Garry's Mod devs Facepunch will be taking action to "push obviously AI-created slop off" sequel S&box's main page, Garry Newman confirms

Also, the original GMod will eat fan-made Half-Life remake Black Mesa with its next update

Update: "Low quality, obvious AI-created slop is going to be a growing problem in every creative outlet," Facepunch founder Garry Newman said in response on RPS' reachout about S&box being plagued by such things out of the gate. "We don't encourage using AI to be creative. We don't encourage using AI to create games for you. But we do acknowledge that it's a good learning tool and it's a good productivity tool. We'll be taking action to promote human creativity and push obviously AI-created slop off the main page."

Original story follows:

S&box, the open source game development platform/game about vaguely minion-looking cartoon blokes messing about with objects that's serving as spiritual successor to Garry's Mod, has released today, April 28th. Sadly, it seems to be heavy on AI-filled user-created games early doors, with developers Facepunch having already admitted they'll "have to deal with people using AI in obvious, low quality ways".

Thankfully, in the meantime the original's still very much kicking, with an update arriving on April 29th set to see fan-made Half-Life remake Black Mesa grafted onto it.

If you've not heard about S&box yet, possibly because you're still struggling to believe that's actually its name, it's essentially a game making tool in the GMod vein, but with the ability to export your creations into standalone Steam games. Oh, and its characters are weird Robloxy cartoon blob blokes, rather than often terrifyingly contorted versions of familiar faces from Valve games.

"I told someone the other day that it's kind of embarrassing how long it's taken us to get here," Garry Newman wrote in a release day Steam post. "That if I was going to make it all from scratch now it'd probably take less than a year. They made the point that that's like a song writer saying if I knew what the song was I could have knocked it out in 5 minutes. I think that's true. It would have been easy to have taken Garry's Mod and applied it to Source 2. I wasn't happy to do that."

While admitting S&box's initial version "isn't perfect", he went on to promise Facepunch'll deliver weekly updates and listen to player feedback so it rounds out into something as beloved as GMod or Rust in future. Judging by the mixed early Steam reviews, one of the first things the studio are being urged to rethink their approach to is AI-generated content. As of right now, S&box's Steam page notes that while Facepunch "don't AI generate anything", the game's user-generated bits "may contain AI generated stuff".

Out of the gate, it looks like those AI-filled user generated bits are rather ubiquitous. "AI slop 'game modes' have unfortunately been plaguing the discovery tab, burying the small number of actual good game modes made by actual skilled and passionate developers," claims one Steam review from a player cited as having 67 hours in the game. "It's an unoptimized mess with a 'game hub' filled with 'vibe coded' AI slop," another asserts. Those two aren't alone in their assessments.

To be fair to Newman and Facepunch, the studio have openly acknowledged in their launch day post that they "know that [they] have to deal with people using AI in obvious, low quality ways". I've reached out to the studio for comment in case they have more to share in terms of how they plan to tackle the issue.

In less depressing news, the update arriving for classic Garry's Mod tomorrow is set to add "mounting support for Black Mesa", Crowbar Collective's reimagining of Half-Life. For thoughts on Black Mesa, I direct you to Graham's review.