"It's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog s***" Garry's Mod creator says as S&box's latest update aims to punish AI-generated thumbnails

"What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top"

S&box, Facepunch Studios' open source game development platform/spiritual successor to Garry's Mod continues to fight a battle against AI-generated games early doors. After Facepunch founder Garry Newman was quick to confirm the studio would be "taking action to promote human creativity and push obviously AI-created slop off the main page" following S&box's launch to mixed reviews, the game's latest update has taken aim at punishing creations with AI-generated thumbnails.

"I've been making a lot of changes to our Workshop so we can identify and discourage the AI Slop," Newman wrote in the notes for S&box's 26.05.13 update. "Our moderators can now mark packages as having AI thumbnails, which will reduce their prevalence in lists and searches. I can understand why people would want to use AI to generate these thumbs, since it makes generating them easy and fast, it does have the massive downside of making everything look like the same shit. So we're actively discouraging it. I've added a warning to the thumbnail page about this."

Further on in the notes, the developer delved into some of the criticisms which've been brought up regularly across the game's negative Steam reviews out of the gate. Asserting that around 24% of these have included complaints about low-quality AI-generated creations, Newman offered his general view on the topic, this time in slightly swearier fashion. "It's not our intention to encourage games created using AI," he wrote. "It's not our intention to encourage people making shit no effort games. But it's a UGC platform, there is always going to be dog shit. What we need to do is remove obvious trolls, discourage it and make sure it doesn't keep floating to the top. We are developers and this is our platform. Of course we don't want it filled with shit."

Newman also claimed that around 12% of S&box's reviews included complaints about NFTs. "I have no idea what this shit is about," the developer wrote. "Of course we don't have NFTs or blockchain stuff, and never will."

Outside of the measures designed to punish AI thumbnails, this S&box update has also seen Newman and Facepunch add three upscalers in an effort to give players with lower end GPUs or high resolution displays more options until proper optimisation work can be done. Meanwhile, the game's Box3D physics engine's been updated and there's a new review filtration system. Finally, by far the most important tweak from a GMod sequel perspective. "Explosive barrels didn't blow up when you'd throw them at shit," Newman lamented. "Now they do. What a blunder."

The distant booming you can hear is probably pyromanics everywhere having an impromptu fireworks display in celebration.