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The follow-up to Garry's Mod, S&box, has been out on Steam for only a day, and there's already some discourse going on. As with anything that involves user-generated creativity these days, AI projects are starting to appear, prompting the devs to make it clear that nothing they've done involves the technology.
Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod and founder of S&box developer Facepunch Studios, addressed the issue in a statement to Rock Paper Shotgun. "Low quality, obvious AI-created slop is going to be a growing problem in every creative outlet. We don't encourage using AI to be creative," he says. "We don't encourage using AI to create games for you."
There'll be some moderation of what gets pushed most prominently within S&box, but he concedes there are use cases in learning about development or simply making things quicker. "We do acknowledge that it's a good learning tool and it's a good productivity tool," Newman adds. "We'll be taking action to promote human creativity and push obviously AI-created slop off the main page."
If you're not fully aware, S&box is essentially a game development, designed to make creating games fun, intuitive and quick. It's a successor, of sorts, to Garry's Mod, a similar toolkit that lets users fiddle with physics and such. While the idea is you'd contribute something yourself, you can also spend your time browsing other people's work at your leisure.
AI presents a dilemma for the studio, because they don't want to discourage anyone from contributing, nor do they want to be policing the origins of every asset in each submission. That's a Sisyphean task in terms of moderation. For now, removing the spotlight from anyone going that route seems like the fairest middle-ground.
At time of writing, S&box has Mixed reviews on Steam, and the proliferation of generative-AI is a significant theme of the feedback. "Let us filter out the AI slop. It's really not a great look if your spiritual successor to Garry's Mod has a front page filled with nothing but AI," reads one of the more highly rated reviews.
"Please remove the AI slop. Please ban the use of AI generated thumbnails--or descriptions," another reviewer states. A boiler-plate on the Steam page warns of gen-AI being part of what the community comes up with. "This game contains user-generated content, which may contain AI generated stuff. We don't AI generate anything," reads the statement.
