Nexus Mods finally tightens the screws on AI, though it's still playing softball with the tide of slop

One particular draining effect that the swell of AI tools has had is in the modding community. Now, some might make the argument that modders are the most understandable group in game development for this sort of thing—after all, they're often fan hobbyists without the pull of a game development studio behind them.

In practice, though, AI has mostly just enabled unscrupulous modders to do things like rip voice actor's words for NSFW mods against their will, vibe code shaky mods, or—most irritatingly—flood sites with AI-generated slop art that offends anyone with taste.

Nexus Mods, which has previously been pretty open, has finally started to tighten the screws a little on AI usage. That's per a blog post that was dropped earlier this week, which reads: "Hello modders! We have been reviewing feedback for some time now regarding the usage of generative AI tools on Nexus Mods, and we've come to the decision that we need to make some changes following these user discussions.

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"One of the main points we've heard from the user base is that our current tag of 'AI-Generated Content' is not sufficient; equating all generative AI use under one tag does not allow for nuance in filtering your mods feed on our platform. So, we're adding a few others and clarifying the requirements of these tags under a new tag category."

The tags draw lines between AI-generated content (code, voices, dialogue, music, etc), AI-generated promotional media (the crappy, glossy jpegs you get on a lot of mods these days that otherwise don't use AI), and AI-assisted, which basically means non-invasive or minimal AI usage. For instance, a developer who actually knows how to code using AI in a limited capacity to prototype or problem-solve.

More to the point, Nexus is now explicitly stating you'll get in trouble for fibbing about whether your mods have AI in them or not: "Failure to correctly tag mods, including undisclosed generative AI usage, may be subject to moderation action." This includes an option to report mods for "Miscategorised Content".

It's a pretty soft-handed approach to AI slop on your site—though I don't want to let perfect be the enemy of good. I take a similar stance to PC Gamer's own Joshua Wolens on this stuff: Yes, AI generation can get you closer to a (and I'm using extremely heavy air-quotes here) "professional" looking, sounding, or feeling mod—but in doing so, you strip it of any charm. I'd personally rather have grainy, crappy voice-acting and MS paint assets over something that looks like it rolled out of MidJourney's bloated corpus any day.

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