AI slop is going to cause a transformation in 3D model repositories.
What’s “AI Slop”? It’s the improper use of AI tools to flood a system with low-quality content. We’ve all seen this on social media, “news” sites, and other online services. It’s also beginning to take over the popular online 3D model repositories, too.
I wrote about this last year when I encountered a cool-looking 3D model on Printables, but then realized that the actual model was nothing like the images presented. It turned out that the submitter had generated a nice 2D image of a print and then sent that into an image-to-3D service to make the model. Which was not exactly the same.
Those steps are pretty easy to do, far faster than manually designing and submitting a model to any of these sites. That’s one reason why we’re seeing more of this.
Another reason is the points systems implemented by most platforms. The idea of a points system is to encourage users to be engaged, submit content, and continue to use the platform instead of others. In other words, pay them to be on the platform because points are subsequently transformed into real goods and services.
However, the points system also encourages some to use AI methods to generate mountains of low-quality content in an attempt to get more points. Sometimes it works.
Sometimes it doesn’t, as the platforms are increasingly concerned with this trend. Some, like Printables, have launched policies and procedures to ensure all AI-generated content is tagged as such. Some other platforms haven’t done that. Some attempt to solve the problem through one-by-one moderation.
I don’t think any of this is going to work in the long run. AI systems will only get better, and it will be increasingly difficult to distinguish what’s AI-created and what’s been manually created. The amount of AI-generated content will inevitably rise, and at some point, it will be a tidal wave.
Consider that today these actors use AI tools to create 3D models as described above. There are some steps to do, and it is faster than manual design. But what if this concept is taken farther?
What if AI is used to:
- Identify trending model types and categories
- Generate dozens or hundreds of models addressing those specific trends
- Generate code to use platform APIs to automatically submit them, perhaps under newly generated fake accounts
- Generate code to monitor the submissions to learn which types of models/images/text/tags perform best and adjust model generation parameters
- Repeat daily. Or hourly
This is entirely possible to do, and do today. Perhaps someone is already working on this?
I foresee this happening sooner or later, and it will effectively end the use of these 3D model sites. They will be swamped with content and unable to keep up with moderation. Search will become increasingly difficult and ineffective.
Meanwhile, text-to-3D and image-to-3D services will improve over time and eventually get close to a useful state. In the end, we probably should not have repositories of 3D models, and instead, we should just ask a generator for whatever we want.
Most 3D models will be made on demand, and there will be no need for a repository.
