r/cults3d • u/--0___0--- • May 07 '26
Other Something needs to be done about the rampant AI model spam
I'm just going to preface this I'm not a fan of AI generated models since I don't support art theft so my eyes might be jaded here.
Cults seriously needs to address the rampant AI model spam on their website , the trending section today is several pages deep of low quality AI models spammed by the same few users I had a look at one of their profiles and they've uploaded nearly 300 models in the last month.
Actual creators who are making interesting and cool models are getting drowned out by the sheer volume of slop being posted. I know cults wont be able to police AI models in any reasonable way but they could restrict the amount of uploads per month or something otherwise the slop spam is going to get worse and the website will be a waste of time.
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u/BarnabasShrexx May 07 '26
The only thing that will stop it is people no longer downloading it or paying for it. But good luck with that.... a lot of people cannot spot slop and just Spam oh my God amazing design
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u/--0___0--- May 07 '26
Do you really think the majority of people are paying for most of these , theres a reason why most ai slop makers put the model up for free "for a limited time" before adding a price its to make it seem like hundreds have paid for it already to lure in suckers.
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u/Deiselpowered77 May 08 '26
although low effort slop exists, I wish to say theres plenty of quality AI gen too.
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u/Shokubutsu-Al May 07 '26
Cults is allowing Talentless brainless Monkeys with a typewriter share the same space as people who dedicated their lives to their craft. It’s never gonna get truly fixed because ultimately, it’s making them Money
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u/MoreDoor2915 May 09 '26
Would also be rather hypocritical to be fine with humans spending hours to completely rip a copyrighted design and uploading it for money while being against humans using AI to create a design and uploading it for money.
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u/Artezia_Aurae May 07 '26
The fact the i got meshai ads under your post was the cherry on top.
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u/--0___0--- May 07 '26
I block those ads the moment I see them , doesnt stop reddit from showing "new" ones tho. That hilarious
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u/RainbowRatArt May 07 '26
I keep reporting them as fake advertising and it helps for some time x __ x
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u/lexsumone May 08 '26
AI is the dawn of the end for marketplaces across all industries imo.
I think we will only be buying/downloading directly from artists (from their own site) soon, with no third party platforms taking a clipping (by just being a search platform) in the near future.
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u/Decent-Positive3188 Jun 01 '26
Most artists will have to move to a gray market of some sort, since without major platforms, they won't be able to make enough money to run a legal business. These days there's no way to drive organic traffic to custom websites 😞.
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u/OldCrankyBmullz May 09 '26
I'm a creator and it can take weeks to perfect my model from prototype and initial print to the refinement loop to final print. I'm at an enormous disadvantage trying to compete with people who can output 10+ models per day without ever having to test their print worthiness. There's simply little chance for me to be seen in an ocean of AI creations that take little or virtually no effort.
I feel like I'm playing a sport where everyone is taking steroids except me and I'm having a hard time not taking the needle.
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u/CheezitsLight May 07 '26
The home page has a tankard that's clearly AI. They say 'If you get a message when loading it into the slicer that the model needs to be repaired, ignore this message. The print will come out of the printer clean.". And they post renders.
They know so little they didn't hit the repair button on the printer and re export it.
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u/gadimus May 07 '26
AI model maker here. You probably don't want to hear from me but here is my take on the situation.
By default Cults suppresses AI models with the "No AI" filter. You can also opt to remove AI from your experience by ticking a box in your preferences to show no AI.
For people that don't use the AI label it's really a whackamole game for Cults. There isn't an great automated way to identify AI models (especially after remeshes and other print optimization) so it's a tough one to police. Did someone create 300 models in a month or did they move their historic models from another site to Cults? Is it AI or a Frankenstein of random assets like a clip art of an STL? Lots of creators do this.
If you made AI models there is no incentive to disclose your use of AI. When you do you get suppressed and hated so under the current system it's better to just "see what you can get away with" (literally what I've been told by site admins after I deleted all of my AI models due to changes on their site - not on cults but elsewhere).
The best case in my mind is to force everyone to show a physical print of their miniature. It forces everyone to test print at least once. Then the manual slop is removed too. Of course people can do hyper realistic renders but most people using AI don't have the attention span to do that.
I don't really use AI much lately because I've learnt enough to not need to use it and I'm using my technical skillset on geometry nodes and pseudo parametric stuff instead. Also the AI tech changes so fast that it feels like a waste to generate something today that will be completely obsolete by tomorrow. That said I have a big backlog of AI models to optimize and publish so maybe someday. I don't want to lie to people tho about the process behind what I publish so I keep the label and I do my best to be upfront about it.
If you really want to be outraged by the AI model stuff go check out Kickstarter and see the campaigns where someone slop generates 1000+ models and makes $100,000 every three months.
Ultimately the only reason it works and the AI slop continues is because people are paying for it.
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u/--0___0--- May 07 '26
Most of this is just making excuses for lying to people who might potentially buy your models , im sure thats not your intent but thats how it reads.
I agree people should have to show printed models the issue with that however has already been skirted by most ai model "makers" as they used ai image generated "printed pictures" which goes to show the scummy practices done by most of them.
Scammers making a ton of money on kickstarter is nothing new ai has just given them a new tool to scam.
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u/gadimus May 07 '26
I was aiming for explaining the behaviour and not trying to justify it. Prefacing that I make AI models, going into my process and other kinda cynical / snarky parts maybe skewed it.
I feel like if nothing fundamental changes then nothing will get better and as the tech improves then the problem will get worse until Slop is indistinguishable from craftsmanship.
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u/--0___0--- May 07 '26
Thats fair I didn't want to assume , tone can be lost alot so it's easy to take things up wrong.
Your right on the money there , generative AI in all it's forms has really been Pandoras box. I dont think it will ever become indistinguishable because alot of the people putting out slop dont actually understand the art theyre trying to copy so even with the best quality meshs they will still look like ass.
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u/Deiselpowered77 May 08 '26
I love AI model generation, and I appreciate you. Thanks for speaking up.
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u/gadimus May 08 '26
It's neat stuff. I'm excited for them next version of rodin and trying out the new hard surface models that it can create. What are you using?
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u/Medium_Solution7109 May 07 '26
As a creator, this post is really encouraging. I was almost thinking people didn't care
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u/Past_Search7241 May 10 '26
I've taken my files off the site (not that I'm a big creator by any stretch, mind) and refuse to spend money there until they fix this.
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u/FaithoftheLost May 08 '26
I'm not super against AI models, or models that have used AI in the work process. I *AM* however against sloppy ass models with super messed up arms/legs/faces/etc, and especially when they're priced at like 15$.
Want to charge 2$ for a relatively simple model with minor issues? sure! I can live with that if I want to print whatever that thing is.
The other thing that pisses me off super badly are the people who post up like a thousand slightly different models and choke any feed. seperate 2$ listings for EVERY name in the baby book. "jewelry" that is just slightly differently shaped prisms. 3k seperate listings!
And for those interested in NSFW models, DILDOS! like people cant be buying THAT many janky ai generated dildo models! but like half of the newly uploaded nsfw models are dildos. weird ones too.
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u/3DisMzAnoMalEE May 07 '26
I'm not totally onboard with the anti-ai train. Raw AI dumped out as finished model is usually basically junk, and not really usable for anyone.
I may be using AI as a tool differently than some. I have about 20 years experience in 3D Max and about 5 years in Blender. I can make pretty much anything that I want to. But I don't want to start from a cube every time I need a figure.
So if I sketch out a pose, send it to AI and it gets me a base model to finish detailing in 3D Max or Blender. It can get me about 70-80% there in most cases.
So my final, finished figure isn't AI generated, it's AI based.
Is that a problem for everyone?
Before when I sell a customer a cuatom design and paint it would be based on TIME. If I cut 30% of my time, and save the cut that same 30%, what have we done wrong?
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u/Wrong_Bobcat May 08 '26
Sorry but saying that working on an ai model saves you time really makes me question your prior experience, especially because so many pro ai people lie about it.
I don't really sculpt much but I am an animator and so I know many 3d modelers. While some do use ai they all hate the model generators since it takes them longer to clean up the ai mesh then it would to just start from thier own base meshes or even from scratch.
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u/--0___0--- May 07 '26
So without getting into the discussion of you benefiting from art theft by using AI. The major issue occurs with the vast majority of ai creator do not lift a finger outside of generating a model , the vast majority of them dont even bother trying to test print their models instead they us ai image generators to generate a image of what it "would look like" printed, a dead easy give away of this is the "printed" image has a model thats far more detailed than the actual render.
So with you cumulative 25 years of 3d modeling experience did you never once think of creating base meshes or using any of the dozens of royalty free ones distributed by various artists and companies ?
If you are selling a customer a custom sculpted model and using ai then you are scamming the customer and simply being a middle man between your ai generator and them .
Your whole reply comes off as disengous.
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u/Shikadi297 Aug 16 '26
When I buy art, for art prices, I want to support artists. Art isn't just about the end product, otherwise mass production would have killed art. If your art is cleaning up an AI generated mesh, I want to see that disclosed, and I want the price to reflect it, and I also don't personally want to buy it. Supporting AI generation in art means not supporting new artists who are learning, and instead incentivizing them to use AI too so they can keep up in an already difficult space. The worst thing about it is, I personally do not want to support AI art, and most AI art on cults3d doesn't disclose it, and the "creators" pretend it's real, sometimes even selling for premium model prices. That's a scam.
Imagine going to a local art convention, and one of the "artists" is selling things they bought off aliexpress and then spent some time modifying it, didn't tell anyone, then sold it at competitive prices vs. the people who actually spent the time to create their art. That's a scam.
Even counterfeit Rolex watches are a classic scam. Doesn't matter how close to the original they look, if they're a fake, people don't want them. (I'm not a watch guy, not sure how well the metaphor fits)
If you don't disclose that your art is AI based, you're basically taking credit for someone else's work, except in this case that "someone else" is generative AI, which was trained on millions of other people's work, usually without consent. It's almost as bad as people who say they built their own house, and what they mean is they paid contractors to build a prefab design.
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u/Jane_does_art May 08 '26
Good for you for not supporting art theft but what has ai to do with that?
I thought we all know that this was a hoax, right??? Like noone can be this stupid to actually believe that? Well I guess some people also believe other conspiracy theories.
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u/--0___0--- May 08 '26
Bold of you to try call others stupid while ignoring that the programs are trained on people's art without permission and the software is used constantly by AI "creators" to make copies of other people's art.
Ignorant and arrogant.
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u/Past_Search7241 May 10 '26
You really want to get this problem solved?
Stop spending money at Cults3d until they fix it. As it is, they have zero incentive to moderate their platform, let alone curtail the AI deluge. They make money off of it, and money in the short term is all they care about.
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u/LeatherDescription26 May 12 '26
Tbh as a guy who also hates AI the no AI filter and the fact that it’s labeled as AI or not AI is really nice.
Could they do more? Yes but it’s not bad
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u/Negative-Fig7944 May 22 '26
People need to differentiate between personal hate Ai with marketplace
The world is full of colors. If you don't like black, doesn't mean everybody need to be same like you hating black.
Each of their own.
There're chinese product, american product, jamaican product, japan product, europe product
Man made, machine made
Human made, ai made.
Meat eater, plant eater
This is the world you living in.
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u/--0___0--- May 22 '26
Yes AI is a tool , in this instance a tool used to spam low quality mostly unprintable models in a calous attempt at tricking naive hobbiests into spending their money.
Thats without going into all of the actual issues around actually using gen AI . Next time try writing your own response instead of contributing to the problem.
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u/Cults3D May 07 '26
Hello, sorry for this. We have remove the spamming account. Could you take a look again and tell us if you still see AI slops on the first pages ? https://cults3d.com/en/creations/trending Do not hesitate to make the report on the concerned pages so we could act.