TL;DR: Don't use AI art and audio, use art and audio with a Creative Commons license attached

It has come to our attention that some of the submitted GBA Jam '24 entries contain assets with missing credits and/or that may have been created using generative AI tools. We would like to issue a warning to all participants in the hope that everyone gets a fair chance to adjust their entries to adhere to the jam rules before the deadline.

Using AI-generated assets for your entries is not allowed as per the jam rules and will result in such entries being disqualified from the jam, possibly without any prior notification. Exceptions can be made in the case that the AI was trained with explicit permission from all artists involved, or solely on public-domain material. Unfortunately none of the popular image generators seem to do this, so we will have to assume this is not the case, unless shown otherwise.

Proper asset usage and attribution in general is required for all entries submitted to the jam. For example, if your game uses sprites from existing video games taken from The Spriters Resource, or music from The Mod Archive licensed under its Distribution License, it will be subject to disqualification.

Not sure where to find assets? OpenGameArt.org and itch.io host tons of graphics, music and sound effects by various awesome artists ready to use for your GBA games, so long as you properly credit the artists and adhere to their chosen license. The aforementioned Mod Archive can also be used to search for tracker music by license.

We're incredibly excited to see and play everyone's jam entries and we hope this PSA will encourage you to spend some extra jam submission time on replacing the graphics and music that violate the rules, rather than removing your entry or letting it be removed during the judging period.

If you have any questions about anything related to proper assets usage for jam entries, don't hesitate to reach out on GBADev Discord's ⁠#gbajam-chat channel or leave a comment under this topic.