Game store itch.io is getting flooded with AI slop gamingonlinux.com/2026/11/game…
#Itchio #AI #itch #Gaming #PCGaming #GenAI
The scrappy indie store itch.io is facing a problem - lots and lots of AI slop getting uploaded to it, but they're attempting to fight back against it.Liam Squires-Hand (GamingOnLinux)
⬆️🧵 Today, after a month of silence in the thread, some LLM-brained user replied he knows that people have "mixed feelings" about AI only to handwave it immediately away that I wrote that the reason why I argue against LLMs is that I don't want to have to flee my home country in ten years due to unsurvivable heat waves. And, heck, I don't live in Africa, I live in Germany.
He replied, "LLMs are just soo useful and it would be incredible to regenerate the tens of thousands of sentences with the latest models. The minor issue that the grammar breakdowns are wrong can be remedied by using one's critical thinking skills".
Shortly before the "Spain is burning" link, I had also posted a link about Richard Dawkins and "Claudia", and how the use of ChatGPT rots the brain with the intention to educate non-techie normies who aren't in our Mastodon bubble.
I'm inclined to reply to the guy from today with a news headline from literally yesterday, that Belgium is currently having the biggest wildfire in its history. And that this wildfire is already crossing the border to Germany. Maybe a two-hour drive away from where I live. That Greece is burning. Firemen have died trying to stop the fires.
It seems I was way too optimistic when I wrote I'll have to flee my home country in ten years. More realistically is next year. Or this year, the year isn't over yet. Today the fire in Belgium is still a few hours away from my home …
I fear I'm going to get banned from the forum (even though I paid for a lifetime license) if I don't shut up and let it be, and just watch idly how my once favorite app goes the way of Duolingo and gets run into the ground. It's so frustrating.
On the forum for language learners where I'm active to get help learning Spanish, the other users are begging the app developers to update the grammar breakdowns generated by the built-in ChatGPT feature with the newer and better ChatGPT models … for tens of thousands of sentences.
First of all, I've come to hate interacting with other forum users. Whenever someone asks about my native language and I, a native speaker, take the time to answer, I always get, "You're wrong. ChatGPT says something else."
Second, the LLM-generated grammar breakdowns are absolutely worthless and *always* wrong. Sometimes just a little, sometimes completely. Even for such constrained problems like grammar breakdowns, when there's a fixed and known set of rules and the LLM ingested all grammar books.
Third, I dared to explain in the forum the correlation between the use of "AI", the demand for data centers, the environmental destruction, and climate change. I asked the other forum users to please believe native speakers more than the "AI". For context, I also mentioned that I'm not some random know-nothing but that I have a background in computer science and understand how ChatGPT works under the hood. And I laid out why the "AI" isn't some infallible oracle but an unreliable source of information. (The forum is supposed to be kid-friendly, thus no swear words wanted.)
I was immediately attacked by addicted users in denial, like, "Oh, Mr. Smarty Pants who went to university thinks he's smarter than all non-academics among us." Some called me a Luddite. It was then I who was scorned by the admin of the forum and lead developer of the app that it's unproductive behavior to attack his user base. If the users want "AI", they'll get "AI", the forum admin and lead developer said.
A month ago, I posted a link to a news article that reported on how France, Spain, and other countries are literally burning right now. That's the cost of LLM usage.
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