These are the ones with AI flag only - there are tons of assets that are clearly AI generated, but sellers are gambling that Epic will turn a blind eye to them leaving the AI-Generated flag off (which seems to be happening).
Notice the ones that I did not mark as AI-Generated at the bottom also look all the same. Maybe they are legitimate, but I doubt it - the artist has over 1,000 Albums of Music each 1-hour long? Really? You composed, mastered, exported and listed 1,000 hours of music between September and Now?
Even if that were legitimately the case - Epic has Approved them all at once, meaning the entire storefront is a single (probably AI??? ) seller right now:
I counted more than 400 audio packs before losing count. None of them are marked as AI-Generated.
The thing is…you should have noticed this during review of these FAB submissions. Is nobody checking???
Don’t take this the wrong way, I’m not trying to be adversarial here - I genuinely want to use the market. I just can’t right now. We all appreciate the recent communications you’ve done with the community on issues like IP-Theft. That being said…
What specific steps are you taking (are there any?) and what is the timeline to execute on them?
Not having a clear ETA to solve the most serious problems are really bad. I’m all for “ready when it’s done”, but the lack of transparency about AI, stolen assets and IP infringement is nerve wrecking. There is close to no clear response from the staff about this, I can’t expect nothing except the worst possible positioning.
This is so frustrating. I sell music and sfx pack and I wonder if buyers will actually navigate music/sounds category expecting something different than AI generated/generic content.
My only hope is that people aren’t buying these crap packs and ppl who use AI will stop publishing stuff because no one buys it.
I bought a bunch of music and sound assets on the old marketplace and every week I was browsing the old marketplace to see if there is new audio or music assets I like.
Now I don’t even bother to look at it anymore, because I don’t want to look at a million AI generated assets and there is no way I can tell which asset is made by a genuine artist and which is AI generated.
First it was the 2D section, now it’s the Audio section that is pretty much dead. And the 3D section is starting to get flooded with AI generated, or stolen / illegal, assets as well. I have no hope it will get any better any time soon…
At OctaveCore, we also produce music and sound effects. However, Fab’s indiscriminate allowance of AI-generated content is making it difficult for genuine content sellers like us.
If this issue continues, discerning customers will inevitably leave. We are unsure whether Fab’s ultimate goal is to serve buyers and sellers or to contribute to the decline and destruction of the marketplace.
Marketplace assets have long been used to train Epic Games’ own AI. When you publish an asset, there is a checkbox that allows AI training. It would be stupid for such a company not to engage in this area. Why do they need nanites? To make it easier to work with garbage models that were created by AI. They have long been preparing to implement neural networks in the engine. Any user will be able to generate a model, material or sound that they need for a project directly in the engine. You can no longer hope for sales
Maybe in a few years that might be the case. It’s not there now, so telling people they shouldn’t expect to be able to buy and sell models until then is incredibly unproductive.
Epic is also a gaming company so they know very well that this is not suitable for making games yet.
I wanted to comment on the statement posted [above]. Epic has not and will not use marketplace assets to train or build generative AI systems. We don’t do it in Fab, UE or with any other tool or feature in our ecosystem. Where we use AI is for things like automatic tagging, search optimization, content filtering, and moderation.
Also wanted to make sure it’s clear that if you choose to use the “NoAI” tag, it will indicate to generative AI programs that your model(s) is not to be used for generative AI data collection. Adding this tag to a model will add an HTML meta tag to your model, marking it as disallowed for use by generative AI programs. Even if you choose not to use the ‘NoAI’ tag, Epic still won’t use your assets to train or build generative AI systems.
I’m sure you are aware that the bots scrapping the internet for AI databases, used to train AI, don’t actually care about the NoAI tag and use the content regardless?
The only way to “prevent” your work being used by AI generators is to salt them.
That’s good to hear. That being said, it’s not the issue that this thread is about (although I get that someone mentioned it).
The main concern here is just that there are so many AI assets (many unmarked) that it’s impossible for buyers to find and purchase assets made be real people.
@justin-274 If you can comment on this, I want to ask: Has any thought been given to limiting the number of assets a seller can submit in one time frame?
Some users have suggested a limit of 1 listings/week per seller just to solve this issue of the marketplace being absolutely submerged by AI listings. This also solves the problem of people not flagging content as AI-generated, since they would still not be able to push hundreds of fake assets.
Specifically, the cases I am highlighting above are sellers who have been allowed to list literally hundreds of separate listings in the course of sometimes only a few days. Basically it is drowning out other sellers. This is the main complaint about AI. Frankly I don’t think anyone cares if there are occasional AI assets here or there. I certainly don’t.
But we do care if that’s all we can find. The front page of new listings being 500 AI-generated listings by one author is totally insane.
Real people will never be able to compete with the volume of data that Bots can produce. If Epic’s business plan is to just allow AI generated content then there needs to be some moderation to ensure the marketplace still functions and is usable. Right now that’s obviously not happening in the slightest.
