This One Fab User Has Over 38,000 AI-Generated Assets

Since its official launch in October 2024, Epic Games' Fab has earned itself a reputation as arguably one of the company's biggest blunders, with nearly every Unreal Engine user seeing it as a major downgrade from the now-defunct Unreal Engine Marketplace, citing issues like the removal of free Megascans assets, missing core features, and the marketplace being overrun with generative AI assets.

The latter of these problems has recently been spotlighted by Ronan Mahon, a talented 3D Artist whose works will be familiar to 80 Level regulars, who drew the community's attention to one particular Fab user whose entire profile serves as perhaps the most illustrative example to date of why allowing AI content to spread unchecked across a digital storefront is an awful idea.

As showcased by Ronan, the user in question has uploaded over 35,000 AI-generated models to Fab – over 38,000 as of this writing – flooding the marketplace with AI junk and making it harder for users to find quality, human-made assets. As if that wasn't enough, they're clogging Fab's server space with gigabytes upon gigabytes of awful-looking 3D buildings, each comprising around half a million triangles for some reason, making this person's content a waste of space in the most literal sense.

What's even worse, according to Ronan, around 10,000 of this user's assets aren't even tagged as AI-generated, calling into question Fab's approval process and how and by whom submissions are vetted, while also showing that the "just throw in some tags" approach some digital art marketplaces have adopted is completely and utterly ineffective when the policy isn't strictly enforced.

Over on Twitter and Reddit, other Digital Artists and Game Developers have criticized Fab and Epic Games for doing nothing about this user in particular, or the spread of AI slop across the marketplace as a whole, while trying to make sense of how a situation like this was allowed to happen in the first place.

The most upsetting conclusion came from Ronan himself, who pointed out that aside from failing to tag a portion of their assets as AI-generated, the user hasn't actually broken any of Fab's rules. In other words, a single individual clogging Epic's servers, burying legitimate creators, and dragging down the platform's overall quality is perfectly in line with Fab's design philosophy, which is just plain disheartening.

Support a real, flesh-and-blood creator by following Ronan on Twitter and checking out his portfolio.