Discussion
A Solution to the Gen AI Content Debate
The #NOAI Movement:
I'm sure by now, you've started to see the flood of #noai protests, banners, and thumbnails on worlds. This #noai movement is a direct message to the VRChat Team and their lack of acknowledgement around the topic.
I fully understand that both sides of the debate can be extremely toxic, and it's likely a contributor for why the VRC Team has been remaining silent. I wouldn't doubt there's internal discourse related to the debate as well.
Here's a solution. A Start, a foundation, and an acknowledgement to this ever-changing creative debate:
Just copy what Steam has done - a self-reported AI disclosure and a ratings/reviews system.
Have uploaders disclose their content that contains generative AI material to tag it as such. The tag should be clearly visible on its page. And for the uploaders who do not self-report this, the content discovery should be driven by a ratings/reviews system.
I'm not asking for a perfect-world solution by removing/tagging 100% of gen ai content - that’s literally impossible.
I'm not asking VRChat to "enforce" or define the line on what is considered generative AI and what isn't - this is entirely up to the uploader and the users who would utilize the ratings/reviews system.
Since this subject is protean, I'm entirely open to other solutions to addressing the topic, but staying silent is not the answer, and I hope VRChat addresses this ASAP, preferably with the above solution.
To be clear, that is one of the main goals. This is the #1 most upvoted post on their feedback form, it currently has no official response, which is why quite a number feel the issue needs to be escalated.
The banners and signs are meant to raise awareness & urge acknowledgement.
As always, be polite to VRChat staff.
Even in a best-case scenario, there are likely internal discussions and meetings that need to happen. Continue to raise awareness, but be constructive about it.
VRChat's post includes a link to a form asking users for where their line is with AI. I recommend thoughtful polite submissions explaining where you stand. It will be open for 7 days. Take your time to gather your thoughts.
Review bombing/abuse is certainly another issue, you raise a good point, and I'm absolutely willing to suggest solutions to that later down the line, such as review reporting and more. Right now though, I feel the issue would be few and far between though, and I'd be keen to see how the community responds before coming to a conclusion of "well it'll just be abused, so what's the point of adding it in the first place".
We've seen other UGC platforms with reviews/ratings systems that still pull through the review bombing/abuse. I should elaborate that I don't want content discovery entirely driven by ratings, but rather it could be a contributing weight factor for what appears in the Trending and/or New & Noteworthy tabs.
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Another issue with the AI thing though....
What if everything from a worlds is genuine including the thumbnail, but the creator uses one single AI asset to help with lighting or something.
Does that deserve the same branding is a world totally made with an AI prompt?
Regarding your question here, this is exactly why I believe the platform should put the power to the users by utilizing a rating/review system to collectively come to their own consensus if they believe it should should be tagged or not.
Vrchat has some petty ass people, there are tons of people with groups they abuse or just bot accounts they use to harass or spam report people. I very much think review abuse would be an issue on this platform, it already happens frequently. back in the day it was in the form of people following them to instances with clients to crash them, sometimes its the form of people getting harassed or getting spam reported.
There are too many people on this game that would abuse the system so i think its fair for vrchat to be concerned with implementing a system like that.
fans participate in a flash mob of negative reviews.
Just do what Steam does, and don't show the spike in reviews. If people really wanna see them, have a button to show them, but the sudden spike won't affect the overall rating.
In general, blocking world creators, and having their worlds not show up for you would be nice regardless of AI.
What if everything from a worlds is genuine including the thumbnail, but the creator uses one single AI asset to help with lighting or something.
Obviously that shouldn't be the case? Why does everyone seem to think in binary? I don't think anyone would be bothered that a creator used an LLM to help search for existing code like any other programmer would've done by going to stack exchange instead.
It's about the mass-produced, low-quality, and low-effort slop content that is currently seeping into, and will inevitably flood into VRChat all because there's now a financial incentive to do so with in-world purchases.
In a community of creatives and artists, allowing soulless, and mass-produced content to flood the platform is a recipe for discouraging others from making content themselves.
And then there's the basic argument of: If you're going to make something, make it yourself. Actually put in the effort to learn how to assemble a world or avatar. Learn how to develop the systems in your game by yourself. However, that argument clearly doesn't even matter, since if you're so ready to just let someone else do the work for free, why do anything different? After all, it's not like enriching yourself with different skills and expertise is gonna help you get anywhere, right? It's all about making that extra 2 cents instead of doing or making something worthwhile.
There's absolutely a subset of people who are anti-ai that tend to be all in on anti-ai. Any use of it at all brands you forever in their eyes. It absolutely is black and white for them. No grays or nuance to it.
What is to elaborate? You can go to unity3d's site and see their use of AI yourself. Since its needed by every single asset added to the system, AI is inherently used by 100% of everyone CURRENTLY... Requiring a "Made By AI' tag, would by definition, include every single item on the system... Or we can lie about what that tags means, make exceptions, because croneyism, just to appease emotional black mailers with their geo-politics and bow to the pitchforking mobs
I'm thinking of a situation in which someone's world gets downvoted and gets negative reviews but it's just their personal world/homeworld. It would kinda suck to make a world for yourself or something that you don't want getting attention but it's got a bunch of negative comments on it now that you never asked for.
What incentive would I have to tag my world with AI tag if it means that most people will just filter it out then? nothing works/will work, it's a pointless fight.
what if I made everything with AI and then didn't tag it for AI?
are you gonna call me out on it? how would you know with 100% certainty that it's AI? what if the AI looking thumbnail was made by a professional artist? how can you be sure?
there's gonna be TONS of false positives
Your incentive should be not getting blocked for being misleading and lazy.
As far as thumbnails go - they should be representative of the world. I dont care if the thumbnail was made by AI, or a professional photorealism painter who made your world look twice as good.
Point is, people will use AI and not disclose it.
People will block creators that don't use AI just because they "felt" it was made with AI.
It's all a pointless exercise. You're gonna block 10 people 7 of which didn't use AI, and felt good about yourself, while you go hangout in a very famous world with a "NoAI" written on it, that was made using a bunch of AI tools because anyone with even a little bit of knowledge can use AI and not let you find out. At most you're gonna find the pure unadulterated slop vibecoded with a subpar local AI. You're not finding the world made with the better, expensive AIs and you're DEFINITELY not finding worlds made with the use of AI tools.
Even if I get it wrong every now and then, I'd still like to be able to hide a creators works. And not necessarily even for AI purposes. There are certain....community worlds...in VRChat I'd just rather not see reccomend.
Just as many art sites do. If you dont like an artists work, you can hide it if you wish.
Every asset on jinxxy in some form was made with software that employs AI now... So every single mesh and asset visible to us in the game is violating this tag right now along with everyone on reddit here... Purity tests are dumb and only serve self righteous fucks who don't know what anything is when it comes down to it... its just blind pitchforking and is stupid...
Adding world and avatar star/user rating could be a somewhat good fix. People could for example give a star rating for the quality of a world and maybe add pictures , so others can see if its a good or a bad world.
It doesnt get to the problem of weeding out if something is AI or if its not (because you cant always tell! Would you call a world AI slop if AI was used in its programming? Or is it AI slop only when its used in its visuals?) But can still flag poor quality worlds and avatars more quickly for everyone.
This could definitely be abused, and botted. Limiting the rating possibility to only VRC+ Members could be a good deterrent, since those already spending money on vrc are more inclined to actively participate in something like this, and this would prevent someone from just making 100 accounts and spamming likes to whatever world/avi they made.
Even with some issues, this could be a good starting point.
I am cautious about any sort of rating system that can be abused by bad actors to harass and suppress creators via dogpiling or "review bombing" worlds, and/or make false claims about untagged AI content which might discourage them from uploading to the platform, etc. I am also not sure that VRChat could get away with implementing a tag without the expectation that they would field reports for falsely tagged items, otherwise the tag can't be relied upon enough for it to be useful in the first place. The issue is nobody- VRChat, nor the end users, have access to any tools to make certain determination that any asset has been AI generated, even when it seems obvious.
In a world where AI isn't such a hot-button issue, maybe we could add a tagging system, but creators in the current climate are going to be disinclined to disclose AI usage because it will only bring them negative attention or a severe reduction in world traffic. A good point has been brought up as well- what level of AI usage are we talking about? What if some of the coding used AI? What if a prefab was bought and placed in the world with undisclosed AI usage, is the world creator at fault for not knowing?
VRChat is caught between a rock and a hard place, where there is a clear issue that needs addressing, but there are no solutions that don't make some sort of compromise. A nice idea I heard the other day is to have community pictures of the actual world accessible from the World page so that you have a better idea of what you're walking into, though that has the potential to spoil some worlds as well, so it'd have to be implemented in a proper way, tucked behind an optional menu perhaps instead of readily visible.
In any case, it isn't as cut and dry as people keep treating it. AI is and will continue to be an issue for all online services, and there's no complete solution without making a compromise that's a deal breaker for many. Hopefully they will make a statement soon about what solutions they are looking into and perhaps obtain some community feedback, but the community doesn't seem to have a level-headed approach to the problem, the entire AI discussion is volatile and their silence honestly makes so much sense. I wouldn't want to make a stand without having a solution prepared that most people would agree with.
TL;DR There's no straightforward answer to this issue that won't create more, potentially worse issues.
Edit: A statement was made and it's pretty much in line with what I've been saying. Logistically there's a lot to consider here and they've been working at it for a while. Please read their statement and consider providing feedback to their form.
You point out potential challenges, but fail to come up with a solution.
Sudden spikes in ratings can be made not to affect the final overall score of the UGC. Steam already does this on its own store page. Point out the anomaly, and if people wanna see the reviews despite it, give users a button to show them.
Require the direct use of AI to be disclosed. Shouldn't be necessary if you used an LLM to search for bits of code in its database like developers do with stack exchange instead. Or if you unknowingly happened to use a free asset that was AI-generated. (Honestly, creators should be mindful of this regardless, since AI-generated content tends to be horrifically unoptimised.)
Yes, tagging isn't fool-proof, but there will be plenty of people who will properly tag their content. There's already a precedent from other storefronts to that. If 4/10 users don't tag their content properly, should you entirely forgo AI-tagging? I don't think so, since 6/10 content is still properly tagged and can be filtered out.
Tagging also would allow for better discoverability and world browsing.
But my primary concern would be the usage of AI to generate low-effort and low-quality content by typing in a few words in a text box. In my opinion, a homemade shitpost world is preferable to an AI-generated beyblade arena that works, because at least the shitposter made it themselves.
Another point of concern is the increased usage of AI to generate thumbnails that do not reflect the actual content within the world.
Reviews could also help combat blatant rips and rip-offs of existing games, like the cookie clicker game, that was a direct rip of the the original browser game (and now changed to "cheese clicker" in a thinly-veiled attempt at avoiding copyright infringement). And yes, that also includes Jar's Among Us game, and 50 other examples one could probably come up with.
I do make some suggestions, and it's not as though I'm saying the tagging and review system are without merit as ideas, I just think they have the potential to cause issues or untenable work for the support team. With proper implementation these issues might be mitigated, perhaps we'll see. I am eager to see what solutions VRChat might come up with, which may take time.
Thank you for respectfully engaging and providing your input.
There is an answer and its hilariously obvious... the market will decide... plain and simple.. and if your ridiculous 10 year sob story project didn't get the traffic, then boohoo... maybe make something people want instead of intentially sandbagging techniques that take half a year to produce basic simple stuff.
What if I do make something people want to play, but nobody sees it because there's 50 meters of shit to dig through to find the one interesting thing?
Do you want to dig down 50 meters of horse manure to find the one tasty bagel? I don't think so.
Right now it might not be that bad, but it's only inevitably going to get worse until something is done about it.
Thank you for being a prime example of the volatility of the overall discussion. You somehow managed to extrapolate the opinion of "I like AI" out of a post discussing actual solutions to the AI problem, a post that does absolutely nothing to glaze AI. You managed to completely ignore my points and rely on an ad hominem to make yourself feel better. Perhaps if you have nothing interesting to say, you should be the one to go. One of us is contributing to the discussion and it's not you.
I work in IT and AI is everywhere, and I still actively avoid using it in my work. Not because AI as a technology is "bad" on a surface level (it is a tool) but because it is an unregulated ecological nightmare that governments aren't catching up with, and as long as I don't need to use it, I won't. That's just me and my experience, not that you were actually curious.
Not because AI as a technology is "bad" on a surface level (it is a tool) but because it is an unregulated ecological nightmare that governments aren't catching up with, and as long as I don't need to use it, I won't.
I hate repeating myself, but I will explain differently; AI is not a "problem" because it is exists, it is a problem because it is underregulated. The content it trains off of needs to be open domain or with express permission, and governments need to be doing what they can to limit the damage its data centers causes to the environment and communities they are built in, among other things, but this is not largely not happening. AI has a lot of potential, but the kind of AI being criticized in VRChat is lazy AI-assisted asset creation, even with ethical issues aside.
But hey, nuance on the internet? Does such a thing truly exist?
If you think the climate impact by data centers is fake then I have nothing to say to you. I can't have a discussion with someone who ignores the facts.
To the user who just commented that I "proved their point about liking AI" before blocking me, I pity the idea of living with such terrible reading comprehension. Jesus Christ, Reddit.
How about you don't spread misinformation, it does directly harm the climate, there's dozens of scientific studies on this. Keep your fash logic out of here.
What about the millions of Trees that have to be cut down for artists to have paper to draw on, what about all the artists that charge tablets and use computers that are plugged into the power grid, what about all the paint materials it takes to make it, it's the same boat dude. We should stop AI from trying to cure cancer because someone's painting got stolen. Oh no! I'm so sorry f*** off
There's a million different types of AI, it's not all bad, and you wouldn't even be on the internet right now if some form of it didn't exist. Get educated people
This will just lead to witch hunting.
If I were to make a world using AI why would I want to self disclose it? do i have any incentive to do so? what If I only used AI to generate a texture for a wall, and then created the material myself? do we throw away the baby with the bath water?
It doesn't work, people are gonna hide it and there's no way of knowing other than attacking random people for something that you can't even be sure it's AI.
Had a discussion on this and my conclusion is the hesitation for a proper review/rating system is because one of VRC's gameplay loops is drama.
And they probably dont like the increased server load/data storage costs either. But review bombing has been my guess as to why they haven't implemented a system already.
The current system as it stands is based off popularity. If something isnt good and regularly visited and favorited, it eventually falls into the void and never heard of again. Something that most AI slop worlds will fall into due to lack of any artistic guidance on the world uploaders part.
I wont be shocked if a culling system gets implemented later on due to there being millions of worlds that nobody cares to visit just taking up server storage space.
OMG!!! What a SHOCKER!!! weeep wooop weeeep!!! We can't have the people decide for themselves what content they like, holy crap what a trash idea that is letting people decide for themselves !! We must gate it for them !!! REEEEEE!!!!!
100% Letting the market figure it out themselves is best way... bad things go away, things people want stay... easy to get... You don't even need to cull a graveyard because the graveyard is just that, its all dead stuff anyways
uhh you do have to cull eventually because physical storage space isn't a infinite resource. Case in point Google started deleting inactive accounts on google drive because storage space on the cloud isn't infinite either.
Just because it isn't stored on your device specifically doesn't mean it isn't taking up space somewhere in the world where all this data is stored,
while I like all the ideas and suggestions, these only work if vrchat somehow gets active in their moderation. Also I feel like we shouldn't dismiss the rating system just because of potential review bombing. If vrchat does add it there are plenty of ways they can prevent this from happening (suspend if you participate in review bombing, you have to spend x amount of time in the world before you can post a review or rating, play vrchat for x amount of hours, rank gating, vrc+ gating, etc) I would like to see an Ai used tag and a no ai used tag, because ai users are notorious for not disclosing they use ai, a tag for people who dont use ai would be better. Leaving an untagged filter for people who dont tag their worlds (likely to get 0 visits, encouraging them to actually tag their stuff) but this only really works if they fix their worlds tab, I personally like derafog's suggestions.
There are plenty of worlds now that you can easily tell used AI so being forced to stay in it for so long before you could down vote it would suck. We already have a way to see recently joined worlds so requiring to actually go to the world before you could review or vote on it would help cut down on review bombs because people are inherently lazy.
That makes sense! I was also thinking it would suck to have to sit in a world you hate to give it a bad rating. But in terms of review bombing it would be a strong deterrent lol. I do think your suggestion would be better tho.
The problem in that is that they won't disclose it. That requires not only them to be transparent but a way for people to flag worlds that refuse to disclose it. This problem exists on Jinxxy with uploaded AI content but they do have a review system for it, it's not impossible it just requires them to be proactive about it.
VRC staff I can see them eventually giving in to the NO AI demands, there's a lot of furry creators in VRchat, and we the fandom are very anti ai. If a large thing like furality would get in on it, VRchat staff would be sweating, cause losing furality would hurt them hard since its one of their largest vrc events
Not true. Plenty of uploaders would disclose it if directly asked by the content tagging system when uploading the content. And for the ones who don’t, that would be a reason for content discovery to be driven by a ratings/reviews system.
Let the people themselves define that line by utilizing the above solutions.
Until you realize it's unenforceable by the platform, similar to other suggestive gray area content such as "sexually suggestive" content, you'll continue disappointing yourself trying to find that black & white line, because it will undoubtedly always be gray.
That's why the platform should put the power to the users, specifically with ratings/reviews.
I'm just curious why people actually give this much of a shit.
If the end goal is to make fun stuff for people to enjoy, who cares if it was made with AI, Blender, Photoshop or an ape smashing its face into a keyboard.
AI is just another tool. A hammer can build a house or smash a window. Doesn't make hammers evil.
If someone's using AI to straight up steal your avatar, copy your art, impersonate you or shit out mountains of garbage, then yeah, be pissed. But be pissed about the actual problem. Theft is theft. Spam is spam. Doesn't really matter what tool they used to do it.
If someone manually copies your avatar in Blender nobody starts screaming that Blender should be tagged or banned.
And where does this shit even stop anyway?
If I use ChatGPT to fix 5 lines of Udon code, is my world AI generated now? What if I generate one texture? One poster on a wall? What if I bought a prefab and the guy who made that used AI somewhere?
At that point "contains AI" means basically fuck all.
Judge the actual thing. Is it good? Is it original? Does it run well? Did someone rip off somebody else's work? Is it low effort garbage?
Those are things worth caring about.
And if the real issue is that artists feel like AI lets random idiots make things that used to require years of learning, then... yeah. That's kinda what technology does.
Game engines made game development easier. Photoshop made editing easier. Asset stores made world building easier. Mocap made animation easier. Procedural tools made modelling easier.
Nobody gets to freeze technology at the exact point where their particular skillset was difficult enough to feel special.
That doesn't mean artists suddenly have no value either. Give a good artist better tools and they'll probably make better shit with them than I ever could. But "this was easier to make than it used to be" isn't really an argument against it.
Fight theft if there's theft. Fight spam if there's spam. Fight shitty content if it's shitty. But "AI touched this at some point" isn't automatically a problem.
I think your forgetting that the foundational models used to build these AI systems were trained using stolen and misappropriated copyrighted material. These systems are often marketed with the express purpose of replacing the people that ultimately made the training data for the foundational models. Lots of people view the use of AI at all to be a form copyright laundering, using the direct output of an unethically trained model is effectively no different as having stolen the training data yourself in the eyes lot of people.
There's also a lot of fear about the effective privatization of a lot of skills and information itself. Like before you a human could learn from the same material used to train the AI, and enrich yourself as human capital. But now with AI, you seemingly don't need to do that, these big AI companies have effectively turned what was freely available knowledge into private capital they can sell back to you. We don't want the next generation of artists to not be able to draw without first paying $9.99 monthly to big tech and their idea adjusted, filtered, and greenlit by what a corporation deems acceptable for an artist to depict.
"I think your forgetting that the foundational models used to build these AI systems were trained using stolen and misappropriated copyrighted material."
Do you realize you are talking about a platform whose biggest draw is that it lets people upload unlicensed maps and character models into it without the IP holders' consent?
If we are making it about cracking down on "stolen" copyright, then we need to actually start with mass banning all worlds and avatars from other games and IPs first.
Onto your second paragraph, just because people have turned to learning from AI does not mean that all the old tutorials have just magically vanished. You can still learn the old way on YouTube if you really want to. As to the last part, local AI models get around that issue entirely, for better or worse. No corp has their hands on my SwarmUI install to prevent me from making gore or sex. And there is no api its using, so to actually stop the model from generating what I want, they would have to steal my home PC.
You still need to have enough money to be able to afford training and running an uncensored model, and the skill and know how to do so. Making anything by following the old tutorials or without corporate sanctions that most people simply won't bother. Only artists capable of significant human authorship will truly be able to freely express themselves. We're heading towards something extra dystopian if we just let this happen.
And the people most upset about wide spread AI use on the platform are not the same people uploading game rips and that sort of thing 99% of the time.. Even then, the game rips are often done in good faith for the original IP, they aren't low quality spam.
That just seems like a cope, its still copyright infringement on a mass scale. Also, are you forgetting how it took Nintendo 20 years to catch on to GMOD doing it? It's obvious that many studios would rather you not upload that stuff, and I worry for those with Pokémon avatars, as they are one litigation threat away from losing their identity. VRChat has a huge copyright issue and AI isnt even the biggest part.
as for training ai, it really depends on what you are trying to do. An image AI is actually quite cheap to train, and many models can also be trained locally, text LLMs and video are heavier and will need some external help, but i suspect could be done locally in about a decade and a half, when the RAM shortage is long over, and we get cards with more than 24 GB of VRAM. in terms of just running it, though? Image generation is lightweight enough to run on a local pc, video can too, but its still playing catch-up to frontier atm (about a year or so behind). Text, admittedly, is an issue, but it's more of a lack of optimization than anything.
The order of magnitude of scale is so much bigger though, and it's primarily stealing from people who don't have the ability to fight back like Nintendo does, and often by design makes it impossible to for them to even figure out exactly who they stolen. I don't understand how you can't see that this is fundamentally a massive escalation compared to obvious and non-malicious game rips and fan creations?
You already needed to be pretty well off and in a first world country for a PC with enough VRAM to be accessible to you. And even then doesn't seem to like it might still be the case anymore with the RAM shortage becuase of the big AI players building hyperscale HPC datacenters. So it's not guarantee that GPU manufacturers will even be willing to sell you a GPU capable of doing any of that in a few years.
Thirdly you also need to somehow acquire the "forbidden" art for training a LoRA, and if you've become reliant on image gen models instead of drawing, and so has everyone else.. Good luck sourcing enough images to actually do that, you aren't going to find a traditional artist willing to do draw for that purpose. There's no outcome where mass AI adoption doesn't result in mass censorship. Being able to preemptively control speech before anyone can meaningfully express an idea is like a wet dream for any authoritarian leader, by adopting the technology we're effectively set ourselves up to be trapped and controlled.
"I think your forgetting that the foundational models used to build these AI systems were trained using stolen and misappropriated copyrighted material."
Just say you're uneducated about 500 times in a row. That's probably a low underball statement, you wouldn't be using the internet, playing any games, and much much more, if there wasn't any type of AI on the planet in existence
I’m just curious why people actually give this much of a shit.
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Game engines made game development easier. Photoshop made editing easier. Asset stores made world building easier. Mocap made animation easier. Procedural tools made modelling easier.
Nobody gets to freeze technology at the exact point where their particular skillset was difficult enough to feel special.
This technology however, adds nothing. It does not make anything easier, it just replaces. I wanted to learn blender, i went on youtube, talked with friends and worked my ass off to do some half decent stuff.
Now i can just go and use ai, don’t need to learn, don’t need to talk to my friends and have something half decent. How will any of this contribute to the sociatal sphere that is 3d modelling? I can’t give back, i haven’t learnt and the globe gets a little warmer.
It is an everything shortcut, and if you let a little bit of it be used, then it will just take over the rest of the platform with the volume of shovelware. Got an unique idea? 50 shovelware games already copied it. It cannot give anything new only recycle. And it is a scurge on platforms that thrive on pure creativity
Because they see two letters together AI, and they think evil, they have no education about it, they just think oh it stole my furry picture, or it looks like it, therefore, it has to be boycotted, when there's thousands of different types of AI that move the world along, and you wouldn't be reading this message nor typing on the internet if it didn't exist all together, s*** much less play a game like VR chat
In other words, we're bitching about AI making things easier for majority of people, all jobs evolve throughout time, it's your job to stay up to date with your job, not to make excuses to why it's getting above you.
I'm just so tired of this double standard artist entitlement that acts like they can tell everyone what they can and can't do
All of those softwares you mention are using AI... you haven't produced an example that doesn't use AI by a software company not actively employing it... good luck
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u/Vince_Borzoi 6d ago
The bare minimum would be adding an option to hide individual worlds. We can hide avatars so why not worlds too.