Update on products generated with AI

General Announcements
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A Fab creator recently published over 41,000+ AI-generated assets in a short timeframe, overwhelming the system we have for managing and surfacing content. We’re sorry for the degradation of the Fab experience everyone experienced. Here’s a summary of how our rules apply in this situation and how we’re adapting our approach to deal with incidents like this.

Content that’s not identified properly with the ‘Created with AI’ setting violates Fab terms. When we detect or receive reports that publishers may be misrepresenting their work, we contact publishers to investigate and take the content down if the publisher intentionally misclassifies it. In this case, we investigated and took action to remove this publisher’s work from Fab.

We’ll be taking additional steps to prevent these types of issues from recurring:

  • We’ll be making it mandatory during the publishing process for creators to select whether their asset was created with a Generative AI Program or not, which should result in this setting being used much more accurately. This change is targeted to go live next week.
  • We’ll be adding automated tools to help us better detect assets created with Generative AI Programs and ensure those are properly tagged.
  • We’re exploring spam-prevention systems, such as a daily limit to the maximum number of uploads.
  • We’re updating our content reporting form in the next few weeks so the community has a better path for reporting content suspected of being made with Generative AI Programs, but that aren’t correctly marked as Created With AI.This will help make sure our moderation team can review those.
  • As part of that, we’re also going to update the Fab Distribution Agreement so the Fab team has the ability to set a product as Created With AI ourselves. This action will only be taken for products where we have compelling reasons to believe assets are not configured accurately.

We want Fab to be a welcoming place for creative expression, from first-time creations to advanced projects, and from original creations to AI-generated work. Fab’s goal is to be a place where creators can easily find what they’re looking for, of the quality and style they’re seeking, and be confident in their purchases.

The growing use of AI makes this a challenging task that requires on-going efforts, and we will continue to look for ways to improve how Fab manages the increasing quantity of content that it hosts, to give you the best possible experience. Once we implement the items mentioned above, we will take a look at additional things we can do – if you have other ideas we can explore, let us know in the thread. Your feedback is essential to building a fair and welcoming creative space.

Also please note that if you wish to hide assets that have been set as Created With AI, you can do so within your content preferences menu, which is the button found in the top right corner of search results.

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Thank you for your continued support and feedback.

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Thank you, this is a great step :slight_smile:

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Thanks for handling this!

Please also include possibility to somehow communicate to reviewers that given seller has a lot of assets not correctly marked (like in the case with the one that was removed).

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None of us asked for FAB. To put it lightly. I really hope epic reconsiders and goes back to the previous model of asset acquisition.

It’s a frustrating change, but I’m holding out to learn to like it, but the massive AI on it has been hard to sift through.

Thank you for this post, it’s a step in the right direction.

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(post deleted by author)

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I’m siding with this. FAB is inferior to ArtStation in nearly every aspect, and we are trying to manage with FAB with all the upload problems, lack of analytics tools etc. Maybe just leave ArtStation Marketplace existing alongside FAB.

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I’m only going to do/say this once, because;
A; I respect you (you know I do, Sjoerd).
B: I respect Epic.
C: I respect everyone working there.

I know I was vocal about the marketplace when I was more of a donkey, and I regret almost everything I said then.
But I must once vent to get it out of my system.

We’re sorry for the degradation of the Fab experience everyone experienced.
Its already at rock bottom, its still very much worse than the Marketplace ever was, and allowing AI crap on it is just… I can’t even put it into words politely.
Not to mention how poorly everything is being moderated, resulting in more and more piracy/theft.
It’s honestly shameful.

Content that’s not identified properly with the ‘Created with AI’ setting violates Fab terms. When we detect or…
Just don’t allow AI generated stuff on Fab and call it a day.
If you want Fab to be welcoming to artists, don’t slap us artists in the face by allowing our hard work and potential income being harmed by this crap. I honestly feel this is disingenuous and unfair.

We’ll be adding automated tools to help us better detect assets created with Generative AI Programs and ensure those are properly tagged.
Make a tool that checks for theft/piracy while you are at it.

We’re updating our content [reporting form]
Flagging content, reporting content, and contacting the marketplace/fab team has been atrocious. We are often replied to with generic emails that forward us right back to where we started.
Not to mention emails ending up at the wrong team; generic “have you tried to solve your Fortnite problem by checking this page” replies have not been uncommon.

We want Fab to be a welcoming place for creative expression, from first-time creations to advanced projects, and from original creations to AI-generated work. Fab’s goal is to be a place where creators can easily find what they’re looking for, of the quality and style they’re seeking, and be confident in their purchases.
It’s not welcoming, its hurtful, and its painful, and allowing AI is a slap in the face to everyone who works hard in their trade. New (gamedev) marketplaces are spawning that do not allow AI content and are curated better. I would rather see Fab changing its approach, drawing a line, and not allowing AI content on Fab.
If you truly respected artists, this would be a no-brainer.

to give you the best possible experience. Once we implement the items mentioned above, we will take a look at additional things we can do – if you have other ideas we can explore, let us know in the thread. Your feedback is essential to building a fair and welcoming creative space.
Start over, start from scratch. I might be in an echo chamber, but I barely meet or talk to people who appreciate Fab, sans people who abuse it to spam their AI content in the hope of making a buck.
Sometimes it’s better to cut your losses and start over instead of pouring time into something that isn’t worth it. If I had to compare Fab to a human, it would be an abusive, neglecting, unloving, and uncaring partner.

And seeing all these fantastic and talented people like yourself working on this… dumpster fire…
Fab truly makes me sad.

PS: I’m not against AI, but I am against the way its currently being used.

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amazing work! thanks!!

imho if someone posts 10+ assets per day, even if it’s not made with ai, i would question the quality.

just to share. i’m personally not interested in ai content at all.
~if i could have a setting to hide every content generated by ai i’d be happy.~
and that includes code generated by ai.
What do you know? Apparently there’s a setting to hide ai :partying_face: unfortunately some users still dont tag it well.

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I respect all the admins here, and the work they do.
But I have an honest question.

What happened to Epic?
Epic used to put creators and customers first, but since the creation of FAB it has been almost as bad as EA. It seems like creators come last, customers come second, and profits come first.

The world is changing and A.I is threatening the entire games industry sector.
The “Made with A.I” filter should be turned on by default to protect creators and discourage its use.

I’d be hard pressed to find any creator or customer who disagrees with this statement.

Moreover, content could be scanned with A.I to prevent plagarism and IP stealing, or even just poor quality assets that nobody will buy.
The marketplace is so flooded right now that anyone could download any asset, change it by 5%, reupload it and sell it for an entire year without being caught. This has happened to me twice!!!

License key registration should be implemented to prevent piracy, and keep content locked to the Epic account that purchased it on.
DRM’s can and should be implemented. Gumroad has license key generation.
Better thought needs to be put into protecting creators against A.I, plagarism, content theft, and market flooding.

Without protecting creators, Epic is going to sabotage this industry, even if its unintentional.

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i’m personally don’t like drm. i won’t use drm content either. but i agree ai is too new and spammy and very problematic for copyright to be a first class citizen on any store.
lol even crypto is banned from some stores and is older. and it’s less spammy lol.

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I agree with this.
One possible solution imho would be adding a small publication fee for each uploaded asset, as someone already suggested in this thread : [Please, add an initial cost to publish on FAB - General / Feedback & Requests - Epic Developer Community Forums](Please, add an initial cost to publish on FAB)

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yikes, i dislike that personally. i wouldn’t publish anything, since i’m intending to publish my stuff for free anyway. and i really don’t like putting my payment info anywhere.

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Let’s be honest, it’s a higher-up who’s stalling all of this and is forcing the Epic team to keep the whole AI garbage on the platform.

Reset the C-suite and get some better execs who aren’t only in it for the shareholders but for the customers and creators alike.

I really don’t think it’s an echo chamber, a large majority of people I speak with do not enjoy using Fab both as a buyer and as a seller- not only for Unreal content but for other uses like selling Blend files, etc.

More automated stuff? Great, can’t wait for one of my assets to randomly be flagged when it was not AI at all, we all know that’s going to happen often and then when you request a human-being to review it, you’ll be stuck in an infinite loop.

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This is just my opinion as an uninformed plebeian but I am not at all optimistic about this…

  1. Manual review doesn’t scale, which means that if you expect Fab to continue growing you are going to have to rely more and more on automated AI detection solutions, which are infamously terrible and so unreliable as to be basically worthless. Perhaps it will improve with time, I don’t know, but it’s track record to date is abysmal. See: The entire education sector’s failed attempts to detect AI generated text in school assignments.
  2. Relying on the community to flag content is also fraught with problems because it turns out, humans ALSO aren’t great at detecting AI generated content, even in images and 3d models it isn’t always easy. Most likely they’ll only be able to identify the worst examples.
  3. You cannot rely on sellers to tag their content correctly. The types of people looking to flood the market with slop are not the ones who are interested in voluntarily disclosing that their content is AI generated if it means reducing the probability of getting a sale because the entire category is so over-run it is impossible to sift through. Threat of account termination is not enough, people already openly try to resell stolen content on Fab. Sellers who are acting in bad faith do not care about these kinds of disclosures.
  4. What exactly is the dispute resolution strategy here? I report something as AI generated, the seller claims it wasn’t. It’s my word against theirs so what happens now? Presumably they’re given a chance to provide evidence but what is the threshold for what is good enough? Who decides? Does it just come down to some moderator looking at it and making their best guess as to who is right?

The most straightforward solution to this would simply be to require a listing fee just as Steam does. I genuinely cannot fathom why this was not the chosen solution. It makes the business model of flooding the market with low effort content completely unsustainable, AI or otherwise. It’s not a panacea but it doesn’t need to be, it just needs to reduce the flood of garbage down to a manageable level, THEN you can figure out how to moderate the rest…

A fee does not prevent AI generated content from being submitted so you don’t need to worry the techbros are going to accuse you of being a luddite. It only ensures that the people uploading the content will be confident it is good enough quality to actually make a sale so they can recoup the cost of listing the product to begin with.

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Welcome to the future.
41,000 items by one guy is crazy, crazy!

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imho personally i don’t believe having to pay a fee before publishing will fix it.
you can pay for it and then publish the slop anyway.
these people definitely have the time and motivation, so i don’t think paying will stop them.

though i think everyone seems to agree this is not an issue that can be fixed simply by one method.

for example, afaik, in google play store for example, you have to pay and have to upload a lot of data, and yet, it’s drowning with slop too.
but adding a fee could hurt people that want to start participating.
so i think it’s a delicate option and a double edge sword.

on steam you have to pay yes, but you also

  • have to pass a review process with what seems to be humans,
  • and you have to wait a couple of weeks before putting it to sell.
  • and things that people aren’t interested in, are shoved to the end of the queue by the algorithm.

fab doesn’t have any of those. so those are alternatives too.

i have submitted things to steam and i’ve sent a few emails back-forth and the reviews where sensible. and i wasn’t allowed to publish something that wasn’t broken, but lacked a detail.
the ux on steam is abhorrent, it’s extremely annoying to setup. but the review process seemed human, with sensible requests.

on fab it was automated and my project was rejected even though it’s really well tested. and i’ve sent an email and nobody replied.
so i think they could start there before making, what it seems to be, like a change so impactful.

on itchio i.e. i haven’t seen much ai content, (though i don’t browse it as much as i browse fab).
itchio has no review process or fee. so something to say about it.
of course fab is being targeted because it’s backed by epic i think.

i saw an ai walking alligator whose tail was so butchered it was absolutely unusable. any human moderator would have rejected that.

i was born in south america, and i know that an upfront payment could be prohibitive, even though it seems like a very small amount to people in USA in some countries it could either be a massive amount, or could be very difficult to obtain an international credit card.
and there are people really talented in south america.
there are many other countries with the same issue.

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Another example of non fee’d moderation. Discord doesn’t have a fee, you don’t even need to put your true details. Yet rarely i see spam like this.

Can’t help to think the forums here are being targetted. Which i find silly, since there are devs here, not players (who you could steal something from, i guess).