactly. "made with ai" could mean something is vibe coded slop, it could also mean a very good and experienced coder used it to speed up the process.

there's also the problem with when do you add the "made with ai" tag onto something. should you use it when placeholder assets were ai but then they got replaced? should you use it when someone used it to just speed up a process that's similar to how people that could code have been using bots and scripts for years? in the future, if/when ai is deeply embedded into basically digital tool, do you always have to have that tag?

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u/regular_lamp Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

One of my first interactions with "AI" was my company enabling a code review tool on our gitlab. Most of the comments it left were just nitpicking. But also the occasional actual bug.

I always wonder what the people with an absolute anti "AI" dogma expect to happen in that situation? Should I have intentionally left that bug unaddressed to claim some moral high ground? Because clearly by "using AI" to fix it I apparently tainted my work.

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u/Ok-Being3970 Sep 13 '26

They'd argue that you shouldn't use the AI tool at all.

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u/luchajefe Sep 13 '26

"We don’t think procedural generation, mocap, Photoshop, code completion, retargeting, or an engine doing physics means the developer “did nothing”. They move the level at which the human is working."

At least the first three of those things have been reasons to discredit an artistic endeavor for a couple of decades, especially procedural generation.

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u/birbbbbbbbbbbb Sep 13 '26

One of my favorite modern conspiracy theories is that AI companies have bots that accuse everything of being AI to stigmatize pointing it out (to be clear, I think there just are a lot of idiots on the internet).

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u/Acherousia Sep 13 '26

I was around for when digital art tools where becoming a thing, and people were freaking out and using pretty much the same arguments, and accusing everything of being "photoshop".

Photographers especially got blasted, at the time.

It's just people being terrible.

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u/Hammerofsuperiority Sep 13 '26

The funny thing is, that people here have told me that never happened, and that everyone, specially artist welcomed it like it was sliced bread.

According to them this has only happened with AI and that's why it's bad and we should get rid of it.

Despite all the evidence out there that it happens pretty much to every new technology.

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u/hyperborea_creates Sep 13 '26

It wouldn’t surprise me. At the very least, it’s likely that the sheer amount of bot accounts that plague social media these days started doing it in an effort to mimic human behavior/talking points.

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u/Klightgrove Sep 13 '26

We’ve banned terms related to this from our gamedev sub because people keep trying to pick fights with indie devs.

We announced a new policy removing low-effort posts about the topic and a bunch of brigadiers pretending to be concerned devs tried to swarm it.

People are so insistent everything is AI it is beyond bothersome.

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u/kenny-dal Sep 13 '26

It’s even happening with my emails at work! I always write in a structured way. Opening statement, bullet points setting out my position, and then closing points. Now it turns out that I write like copilot and everyone thinks I’m running my text through AI before I send.

I’m the hipster of bullet points!! I used them before they were cool!

So annoying…

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u/Parapodiax Sep 13 '26

Shit sucks, my art got accused of being AI the other day even with time lapses.

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u/Xeadriel Sep 13 '26

They should go back to hating themselves for being too lazy to work on their own skills. Don’t let them discourage you

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u/randomguy301048 https://s.team/p/dtqv-kmw Sep 13 '26

Its getting so annoying. People just constantly calling something ai and responding with "it just looks so obviously ai" "it sounds just like ai".

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u/fellipec Sep 13 '26

Yeah. Again, Text-to-speech exists for 40 years or more.

Because it got a better underlying tech, now people are upset.

And looks like that is not even the case in this game.

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u/arbyD Sep 13 '26

Bringing back memories of "soi soi soi soi soisoisoisoi".

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u/Xeadriel Sep 13 '26

It’s just scare campaigns of people not wanting to loose jobs they didn’t even secure yet.

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u/kaanivore Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

Oh so this guy says “my wife isn’t AI” and you all believe him, but when I say that about my wife it’s “not believable”?!?!

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u/Dipsey_Jipsey Sep 14 '26

Have you tried changing the voice for your AI wife to better suit those around you? My kids hated the male voice of their new mum, but eventually we settled on a female voice to restore balance in the house.

/s

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u/Special_Cicada6968 Sep 14 '26

I use the Optimus Prime voice for my AI voice.

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u/lectric_7166 Sep 14 '26

Bro, we get it, your wife is very nice and has big tits and definitely is not AI.

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u/Dry-Chance-9473 Sep 13 '26

I mean this was the point I wanted to make. People lie about their AI use constantly. People who are clearly blatantly using AI will have "anti-AI" in the description more often than not.

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u/macandcheese1771 Sep 13 '26

Idk, I would have to see some kind of proof therr before I believed him. Theres too much emotional manipulation in his comment for me to take it at face value.

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u/zencodecat Sep 14 '26

This is kind of ridiculous. I feel like people like you will make the anti-AI in video games movement seem like an un-winnable witch hunt, thereby dulling the impact of actual accusations with merit.

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u/kerfuffletiresome Sep 14 '26

Everyone is just believing the wife claim, but I might be too cynical that first thing that came to mind is if this is a creative attempt at advertising of getting initial attention by playing to sympathy by using AI accusation to try to go viral.

And then followed by people in comments asking what is the game to make it come off as not being an attempt at advertising.

It could be genuine, but it's a very common subtle marketing technique often seen in clips of some product but not disclosing what it is and having someone ask and bring up what the product is to make the whole thing seem organic.

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u/siryuber Sep 13 '26

Yikes, I feel bad for her now :(

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u/Nyarkll Sep 13 '26

Me rn, the "she tried her best" got me.

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u/bc_gamez Sep 13 '26

Also a lot of artists complaining they do their own work and then get accused of doing AI. The witch hunt needs to stop.

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u/FarplaneDragon Sep 14 '26

I've seen artists do full start to finish streams creating artwork and still have people accusing them of being AI generated.

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u/mazaa66 Sep 13 '26

AI, Slop and woke are used way too much to describe something you don't personally like

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u/iwearatophat Sep 13 '26

The -slop suffix is already tired and overused.

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u/Eyevis Sep 14 '26

Its the sloppification of internet discourse

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u/NewWelder7153 Sep 14 '26

lets put and end to "-slop"slop

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u/Eroica_Pavane Sep 13 '26

That's almost become the standard usage of slop these days, unfortunately. Anything someone doesn't like gets called it.

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u/Critical_Bee_4302 Sep 13 '26

it's only woke if it doesn't sell well. If it does, then it's important to explain why it actually isn't woke

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u/Anzac-A1 Sep 14 '26

I guarantee that about 95% of the accusations of AI usage is just people forgetting that humans makes mistakes etc all the time.

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u/SilentSorcery Sep 14 '26

People also accuse others of AI usage for having good grammar or using things like em-dashes and semicolons

(which is actually fair in cases where non-native speakers use AI to deliver ideas more cleanly)

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u/Endorkend Sep 14 '26

Dude, I've had the, "sorry, I'm not AI, I'm autistic" joke come to life on me several times a month this year, because on GitHub, I submit tickets and PRs with detailed documentation, logs and full reasoning behind changes or Issues I found.

I'm a dev, old-school system level dev and autistic.

But to all these AI vibecoders, someone handing them quality reports is apparently over their heads and requires a "you're AI" blame so they can ignore it.

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u/Kuajinai Sep 13 '26

never trust an under 2 hours reviewers often they are bots

i know is ironic

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u/boxinggoose Sep 13 '26

A lot of these indie games are beaten in under 2hrs, this idea doesn't work lol

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u/Kuroita Sep 13 '26

There are steam reivew mafias that nukes reviews for indies and ask money to remove negative reviews

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u/Sweet_Solid_7746 Sep 13 '26

Why would someone negatively bot an indie game

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u/phthalo-azure Sep 13 '26

Why does any internet troll do internet troll things? Some people just get a kick out of being an asshole.

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u/MetroSimulator Sep 13 '26

Not ironically this, have the unfortunate experience of knowing one of those ppl, they can be fun, aggressively fun but they suck the energy of a room and can be hyper sensitive, fighting for the most worthless reasons

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u/Sweet_Solid_7746 Sep 13 '26

Okay but you need to actually buy the game to leave a negative review, why would a troll do that? Usually botted reviews are done for like political reasons, I’ve yet to see this happening to smol bean indie devs for no reason.

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u/phthalo-azure Sep 13 '26

Even people with lots of money to waste can be internet troll assholes. The motivation is inexplicable to most normal people like you or me, no matter how much money the troll has. Some people just like feeling strong and powerful by shitting on other people.

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u/LeonMotton Sep 13 '26

Ever heard of Rust? A cheater will cheat, get banned, create another account, buy the game again, cheat, get banned and repeat until they get tired of it.

Some people don't hesitate to waste money.

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u/movzx Sep 13 '26
  • Steam refund window is 2 hours
  • Your game shouldn't need more than 2 hours to become good
  • Key problems with a game can usually be identified within 10 minutes
  • Indy games are often short, some may only be 30 minutes of actual gameplay
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u/Lumpy-Strain8624 Sep 13 '26

Steam has a two hour refund window.

Congratulations, you just invalidated every single unhappy customer who got a refund and posted a review as to why.

Why does Reddit reward such clownery?

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u/Rulanik Sep 13 '26

I hate AI, but even more i hate the blanket accusation of AI constantly. If you don't have proof, gtfoh.

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u/EbbOwn303 Sep 13 '26

I wrote a review of the new black flag critizing how aggressive the microtransactions are and got flooded by people claiming I was a bot for not worshipping ubisofts shitty money making techniques.

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u/Ghostofasmallbird Sep 13 '26

I kinda want to hear her voice acting now, love me some bad voice acting lol

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u/diibadaa Sep 13 '26

There’s a lot of AI shit, doesn’t mean people should accuse random game devs or other things of using AI if there’s no proof.

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u/Matto_McFly_81 Sep 13 '26

"AI" has become the lazy critics crutch. Its being used so much that when devs actually use AI it flies under the radar.

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u/lordofwhee Sep 13 '26

"This is AI" is just the newest "I don't like this".

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u/Indecisive_Noob Sep 14 '26

It is annoying how sometimes (and I am guilty of this too) when hearing/seeing something a bit awkward one of the first things some people's minds jump to is AI.

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u/penny-wise Sep 14 '26

Every lazy, edgelord calls things AI when they don’t like it.

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u/SigmaOmegaMale Sep 13 '26

Things will only get worse, seems AI literally imitates human work for the most part. People will only mix up what's AI and what is not more and more as AI gets better. This was one of the big threats from the start. Not only does it take peoples jobs, but it discredits the people who still manage to make it in their jobs.

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u/grady_vuckovic Sep 13 '26

Yeah that part of it sucks.. I can spend weeks writing code for a new project for example, and then when I share it with someone, everyone is like 'So?' because they assume I just wrote one prompt into a code agent and it generated the whole thing for me rather than spending weeks learning new concepts and writing code from scratch because I'm actually interested in learning and improving rather than letting my brain and skills rot.

And I hate it because I too am suspicious now of everything.

Photo of 'something that happened' on social media and I'm skeptical? Let me just look really closely for signs of AI generation..

Friend sending me a link to a 'funny song'? I'm nervous about clicking on it because I don't want youtube's algorithms to start recommending nothing but AI generated parody songs to me because I clicked one link for one AI generated parody song..

Cool digital concept art? .. I'm looking at the artist's page and checking how many images they're putting out per month and if they suddenly started posting in the past 12 months..

"It's not just X — it's Y" in an article? Suddenly I feel like I'm reading LLM output and that's what I'm now thinking about instead of the contents of the article. I'm wondering if I'm wasting my time reading something that the 'writer' didn't even read themselves. And it's not like it doesn't matter, I've seen AI generated game reviews where the reviews had entirely incorrect information about the game, getting core facts like game modes and character names wrong.

GenAI is ruining so much of what I used to take for granted in life.

It doesn't help that there are grifters out there literally are trying to lie to people.

Fake cat videos, fake viral videos, fake political crap. They post things like AI generated videos of speedpaintings of images they generated to try to trick people into thinking they really painted something in photoshop, or fake screenshots of Blender UIs and wireframes to try to claim something is a 3D model and not AI generated. Or take someone else's work and just run it through a GenAI filter to subtly change it. There's 'artist accounts' on art websites where everything, even the text description of the images posted, it's all entirely AI generated, fully automated fake behaviour, the image topics even are picked at random by an LLM and fed to image generators, absolutely zero human involvement.

It's so hard NOT to be paranoid about this stuff any more when we have absolutely every reason to be paranoid.

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u/EternalAntFarm Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26

It reminds me of the monologue from Chernobyl.

"What is the cost of lies AI? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear see enough lies AI, then we no longer recognize the truth at all".

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u/JameEagan Sep 14 '26

This is honestly the worst part about the era of AI. I have a project I spent three years working on and when I shared an early alpha of it I get accused of it being made by AI. None of it was written by AI. Feels bad man.

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u/SomeOnionHater Sep 13 '26

"WeLl, ThEy CoUlD hAvE dIsClAiMeD tHaT!"

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u/Relative8094 Sep 13 '26

game name? I would love to wishlist it after seeing the dev response

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u/Dodgeflyer Sep 13 '26

"the indie game Luminary"

It's literally in the text of the post itself

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u/JustinTayl0r Sep 13 '26

Luminary.

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u/KimberStormer Sep 13 '26

It's very funny that on reddit, especially from the very euphoric side of it, the position that "you should believe everything you're told because skepticism is annoying" is so popular.

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u/DeepAstronaut Sep 13 '26

AI is the new "Salem witch hunts". Dumb people with shit for brains accusing other of "using AI".

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u/LoversAlibis Sep 13 '26

Human does something that isn’t PERFECT? AI.

Human does something absolutely perfectly? AI.

Part of the human experience is trying something new, failing, and getting better at it. If we don’t give people the grace to do that, what the hell are we doing?

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u/Main-Astronomer5288 Sep 14 '26

It's because majority on the internet right now are just Hedonism crybaby, who believe the world is revolving around them, anything new anything just created is all meant to entertain them and work towards their interest only.

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u/DeltaStorm2013 Sep 14 '26

Add one more layer to the Bullshit that is AI. Now we have insufferable assholes that just accused everything of being AI. Artwork looks too good? AI. Voice acting sounds just a little bit jank...AI. Voice acting actually sounds too good..AI. Actual recording of a tornado taken from a drone that they don't believe was actually possible....AI. (the tornado drone thing actually happened btw)Everything is apparently AI to these people and it just gets tiresome.