Hi all. I registered just to post in this thread. I’ve never participated in IFComp before and have no interest in authoring, but for years I’ve considered playing and judging - and this year I finally took the steps to see what that entails. And I have to say: immediately I was put off by the mere presence of obviously AI generated entries among the lot. This is something I naturally assumed IFComp would have ruled against already - five years ago AI Dungeon showed the way the winds were blowing, and watching platform after platform impose bans to protect the integrity of their community, I figured that IFComp would be at the forefront of handling this.
As a result of seeing the AI slop, I simply decided against playing this year. I had also prepared to recruit friends to help out, because group discussion about games is a fun way to boost interest and enhance the experience. But I won’t be doing that either. (And not just for me - I already know my friend group is opposed to this rising tide of garbage, so I wouldn’t even want to waste their time either. I assure you, they have the same objections.) This isn’t a threat, it’s just an explanation of the multiplicative effect of the choices being made here: if people stop sharing IFComp on social media and pushing for folks to get involved, it will see drastically reduced participation and outreach.
I need to be very clear that this isn’t something you can “debate” people out of. I see a lot of people going to bat for LLM tech in here, telling people they’re wrong about how it works, or what it can do, etc. But even if the environmental costs were reduced to 0, and it gained perfect Twine or Inform support, etc. that wouldn’t matter in the least to the central issue people hold - which was spelled out in the initial post. Bluntly, AI generation is against the spirit of IFComp, at least as far as me and many others believe. If that’s not the case - if the mods agree that it’s as valid as the human creations - then anyone like me who disagrees will silently disappear, and the remaining may enjoy the reduced community they’ve created without our whining.
One thing pointed out before in the “AI Slop” blog post is that there is no recourse for me, a (potential) judge, to push back against this. If I summarily give all AI entries a 0, I haven’t done my 2 hours duty, and moreover I’ll be spotted for obvious review-bombing which is also against the rules. If I avoid playing AI games at all, then their final scores will be dominated by people who either don’t care or are outright supportive of this kind of spam. If I don’t participate at all, at least my time wasn’t wasted, but nobody hears my reasoning for why I’m not playing. IFComp is bleeding judges without any direct statement or understanding as to why. (EDIT: I see in the posts above that there’s a survey… maybe I should have looked harder haha. well, I’ll be putting my opinions there, if this thread runs aground)
My final response here is that I see a big post about the difficulty of weeding out AI entries, the balancing act mods must make, that people can lie, etc etc and I will also say to this person: that sucks, but… I also don’t care. I’m sorry. As a lay judge checking this out for the first time, the fact that nothing was done at all to stop this - no matter how “hard” it would have been to do so - to me is akin to IFComp saying they welcome these entries. Is that unfair? Is that placing undue burden on the admins? Probably! But such “there is no perfect answer” objections fall on deaf ears as the Internet slowly becomes overrun by AI slop everywhere, and people like me begin to seek out refuges doing something against the encroaching wave of such spam.