Even Animal Crossing Fans Can’t Escape AI Slop

Not even the Animal Crossing community is safe from AI ensloppification.

With the Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update only a few weeks old, players have been hard at work sprucing up their islands and posting pictures of all their hard decorating work. But some have been using generative AI to “enhance” their photos or fabricate them altogether, and fans are getting pissed. 

Sharing stylistic edits of Animal Crossing screenshots online is a foundational pillar of the game’s community. Photos are typically edited to enhance the game’s lighting and shadows, or put through filters to achieve a certain vibe. Photos with the best vibes are rewarded with likes, upvotes, or whatever the clout currency is for a particular social media website. However, Polygon reports that on X and elsewhere, AC screenshots enhanced with AI have started trending, often without disclosure that genAI was used.

“I think it’s time we talk about the AI use in Animal Crossing aesthetic posts that are trending,” wrote user Cozyberru on X. In a thread, they highlight how a number of recently trending AC screenshots were likely created with genAI, pointing out the usual suspects of funky-looking numbers and warped textures on background items. But their issue isn’t so much with using the tool itself. “All I am asking is to be honest and disclose your use of AI or editing,” they wrote.

Animal Crossing has thousands of little knick-knacks, pieces of furniture, and more. Not sharing that an Animal Crossing photo has been enhanced with AI can lead to confusion in players who might want to get their hands on something they don’t know has been wholly made up.

In the thread, one commenter thanked Cozyberru for their service. “I’ve been sitting here thinking, ‘is there a mod or hack or glitch going around that I don’t know?’ Because there’s no way to place that item that close to the furniture as much as I want to.”

Cozyberru doesn’t explicitly share their feelings about genAI, but others shared theirs in the thread’s comments and elsewhere online. Though it’s not called out specifically in the rules, it seems the Animal Crossing subreddit has a strict “No genAI policy.” In a post regarding fanart, a moderator advised community members not to report anything that wasn’t “blatantly NSFW or AI.” In another post, a user reposted a video of their island after the original was taken down for using text-to-speech AI voiceover.