This is a hard problem to solve that always existed but is exacerbated by the barrier to entry dropping to the ground.

Really itch is kinda hitting what the mobile markets have been dealing with since long before LLMs, those markets were awash with clones and low quality even outright scammy crap.

Though maybe a bit harder for Itch since their whole shtick is being a low barrier place for people to put their game. Arguably the platform has always had slop, but I would categorize the majority as "honest slop", a person who maybe isn't any good at making games, or doesn't follow through actually finishing their game putting something up there.

anyone old enough to remember Newgrounds and the era of flash knows that loads of flash games were awful. but you would get a more normal Pareto distribution. Ai has lowered the bar so low that ratio becomes skewed. like 1:99 instead of 80:20 with the flood.

Banning AI seems like a non starter, you can make "honest slop" with ai, you can make even good games with it. Self tagging is basically saying "i don't want anyone to play my game". an honest game with AI will get thrown into the pit with the total crap. it's death.

chewing up real people in filters or auto-mod just makes the problem worse. Real people give up on the platform because they were burned, only the AI slop persists.

I don't know how you retain an open and friendly platform that's accepting of honest slop but can stem the tide of genuine slop.

The issue with AI slop is not so much the slop itself (there was always slop) but the amount of slop. When people are producing slop they are limited by time and ability, so the slop can go from mildly annoying to quite bad, but no more. However when it's entirely machine produced, you're literally drowned in slop if nothing is done. It's like the difference between being crapped on by a pigeon and falling in a manure pool