Tell this 80y/o what a Dungeon Master is. I don’t get out much.
The leader of a game that was created by the devil.
D&D is a fantasy roleplaying game where the dungeon master designs the world the players explore. They can draw out castle floor plans, outdoors areas with forests, caves, rivers, etc. Basically anything. Then they populate it with things to do, other characters, treasures, potions, magical items, etc.
Everything is probability based which is why the different dice. Anyway, if the players move to an area where there’s a bad guy, good guy, creatures, etc, players try to interact with, fight, flee, or whatever and the dungeon master arbitrates, guides, and does impressions.
I don’t know what you think an “easy print” is, but look at how much of the model needs support because it’s overhanging. That’s something a real designer would reduce, but the AI slop generator doesn’t know or care how to make things properly printable.
The axe head needs a ton of support due to how the character is holding it, the cape is even worse. All of those ripples likely need to be supported, and the thin cape might just break off when the supports are removed. This is the essence of AI slop. No thought about the printing process, no changes to make it more printable. Just slop, and you appear to be fooled by it.
Me thinks your sarcasm detector may be broken, 
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I said what I said as sarcasm but it may have been unfair. Some of the models are actually split out into smaller bits that would be easier to print and get glued together to make the final figurine.
It takes examining the preview to know.
But more advanced to print for sure and some are really into those models and painting them up all sorts of ways.
But there are also slop figures out there that won’t print well either.
For better or worse, AI is here to stay. It will permeate every part of our life. This is the early stages, and it’s evolving rapidly as we learn to use it (and maybe as IT learns to use us). We must come to grips with all the major changes AI is making to the world. It’s important to accept the fact that this can’t be shut off, and it could ultimately manifest itself as an unstoppable cancer, overwhelming all forms of written, audible, visual, and interactive communications, embedded in the very fabric of our society, industry, government, entertainment, education, etc., controlling every aspect of our lives. The other alternative is that it could make the world a far, far better place, being instrumental in curing disease, improving food production, making major scientific breakthroughs, freeing us from manual labor, bringing us limitless energy, blazing the path to space travel, and curing all illnesses.
I really empathize with your rant, I’m sure many people feel the same way. For me I’m pretty good at accepting what I cannot change and taking, as scary as it is now, a wait and see attitude.
As far as I can tell, no one has called for that; so far, we’re just talking about labeling - which would be desirable - so that competitions aren’t flooded with AI models. So that everyone can decide for themselves whether they want to see AI or not.
That’s a big stretch from your interpretation of “shutting down.” This isn’t really about acceptance; it’s more about categorising and labelling. Ideally, the next step would be competitions that focus on the human aspect, but that’s mostly wishful thinking.
I think - please correct me if I’m wrong - that you’re reading too much into the thread? Most users would be happy if it were simply labeled so they could choose whether or not to see it.
Beside - I haven’t seen anyone here calling for AI to be completely eliminated from medicine, science, and so on. Like I said, I think you’re reading a little too much into these posts. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
What you’re talking about is more like stagnation. ‘You have to accept it’. But even with AI, you can have a say and not have to accept everything. Having a say and shape the future also means disagreeing or even disputing.
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I don’t think labeling is a realistic option. Should we label documents that use spell checking or AI polishing? To what degree we employ AI tools should we be forced to label ‘AI Was Here’. AI will soon be everywhere the cars we drive the art we create the products we make. I think you’re missing the real issue. The real issue is the quality of the work. If AI creates a great book or creates a great 3D model and it’s useful and serves its purpose that’s what really matters.
If AI creates bad models don’t use them. Just because it was created by AI doesn’t mean it’s a bad model. If people create bad models don’t use them. I think there are more important issues to worry about in 3D modeling. People downloading original creations and selling them as their own. People downloading original creations and making a minor change and uploading them as their own creations for points.
3D models used to be made with a block of wood and a whittling knife. We have come a long way with technology.
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I think you’ve completely lost track of the topic. I use AI myself in my personal life, but this is about:
- competition - visibility and profits
If you want to hold an AI competition, by all means go ahead. But the fundamental goal here is to promote 3D printing: new designs, ideas, clever solutions, and so on. It’s a competition.
What you’re describing is a classic red herring in the discussion; we might as well be debating whether robots should be allowed in sports, or whether image generators should be used in drawing contests, and so on.
Please take another look at the thread to see what it’s about: Contest. It’s not about which AI generates best misleading images and 3D models.
Even though that’s not always the case, unfortunately it is - why? Because people are lazy and flood the contests with misleading entries and bad model.
Sure, but why ignore a problem when there are others here as well? If you pay attention, you’ll notice that many problems are being addressed in this forum. If you can only focus on one problem, I would understand, but generally speaking, users can discuss and address multiple issues.
Edit: I just looked at your profile and saw how you describe it: “Making for humanity.” There’s a difference between misusing AI in competitions - and advancing 3D printing for the benefit of humanity.
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By the way, here are the latest poll results, which are right below the contest:
Now 66% are against AI - 17% are in favor of AI
We’ve hashed over the topics of AI enough to hone down the issue a lot of us have, and the issue a lot of us have is pretty similar. We don’t like sloppy, crappy, half-assed work being shoved down our throats while the creator berates us about how they’re a real artist. This isn’t even an issue that was special to AI. We’ve had other slop flood our space before, and the community reacted accordingly. Remember hueforge?!
I spent the last 20 years in the game industry, and spent a good chunk of it giving feedback, art direction. The models that these AI generates are making just aren’t good. There are tons of issues. It is stupid to sit there and act like well AI is here so we’ve just gotta accept this now. We should never accept garbage being shoveled at us.
The AI slop is the TEMU of 3d printing. It’s garbage shipped directly from the AI to our printers.
SLOP! Not all AI. We’ve shown that AI can be used in all sorts of awesome ways.
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Even if AI created a book, why would I care about a book from AI? That isn’t a human expression, that isn’t someone’s imagination. That’s regurgitated garbage.
I mean, I think the issue with all the ai “history” channels on youtube now spewing incorrect garbage, just shows how meaningless and worthless AI’s ability to write can be.
Anyway, back to the topic of AI slop on Makerworld. MadSciSlack might have missed MZips sarcasm, but the dude was still on point. These models are crap for 3d printing in a lot of ways, beyond just the model defects. A lot of the “artist” that create that slop, they just shovel that stuff onto Makerworld and put little to no effort into cleaning it up, or making the model more 3d printable. You go on there and you see how the creators of this ai slop, and it’s obvious how shallow it all is, how little they actually care. They want attention, but don’t want to put any effort behind it. That is all it is.
Some people start to actually care and put a little work into it, haha.
These AI tools can be great. I’ve been exploring using them and having fun. The issue isn’t that they exist, it’s the slop that people churn out
No, this is an issue because it floods the platform with garbage, poorly thought out models. Just like when we got flooded with hue-forge. It degrades the user experience. It’s just like amazon with their cheap drop shippers now. I search for a rice cooker, and now there’s 500 billion models to choose from. Just stop it with this flooding of garbage! It’s too much. I just start avoiding it because finding anything worthwhile amongst the junk becomes a pain in the butt.
Amazon’s slop problem with drop shipping has pushed me towards name brands because how the f- am I suppose to trust all these random “brands” that are only top sellers because of the games they play. Like the amount of times I’ve got a little card in my package saying “give us 5 stars and we’ll give you this or that”, or the times I’ve been contacted after giving a bad review, offering me free products to change my review.
Slop is an issue, regardless of the source. It degrades the user experience, and as a user, that’s my experience it’s degrading.
I wouldn’t print minis from Makerworld. I would go to one of the sites that has specialized in that sort of work far before Makerworld existed.
Retrosharky linked this page earlier, and 
Seriously. To throw my wretched past around a little more. That 20 years of industry experience. I don’t even have to see the models up-close. Those Brite minis, I can just see, know, tell, feel it in my bones, my soul. They are really well done models. Especially for FMD, they look good. The details are a good size, the way the models are posed leans well into how FDM prints. There aren’t tiny nearly impossible to print at scale details floating all over the place. It’s just, hmm, chef’s kiss.
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Currently AI is only as good as the designer, if the designer is not good AI will produce slop. If you think AI designs create bad models than competition isn’t an issue, they will always loose when competing with a good designer. I don’t see any problems there. AI is a tool just like Orca, Cura, Bambu Studio, Solid Works etc. Within 12 months all of these tools will have AI options or be left behind.
As a human there is plenty of room to ‘think’ and ‘create’ something new thats never been done before. Thats where the competition will be. Currently AI can’t do a great job at that, who knows in 6 months it may be able to. So then lets say hypothetically AI will do a better, more creative job than human beings could ever do, we could have two competitions one for really leading edge creative stuff which would be done by AI and one competition for slop done by humans. Of course maybe I am a little sarcastic, but then again we have open our eyes and figure out how we compete with AI. Just labeling something designed by AI, in my opinion is a pretty naive idea.
What is it specifically about being a “dungeon master” that makes you more excited about upcoming contests than the average MW user? What am I missing?
a good old block of wood with a great smell when working on it with your hands and a knife, chisel or gauges… this sounds nearly somehow romantic to me…
im very sure that im living in the wrong time…
I love woodworking. I have been involved in technology for over 40 years and relax by making furniture for my home in my woodworking shop. I love the imperfections of handmade woodwork, pottery, sculpture etc. I am very much inspired by Wabi-Sabi and Kintsugi, the beauty of imperfection. I still design/build 90% of my 3D models myself in Blender and Openscad.
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But you do realise that this isn’t a philosophical topic, don’t you? It’s not a fundamental AI topic either - there are already countless active threads about that. Your comments are straying so far off topic?
To name one:
This topic is about practical issues like visibility, winner selection, and the submission of massive amounts of AI-generated content. And above all: rant backed up by facts.
As I said, don’t get me wrong - post as much as you want and whatever you want. I just want to make it clear that this isn’t a fundamental debate. That topic has already been beaten to death.
If you would like to discuss “AI and slicers”, for example, it would definitely be a good idea to start a separate thread on the topic. As I said, you don’t have to, but I’m going to point out this topic for the second time: “rant about The Breach makerworld contest”
You’re just wasting a lot of potential right now because your comment don’t really fit the topic and are more philosophical. But like I said, keep going - I’m not stopping you; it was just a suggestion - maybe start a separate thread about it. 
It’s hard to not come off as gatekeeper-y about this subject but it’s been absolutely beaten to death in the forum over a couple years
- Makerworld thoroughly embraces AI models, provides you the tools to use, and share. If you go to a barbecue as a vegan, its hard to feel sorry.
- Makerworld, like many section 230 regulated social media sites who host user generated content that is [often] copyright infringing, applies “moderation” primarily based on user reports. If they build tools to detect it themselves, they become liable for insufficiencies, so they just don’t. They are legally protected from nintendo when you post a pikachu SOLELY by their own auditable ignorance.
- With no real enforcement, the cover photo that tricks the most users wins the algorithm
- The algorithm gives cash equivalent rewards, so people are incentivized to follow it’s dark patterns. Back in the day this was simple bots and photoshop but now its fully autonomous AI agents slopping out 20 model listings an hour.
I dont think you should count on AI slop being cleaned up, the site is structurally made to encourage the complete opposite thing.
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Don’t worry, it doesn’t come across as gatekeeping - you’re just right. Your comment should really be posted under every AI / competition thread.
I’m not really making a philosophical statement at all, the point of my statement is the impossibility and pointlessness of preventing ai generated garbage from appearing in submissions. There are a couple reasons why it’s impossible and pointless. First you have to determine if it’s AI generated or AI assisted generation. I work with a lot of technical journals that are also getting overloaded with AI generated submissions, the same as court cases. There are tools used to determine if submissions contain AI generated content, but they are far from perfect and as AI gets better the tools need more work to catch up.
Dealing with the shear volume of AI created content will overwhelm current systems as they operate now. There are probably two obvious solutions to help for dealing with this volume. Crowd sourcing - as users download and use these models they can rate them as potentially AI generated, depending on the volume this could be overwhelmed eventually. Programatically- quantify good model geometry based on complexity, manifold characteristics and other attributes a well thought-out and designed, determine a model signature of unique attributes and weights that can be compared to an existing database of existing models. Something like this already exists in the music industry. But probably the most effective way is to penalize the contributor and not reward the model. if we think of AI submissions like spam we can use some of the same techniques to filter them out.
None of these techniques will eliminate the problem. Spam is spam and as long as there is a benefit to the spammer they will find a way in.