u/TimoshQ

Hi y'all! Not sure if this posts under rule 11, but I'll try my luck as I think it's fair to discuss this.

I recently found the "Railroader" mod on the front page, and I was quite skeptical as the UI, description and obviously the trailers were all AI generated, I want to be clear that I am not anti ai usage and I don't have an issue with AI mods, but in my opinion: when they are this unoptimized and present themselves as fully human made it starts to get quite annoying for actual mod authors and people who don't want to bloat their modlist with mods that take up a lot of space.

So after a short discussion in the comments of the mod, some people that were defending this mod (not blaming them, this is a really cool idea and I am really looking forward to see some actually high quality train mods) asked me for proof of why I claimed it was unoptimized. And besides the code I found this model, which is hilariously badly made for a game such as PZ. This might be on the same level as the solar panel incident, I instantly thought that this deserved a post on this subreddit

The model is full of artifacts, and just so, so much unnecessary detail. Plus all the code has snippets of AI explaining on what the parts of the code do, so it's pretty clear that the mod is fully AI gen with minimal human involvement.

Also I think it's worth noting that all this wouldn't be such an issue if the mod creator didn't paint a picture of it being human made. From the description:

"I make these solo, in the evenings, over months." - I am not denying that this took months even though I highly doubt it, but I feel like it's just misleading to put it in this way. I personally reading this you would imagine a modder working hard on coding a mod and testing it, not writing AI prompts. Especially since the author has a donation link attached to this bit

"Every mod I make comes with a short film, and this one is no exception (watch The Railroader above; the photo album you see in it is a real album I filmed with a real camera, page by page)" - This is just not true, the album is just ai generated photos with a filter over them

Overall I feel like this isn't a massive issue, I personally don't like it, but I don't want to make up anyone else's mind
Thanks for reading!

Small edit:
The author added this to the description recently:

"MADE WITH Full transparency, since fair questions were asked:

• Design, mechanics, balance, story, months of testing: me, solo, evenings.
• Code: AI-assisted, written under my direction. An optimization pass is coming in the next patch (thanks to the community code review in the comments).
• The album in the film: a real physical album shot with a real camera, page by page. The photographs printed inside it are AI-generated. I should have said that clearly from the start.
• Some film artwork: AI-assisted."

Edit 2:
Just want to clarify something, some people misinterpreted my view on the situation and said that I am hating for no reason, I am not against modders using AI, however I decided to make this post because I found the model to be really funny and wanted to highlight some issues I had with the description. The mod author has changed the description drastically and I think he is a lot more transparent now, even though the album explanation still doesn’t make much sense everything else has been (mostly) explained by him. Also turns out that the model is off sketchfab which is true and some great people in the replies confirmed that, it however was really messed up by the decimate multiplier as the actual model is for scenes and not games. The rest of the mod and video is AI though

Quick edit: I do not think that this mod would affect fps that much, In my opinion the model is still very overkill for PZ and clunky aswell, hence the post