Exploring Steam Next Fest With An AI-Blocking Extension Is Very Depressing

I usually have a good time digging through the demos in Valve’s recurring Steam Next Fest event. This time, with a tool installed that warns me if a game or demo includes generative AI content, the event became very depressing — more than half the games I checked out featured an AI content disclaimer.

When I opened the main hub page for Steam Next Fest earlier today, right after my email inbox was flooded by PR messages reminding me that the event had started, I was excited to go exploring. As I did, I started running into numerous games that feature disclaimers from the devs confirming the use of generative AI tools for various parts of the game or its marketing.

Curious how much of that hub would contain AI-generated warnings, I clicked on 16 different games featured on the Steam Next Fest main hub page, and 10 of them triggered my extension and warned me of generative AI disclaimers. Scanning the most popular demos, I continued to run into AI warnings, so it’s not just my algo serving up slop.

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