For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of pre-fabricated objects; bought in a store and assembled into a world, and for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the stores are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad, or that they’re badly made- although a lot of them are- I mean they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in the sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.

• Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy

I care deeply about VRChat as a platform. It’s been a wonderful creative outlet for me and my friends to play dress up dolls in and meet new people in. I’m even one of those sappy folks who found love in it! So I’ve been awfully heartbroken watching the creator community turn inwards on itself with so much vitriolic hatred centered around AI.

Context: Regarding AI Usage on VRChat

I’m a programmer by trade. I’m staring down the barrel. The skills I worked hard to cultivate my entire life are being rendered completely useless thanks to coding agents. People at the office are gradually coming to terms with the fact that the AI is more reliable than humans. And we’re all scared about what that means for our futures! So I want to make it perfectly clear: I do not want any restrictions on AI generated content in VRChat.

No matter where you draw the line, people will adapt to incentives and continue bickering. “Assistance only” to fully generated worlds, it doesn’t especially matter- I do not want to fear violating a hard policy kicking around between a wild variety of takes of public opinion. Why is AI generated code okay, while AI generated illustration isn’t? Or why is “a few Udon scripts” okay, while “more than a few” isn’t? Why is it cool when AI puts Steve from Minecraft in Elden Ring, but bad to try to use AI to make something new? There is no litigable solution here.

You can’t ban it outright, either, since detection is so hard and such a moving goalpost. It’d be a system entirely reliant on trial by public opinion and another policy for Trust & Safety to manage. I really think this one just has to be voluntary disclosure.

I want to hone in on this unanswered question about content labeling in the blog post, because I think it is the most important of them all:

What if they get harassed for following the rules?

I think anything other than allowing voluntary disclosure will result in more harassment. Voluntary self-disclosure of AI-generated content means that people who do not want to see it will not see it or get involved.

Sure, if somebody lies about whether or not they used AI, they are opening themself up to an absolute barrage of discourse, labeling disputes, and reports, but they’d have at least had the opportunity to avoid it and chosen not to. I think how the label gets applied to people who choose to try and skirt the line is not very important compared to giving people an opportunity to voluntarily disclose and opt-out of the rat race.

Content Quality

I suppose any platform based on user-generated content is subject to Robloxification, right? And like, that’s definitely a bad thing for everyone: The casual quest users, the die-hard hobbiests, and the creators working super hard to show off all kinds of cool technology. Nobody likes Robloxification other than grifters! It made me very glad, reading the developer update, to see all of these efforts dedicated towards aggregating and serving high-quality content. I just wish this hot-button subject of AI didn’t have to be grafted onto it.

I found this back-to-back exchange quite stark, yesterday a prefab scene slop creator posted:

Because of GenAI, it’s preventing my friends, family, and partner succeed in their art fields to the fullest.

Because of GenAI, it feels like my years of work in world creation, music, or art-related, are dismissed and don’t matter.

Because of GenAI, we lose our jobs and income due to lazy leaders who disregard the work and effort that people put their soul into.

I’m joining this movement, and you should too. These worlds in the “Can’t Stop Uploading” Tab will have the “NO AI” banner in it to support this matter. ❤️🐈📦

#VRChat #VRC #VRChat_World

- name redacted

Life comes at you fast:

World discoverability in VRChat has been a problem long before AI showed up. Asset-pack reuploads with tiny tweaks and low-effort worlds have often made it hard for great work to get found… but AI makes it possible to publish far more worlds, far faster.

- Regarding AI Usage on VRChat

Those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, I suppose.

Stealing

Several of my friends all got together about a month ago to do our weekly world-hop event. We ended up at an AI generated knock-off of the classic map “Victory of Rounds”. I had a pretty viscerally negative gut reaction to it- perhaps I’m too old for VR shooter games these days, but it felt awful.

Thing is, I was surprised that the people in the lobby didn’t seem to care at all:

• They did not care about AI. I had to explain to them that it was, as it wasn’t disclosed in that instance, but the group consensus was “so what? It’s fun, let’s keep playing.”
• More shockingly, they didn’t care that it was a shameless ripoff. In fact, people seemed to really like the innovations the game made on the formula (they loved having drone-based abilities and some of the zanier cards)

That was a bit of a wake-up call for me. Outside of the world of programmers and artists, I think people do not care about AI very much at all. And who am I to tell somebody that they can’t have a VRChat game they find more fun and interesting than the original? Telling people they can’t have the knockoff makes me feel even worse than the knockoff existing in the first place.

As for me? I’m going to keep using AI coding agents. I’ve come to terms with the fact that the skills I have cultivated are less useful now. But there’s no point in wallowing over that, when I can be excited about all the new possibilities the technology has unlocked.

This is not the time to doom, baby. This is the time to bloom. Intellectually, spiritually, and productively.

- DHH, creator of “Ruby on Rails”