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