I watched a deep dive video into the weird and wonderful world of AI slop memes which revealed a plot/campaign to legitimize AI “art”
Video source but I am going to summarize to the best of my ability:
“The Bizarre Rise of Tung Tung Tung Sahur (And the Lawsuit Nobody Expected)”
https://youtu.be/6BdRjuaGlJ0 (~22 minutes). Side note: I think Frankie Fey does an amazing job with researching and presenting these bizarre insight into what the “kids” are up to these days.
tl;dw
Gen Alpha and Gen Z use AI to make what they thought are public domain memes.
A RoBlox game called “Steal a brainrot” created by “SpyderSammy” used these memes in a Roblox game that prints money for the developer (Millions of USD per Month).
September 2025, SpyderSammy removed a very popular AI slop meme character called TTT (initials, name is much bigger) because of “Mementum Lab” demanding compensation. Mementum lab is trying to seize control of public domain memes - https://www.mementumlab.com/
Lots of drama ensues along with an escalating legal battle.
April 2026 the the AI slop meme character TTT shows up in Fortnite as an skin (think of it like an aesthetic costume for you player character) with a one time approximate purchase cost of 10~12 USD.
https://fortnite.gg/cosmetics?id=22470
Fortnite is a game created by Epic Games which is a massive money printing machine masquerading as a game. To be fair it has an almost cult like following and is supposedly a lot of fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite
Epic Games is owned by Tim Sweeney - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sweeney
In my opinion, Tim Sweeney is a greedy and disingenuous asshole billionaire.
Tim Sweeney also owns the Unreal Engine (a massively popular and ubiquitous tool for making games that is also a money printer).
Put it all together. MemetumLabs is trying to turn AI slop into property with a monetary value. They failed to extract money from the Roblox meme game made by SypderSammy LLC. Tim Sweeney via his game Fortnite has swooped in to help try and make MemetumLab’s more legitimate.
Additionally there are substantial rumors that the next version of Unreal Engine (version 6) is going to be packed with AI slop generating “features”.
Not relevant to this post, Fortnite is why Wall Street has murdered a big chunk of the games industry as they try to make their own perpetual money printing machine.
Thank you for attending my Ted Talk, please exit through the Gift shop.
Crazy how sweeney seems to be on the wrong side of quite literally everything. If you came to him with an idea to remove the brains of children to make the perfect killing machines and he’d give you a trillion dollars no questions asked. Actually no, he’d ask questions but only so he could get off on it later.
I wonder how that is supposed to work, when it’s been ruled that copyright does not apply to the output of an AI.
There needs to be a transformative change for copyright to apply. It’s hard to see how the company would have legal standing to sue over it.
As I understand it, because SCOTUS refused to hear the latest AI copyright case, that leaves the door open for them to reconsider later.
Damn. This is worse than I imagined. Never like those AI memes.
Although I do like the “he is with TTT now” meme.
What’s the difference between procedural generation and AI slop? IOW, why should I be upset about UE6?
edit: please don’t downvote people because you don’t like the question, think its too obvious, or whatever. Discussion and debate is a good thing! If we shun people for asking questions, we end up with a bunch of stupid people. Also I don’t think this was a bait or leading question.
Three issues I see:
I actually don’t mind some parts of “AI” technology but I start heading into Neo Luddite when you factor in these models used massive amounts of stolen material to make them. Furthermore AI is only going to benefit a tiny minority of people. They stole the public library and now want to charge you money to access it.
Completely procedural generated content is generally kind of crap. Humans are so good at spotting patterns that our brains create patterns where they don’t exist. As AI generated content floods the market with “slop”, it will (has already in some cases) drown out the real creative work of individuals. The quality is guaranteed to never improve because “AI” isn’t actually intelligent and is only designed to make a pattern of data that is acceptable to humans. Eventually humans detect that pattern. This is one driving force behind our ever evolving cultures and is something “AI” can’t do. Feed slop back to AI and it breaks. Feed existing culture to a human and it evolves to create something new (eg Mozart synthesized into dubstep)
Two parts to this: The end goal of the current “AI” war by the tech houses is to obliterate the competition. Our reality is recursive. In nature when there is no competition you end up with an extreme collapse of the ecosystem. The winning tech house will lead to a similar dystopian nightmare. The other part is that in the process of getting to that point, the winning tech house will ratchet the price up as high as it can. The coding tech houses have been forced to raise prices but its still not high enough to be profitable. Economic pressure of competition is preventing any of them from raising their prices higher.
AI theft is a valid ethical concern across all AI.
But my question is really is AI in a game engine is any worse than proc-gen or off-the-shelf assets. In all cases, you can get something with very little work, but without a significant amount of human effort and creativity, it has no value. Nobody wants to play a game made with straight-off-the-shelf assets and nobody is going to want to play a game with un-modded-AI generation.
I really enjoyed the game “In Death” in VR. It was quite delightful and it advertised itself as “procedurally generated”, but the “procedure” was basically mixing and matching a very small number of tile sets. That’s a bit different than, say, Dwarf Fortress proc-gen, or Minecraft proc-gen. So I’d say not all procedural generation is created equal.
Is an AI monopoly a real possibility? Seems like there’s tons of free models that people can even run locally. There’s no “network” effect, really, which is what has driven most modern monopolies. It doesn’t seem like an ecosystem liable to be heavily consolidated.
Isn’t procedurally generated some kind of advanced algorithms, and programmers invest months of time to make it (hopefully) great? Like the biomes and endless landscape in Luanti/Minecraft? Or some space game with almost infinite solar systems… That always looks like a lot of work to me. And it kinda pays off, if done right. Whereas the difference to AI is, they don’t invest a lot if time and they also don’t program any complicated algorithms and don’t spend time tweaking it until it’s balanced? I’d say that’s roughly the difference between procedurally generated and AI.
Reminded me. Human creators of procedurally generated content often “cheat”. Best example is Valheim which most people believe is 100% procedurally generated landscapes/geography. Reality is Valheim has a hidden super or master map with the gaming copying a small circle of it and then uses the procedural generator to decorate that.
If not for all the modders its unlikely anyone would know.
Ooo, wait! What is Luanti?? [Edit: Cooool! What games do you play on it?]
What I’m saying is that AI is low-effort crap that CAN be improved on, just like proc-gen CAN be low effort crap that can be improved on, just like stock assets are low effort crap that can be improved on.
I think maybe the argument against AI in UE is that it’s a blackbox that people can’t manipulate or improve on, which is really increasingly the argument against UE (or how its used) in general.
Luanti is the Free Software Minecraft rip-off. Formerly known as Minetest. I spent way too much time creating a world during Covid-19 times 😅
Yeah, I guess the main issue with AI is, how it’s mostly used to cut corners. That’s what it’s especially good for. So we tend to end up with low effort crap more often than not. At least as of today.
I can imagine AI being used to breathe in life into NPCs and you end up with a better world. Or a sci-fi game with an intelligent space ship computer like in Star Trek. Heck, maybe even the holodeck and you fight against some AI Moriarty. That’d be interesting stuff. But 99% of what AI is being used for (instead) is to cut out the graphics designer because cheaper textures will do.
Thanks. Been messing around in Asuna for the past hour, digging about.
For actually employing AI in-game, two things I worry about are cost and unexpected outcomes. People get AI do some crazy stuff.
They’re certainly trying their damnest to outspend each other to be the last man standing.
The open models vs the leviathans (Gemini, Claude, OpenGPT, etc) share a lot of the same architecture with some major differences:
the first difference is parameter count. Very rough example: we know the difference between right vs right or green vs green. That distinction or concept is basically what a parameter is. These tiny little details may be an entire parameter or just a marginal shift between 0 to 1. Each parameter is anywhere from one bit to two bytes with the size further influencing the nuances of various patterns. In application, a model with 300 billion parameters needs 600+ gigabytes of fragile and difficult to mass memory chips.
Second difference is the ability to handle a large context window. I understand this enough that it gives me a headache but not enough to explain fairly well enough. Models you can run on consumer hardware is unlikely to a have a large context window.
Third difference is speed. There is a scifi book series about space faring clones of a guy named Bob. In one of the books, two Bob clones are slowly losing their minds because an alien librarian will only answer one question at a time when it reaches the front of a massive queue of other questions. Every time I have worked with a model, its usually a rapid fire process to zero in one the desired result. That’s not happening for most normal people who don’t have a micro cluster of computers in their home.
On the tail of that last one, they are seriously trying to hook these things up to nuclear power plants to make them financially viable. At home, having a computer running full tilt can translate to a dollar or more of extra electrical costs. $100 added to the power bill at the end of the month on top of not being able to do anything else with an expensive computer is dead on arrival.
You’re describing a system where anyone (with money) can just jump in and compete if prices get too high, with plenty of cheaper (if less appealing) options.
I guess if someone really has a massive infrastructure that is massively efficient they can offer a better product at lower prices and thereby capture the market, but that seems like a long shot;
And since AI companies were positively BURNING capital in order to look productive, they haven’t really even TRIED being efficient, and I don’t know that the market is willing to sustain at-cost pricing long enough for it to happen.
