Trying to make everyone happy could make no one happy.
VRChat has published a support post explaining the results from a survey of users regarding artificial intelligence on the platform. Despite 95 percent of its respondents stating that they want some form of label to designate AI usage, the company said that at this time, it will not be implementing any tags in that vein. VRChat is an app for creating and sharing virtual worlds for hosting social interactions.
The post says that VRChat will continue weighing the addition of a label for “Human-authored” content as well as a “Tools used” field, but it has not adopted a definitive stance yet. Similarly, it will not add a tag for labeling AI-generated content or for filtering it out of search results.
“While we think some creators would honestly label their content, we think others would try to pass off generative or assisted work as completely authored by hand,” the game’s creators said. “Likewise, we could see this creating ‘sleuthing’ behavior, where folks would attempt to sniff out ‘AI’ content or might harass other creators, even if they are genuinely not using any AI tools in their workflow.”
The language in the post seems to want to make people with many different attitudes toward AI all happy, rather than accepting that it might adopt a policy that could be unpopular with any particular group. Instead, the platform said it would adopt some changes that had “alignment across the community,” which included accurate thumbnails, better discovery tools and “quality as a core metric.”
VRChat has displayed the potential for creating some genuinely cool things. It’s being used in filmmaking and to create safe communities for transgender people. On the flip side, the platform has also been accused of hosting toxic and predatory behavior.
