I won’t mention which game and creator this is (a game on itchio), as I don’t want witch hunt here. It’s an indie dev after all. If you saw the post "I watched an artist evolve from producing rough art to delivering elite, top-tier artwork” with NSFW content (the one with oversized boobies), then you know what I mean.
What makes me sad and angry is, that I pointed out it looks like Ai was involved in the art creation. The author of the post replied that only background and 10% of the art was created with Ai, and that the game is 50 hours long. Feels very much like it was the developer himself? After I replied with this is problematic, because this was explained only after I mentioned it. There was no Ai mentioned in the itchio page or the post.
What followed was, the post got deleted. I reached out to the Lemmy user and asked in a private message why it was deleted. Shortly after then the Lemmy account are got deleted too.
What to make out of this? I was not toxic in anyway and didn’t saw any toxic comments from others. I didn’t want an indie developer to disappear, if the work is honest and the game is fun. Just don’t hide things. How should a situation like these be handled in the future?
I saw the post. I believe the dev wrote the post, maybe with an LLM, or perhaps had an agent do it. We know agents are using Lemmy as a pastebin for some reason. I also think the game was made using AI.
Posting on Lemmy about games and loading them with postive sounding adjectives appears to be the sole purpose of these posts. I even saw one on the rather small shmups community which is specific.
I believe that the way the fediverse functions is seen as useful to bots/agents.
Making a post, loading it up with keywords, and providing a link to the project is better than any forum or even reddit. Once the post federates, it will create multiple free backlinks. Also, even if the post is deleted, the content will take time to delete across the fediverse. Other sites and users that use LLMs to write their reviews will find it and repeat the same slop. Slop cited in slop. Insloption. All free.
According to the SEO audits of my personal blog, the majority of my backlinks are from Lemmy instances.