Annual Dumpster Fire Moment exists so we can call out nonsense without pretending it’s fine, and generative AI earned that spotlight in 2025. Across games and the wider industry, Gen AI kept showing up as a shortcut dressed up as innovation, often at the expense of artists, developers, and the planet. The tech’s growing use as a labor-cutting tool, paired with ugly output and louder corporate hype, made it impossible to ignore. For our staff, this wasn’t a single incident but a sustained mess and easily the biggest dumpster fire of the year.
2025’s Dumpster Fire Moment – Gen AI/AI
Spencer: I personally think it’s awesome to replace meticulously crafted art with ugly slop that blends together, uses up resources, and encourages people to never learn or grow. The future is bright, baby!!!
Diego: All my homies hate AI.
James: Burning the planet, destroying the air, and stealing the hard work of real artists should be more than enough to shun the use of generative AI. Couple that with the biggest tech scumbags alive desperately trying to get out paying employees so they can accumulate more wealth by churning out the most worthless garbage you’ve ever seen, and I simply can’t understand why anyone would use this technology. I can’t say what I think should happen to these tech CEOs, but I can say that killing Gen AI is a moral obligation.
Samantha: I look forward to the day when I never have to hear about generative AI ever again.
Nick: I think a lot of people conflate just regular ass AI with GenAI a little too often. This category is a pretty good example of that. Games have had artificial intelligence in them forever. But the way that genAI is being adopted by so many companies as a tool to control and eliminate labor is extremely gross. That alone isn’t that big of a deal though, clearly AI companies are suffering and struggling to get people to adopt this fairly useless technology. I’m really only interested in experiencing art through a human lens. Let AI clean my house, I’m the artist.
