Fab is currently overwhelmed with low effort AI generated garbage, assets that reek of ChatGPT and Midjourney slop rather than actual craftsmanship. Browsing the store has become a chore instead of a resource.
The core problems:
No filtering. I can’t exclude AI generated content from search results.
No blocking. I can’t block creators flooding the store with mass produced junk.
No hiding. Once I see garbage, I keep seeing it. There’s no way to curate my own browsing experience.
No collections or lists. Unity’s Asset Store has had this for years. Fab still doesn’t.
Basic discovery is broken. I can’t even find simple, clean low poly assets anymore. They’re buried under algorithmic noise.
This isn’t a minor annoyance, it’s a fundamental failure of a marketplace’s core function: helping people find things. A store that can’t be searched or curated isn’t a store, it’s a landfill with a search bar.
Until Fab gets real moderation and filtering tools, meaning AI content tagging and exclusion, creator blocking, and saved lists or collections, it’s actively working against the people trying to use Unreal Engine to make things. I’m not alone in this either, check any recent Fab related thread and you’ll see the same complaints on repeat.
Fix the store. Until then, I’m building elsewhere.
There is a button to hide AI content or specific authors you don’t want to see. In fact, when you first visit the site, AI content is hidden by default. Yet, many “clever” authors deliberately tick the box claiming their content isn’t AI-generated, even when it’s obviously a low-quality, distorted model at first glance. You have to wonder what kind of idiots they think their audience is. I even saw an author here who posted AI-generated assets for a dollar; then, “someone” would buy all of them—every single one of the 50–70 items—within 24 hours and give them five-star ratings, after which the price would jump to ten dollars.
The simplest approach is to stick to Unreal Engine assets, as those files actually get reviewed, making it harder to cheat the system. Moderation for other file types takes anywhere from 40 seconds to five minutes, so I doubt a real person is actually looking at them.
What’s funny is that it seems after a kindly user taught me how to block certain publishers from the results on the 3D category, OTHER “publishers” went completely insane and ramped up cramming unusable slop assets into the category.
It was like a monkeys paw. I have up to 10 spam sellers blocked now when I look for 3D assets… and in their place I see “3D model of a soullessly smiling ChatGPT stock cartoon AI styled kid”. But not just once. Like, several times with slight color variations. And who is buying those? Who is buying “pipe socket” for, not kidding, 25 dollars? You can clearly see its a part from a larger model, because the seller is selling each individual pipe for 25 dollars and barely changing the thumbnail. Nobody is paying for incomplete models, much less models being sold by the actual mesh component.
Will moderation or filtration ever be a thing? I used to be able to check the 3D tab for real cool weapon models and character models, as well as some fantastic environments. Now it’s a literal garbage dump. I am actually thankful that I made the effort to bookmark specific weapon, environment, object, and character artists before the trash took over. I had years of a head start, but I NEVER would have found them if I started today. That’s how bad the 3D category has become. And woe to anyone who posts their work to the 3D category now if their hard work includes neat actual game mechanics. Apparently their work is less worthy or important than spam, because it will basically never be seen.