Any plans on making it a requirement for games?
Actually, it was a "requirement" for games even before. It was and is in the quality guidelines.
https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-uploading-excessive-amoun...
If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description and that it adds substantial value to the user experience.
Though one can misread it to mean live generated AI stuff. There are games that do that. But in context it talks about AI content, such as images.
But in many cases, it was not necessary to bother either way. The usage of AI in games is often very blatantly obvious. Problematic are only the cases where the developer is activly lying or hiding the AI usage. And as has been discussed above, the usage of some AI generated code is not the same as AI generated images and story, so most people do not even think about this, when talking about "AI", in my opinion, because code != content.
While some developers did use the tagging system to state their usage of AI, there was no commonly agreed upon tag for that or the reverse.
The new feature adds the capabilities to give the information in the meta section and generate a standard tag and anti-tag and even sub-tags and hopefully more anti-subtags. And as soon, as the AI info is given in the actual information box on the project page, devs need no longer worry about that "clearly stated in your project description". (The meta info "tag" is currently is not shown. If you see an ai tag, it was manually added by the dev, not by the system. You do can search by that tag, but you do not see the ai meta info on the project page, like you do see engine info or session length and such)
With the current filtering options, a no-ai tag is also very handy, although only to be trusted for assets after the grace period, because the AI info is strictly enforced for assets due to legal ambiguties. Assets are meant to be used in other projects after all.
I do hope there will be a no-ai-content tag to exclude the code usage, because I suspect there are many developers that use ai tools for their code and most people that want to browse for "no-ai" would not mind ai code, but only ai story, images and voices.
We have a strong disagreement in our team in regards to the current state of the system.
On the surface, its goal seem to be to filter blatantly AI-generated assets which is reasonable and understandable. But in reality and based on leafo's answers, projects should be marked as AI-generated even if we used something like Chat GPT / Copilot for writing portions of the code. Our game is built by experienced and professional programmer but some scripts (small percent) were generated to save time on a game jam.
With desire to be honest we marked the game as having AI-generated parts in its code, but it leads to our game being in one big pile with more blatantly AI-generated projects. Currently it is not possible to opt-out without "lying" about use of AI in project page settings.
It does not seem fair that games with small part of AI code in technical side are put in one category with less crafted projects. It especially hurts feelings of our artists because the game is hand-drawn and a lot of effort was put into visuals. "AI Generated" tag is too broad.
It seems that games should either be give options to opt-out (which is not possible once tag is selected) or being forced to opt out (after all games are much more complex project that art assets) or categorization should be improved. It seems like "No AI" tag is made so people could filter low quality projects or assets with questionable legal status, not nice games with some chat-gpt-generated generic code under the hood.
I honestly do not see how marking code in games as being partially AI generated helps anyone. I understand that it is more reasonable in regards to assets, especially paid ones though. But my post is about games. Perhaps there should be different tagging for games or it should be disabled for now until better way is figured out?
Please advise.
(our game is Headquarters, first game in AI-generated tag currently...)
So yeah, I marked some of our games that were developed with a small portion of usage of ChatGPT/Copilot, and now we are the top-1 game on itch with the tag “AI generated.” From a user perspective, this may look like we just generated our game, which is, of course, not true, and a lot of effort was put into it
At the same time, @leafo includes in all his examples that it’s fair to say such projects should be marked as I did, which leads to a situation where the tag, from the user’s point of view, is not entirely misleading, but many would misunderstand what it actually means. So the system, in its current state, seems not to be working properly for user experience as it puts games where 1% of the content is made with assistance of AI and games where 90% of the value was made with not-so-good-looking AI into the same bucket
I wish we could either remove that tag entirely for our games, as it unfairly puts us into the odd company of fully AI-generated content, or have a green light to put “No,” as the portion of AI-generated content is as small as if we simply copied it from Google (which I believe also uses AI-generated content somewhere inside). Therefore, the first option is not available in the interface, and the second is basically a road to de-listing our game as it looks like we are breaking the rules, which I also cannot do
Moreover, people who see the “AI generated” tag probably won’t look at what exactly was generated (actually, itch does not provide a very easy way to do so as the only possible way, as I see it, is to open each tag separately and check whether the game is listed in them). So, from the average user’s perspective, people may think that we generated game art (which is mostly what people think about generation in game dev), which reasonably upsets our artist, yet I upset him even more with my scareness of getting delisted
P.S. If possible, I ask the itch.io administration to remove that tag from our games, as it was not mandatory, but now we cannot do it ourselves, if it is, of course, possible
P.P.S. Want to make it clear - we as a team do not intend to hide anything, we just don’t want to be judged as people who generate our games heavily. If there was tag “ai-assisted” that would be much more appreciated
It is only enforced for assets. Unless you lie about the gen ai nature of things and claim you made it yourself, I do not think this will be a problem.
For games, the question is, how or if players will use or not use the new infos. There are catalogues of items where you would have check boxes to select which attributes the items you will see can have. Itch only has one such check box that I know of, and that is the adult content checkbox.
The rest is just tags. And those stack up to an url. However that works under the hood. In comparison, on Steam you have several account settings and when browsing games you do have check boxes. But they also have a limited pool of tags and so on. So you could check boxes for pvp, languages, some tags, the os, controller support and so on. Adding a filter to that layout to filter the 4 gen ai categories would be trivial in concept.
But on Itch with the tags, the only tag currently is no-ai and that is a catch it all. (Yeah, there are 5 positive tags, but I somehow suspect, the negative tag(s) will be used much more often).
Oh, and objectivly telling if something is gen ai or not is simple. Did you make it with a prompt of a llm gen ai system and optionally modified it afterwards? If yes, then it is "ai".
That is why all the coders are very concerned, because asking a gen ai system to spit out some code snippet and integrating it in your code is business as usual, but would qualify the whole game as "ai" under that no-ai tag.
It can be used and abused like any tool. Personally, I wouldn't be able to make the slice-of-life RPG I'm working on right now without AI-generated art. I don't have the artistic experience to make the assets I need myself, I don't have the money to hire artists (who thus aren't missing out on work anyway), and I doubt there's free art assets that fit what I need for the game. If my game miraculously takes off, I'd love nothing more than start a Kickstarter to raise money to hire artists who could replicate the ingame art from Midjourney, but as it is, on a student budget and making a freeware game, it's a pretty big ask to hire professionals to do the art for me.
tl;dr, it's a bit black-and-white to claim AI hurts artists when I literally couldn't have made the game I've dreamt of making for a long time without the assistance of AI. Again, all AI generators are tools that can be used or abused, they're not inherently good or bad.
I really liked Austin McConnell's take after he received a lot of criticism for using AI-generated art and voices in a video he made.
Also feel it's grasping at straws to use AI-generated articles on WP as an argument against AI-generated assets in games.
Sure you could. You could draw some crap art, plenty of fucking fantastic RPGs have taken this approach in the past and it didn’t hinder them at all. Working with and around your limitations is part of the craft.
I can only speak for myself, but I find projects with visuals that have poor technical quality significantly more impressive than ones with AI art–regardless of how you feel about the financial aspect, in the former case it’s immediately clear that the creator actually gave enough of a shit to try.
you should check out these two games if you think AI is just blanket bad:
https://jameshillten.itch.io/strange-journey-2
https://jameshillten.itch.io/megami-tensei-neuroheroine-2
creators like this shouldnt be punished over some moralistic nonsense.
Hold on–I’d urge you to stop and consider the implications of your last sentence.
creators like this shouldnt be punished over some moralistic nonsense.
This is about disclosure, and allowing people to select what they want to see and not what they don’t (after all, games with and without AI content are all visible by default).
Yes, personally I don’t want to see games made with AI content. I’ve given my reasons, and I assure you that a couple of fangames that couldn’t be arsed to even come up with an original setting aren’t going to sway my opinion. It’s your right to argue about whether you feel that’s unfair, try to change people’s minds, etc. But at the end of the day, it should still be peoples choice to make.
In short, contrary to what a shocking number of people in this thread seem to think this isn’t a fucking punishment–it’s about letting people decide what kinds of content they do or don’t want to see. And look–if you still feel like it is a punishment because people don’t want your content once they find out it’s got AI stuff in it…maybe stop and think about the implications of that fact.
EDIT - Just realized you’re in this thread not advocating lying about this so I guess you not only have thought about the implications, you came to the conclusion that ‘it means you’re lying to your players’ was cool and good. Christ.
Tried replying directly to Hughes and got an error message for some reason.
Fair enough. I'm considering trying my hand at tracing photos of the places I'm taking photos of and seeing if I can make backgrounds that way (unless I just slap filters on the photos and call it a day), but drawing people? I think that's too high a hurdle for me, thank you. Also there's the slight issue that I want my game to actually be done at some point. So far I've written 20 000 words (or roughly 44 pages) of dialogue and narration and I've only covered a fraction of the scenes I'm planning to make. If/when the game is done, it'll probably be novel-length in terms of narration/dialogue. Then there's all the time to spend coding, testing, bug fixing, taking photos of locations, etc. Learning to draw people on top of that sounds unrealistic, to say the least.
Sure, you could say people should work around their limitations, but I'd rather my game looks good. And I mean, I'll also be sourcing my music from others, probably a combination of free and licensed works, yet I don't think anyone is going to criticize me for not trying to make my own music, you know? To be frank, I don't understand why the moment we talk of AI, suddenly there's this expectation that creators are supposed to do everything ourselves, or gatekeep creativity by saying it has to be done a certain way, otherwise it shouldn't be done at all.
Also, see the vid by Austin that I linked to.
Yeah, I think it's too simplistic to just have a binary "AI Generated" or "not AI Generated" toggle. There's a big difference between using AI to generate most/all of your game and just using it for help with code, the occassional feedback on writing, or for some of the art assets, for example.
That is terrible advice. And apart from violation of Itch guidelines might be grounds for legal action of customers. The reason for mandatory ai disclosure for assets are of a legal nature.
AI disclosure was requested before this new feature, in the quality guidelines: https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-uploading-excessive-amoun...
Please ensure that your content brings something new and valuable to the community. If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description and that it adds substantial value to the user experience.
The tagging feature just formalizes the method you can desribe your content having gen ai.
What I see critical is the usage for game filtering. For assets it is clear. Any AI usage has to be known and filtering is a big help. But for games there is a fundamental difference if the content is gen ai based or if only code is gen ai based.
So I would prefer to see a no-ai-content tag. Gen ai code is not content. It is not story, it is not assets. The few people that hate AI with a vegan mindset should have their no-ai thingy, but it is not helpful for people that just want to support human made art. Code is not art in this context, but non developers might not grasp this at first sight.
If you search positive, you can use the sub tags for graphics, sound and writing.
In the suggested box there currently is only no-ai and ai-generated. Both include code, something most people will not care about. The games where you did not see which part was ai might have had "ai code".
But code is not content! Not to my understanding of language and not to the current description of what the tag means.
Featuring content created or edited through generative AI, such as AI-driven narratives, character interactions, and generated assets.
Also, "AI Generated" sounds like the game was made by an AI or the gameplay is AI driven. There are games like that. They either have a llm on your computer or connect to a llm service to let an npc act.
The tag should be named ai-content or similar and exclude code. Respectively no-ai-content. The "full" tags could be named no-ai-usage and ai-usage.
The absolute majority of users will not have read this thread and have no idea that code is included in "ai generated". It must be usable intuitivly by tag name and description. I mean, it is a popular thread, but only has 10k non unique views.
"no-ai-usage and ai-usage." That sounds more precise and right, IMHO.
I actually use Microsoft Copilot as assistant. It behaves like a person. It makes mistakes, bad coding, and all. But it's great for ideas, for formatting, and when you don't remember how something was done it tells you an unusable example that you have to adapt.
So I suppose I have to use the ai coding tag, if it existed. Or not? As you see the real life practice is not at all as people think.
Then the ai art part. It also means making source images from scratch, then using my own styles, then rendering concepts and people I've created, then retouch and possibly iterations, paint parts, paint on top, recreating other parts by hand... Not at all as people think.
So the use is more like ai-usage than ai-generated. I know many other people work this same way, specially if they already had artistic and coding skills before ai.
So in my opinion that is how the tag should be named, exactly as you suggest.
Why does the quality of the end result matter? For those of us who want to support developers who refrain from using AI, the end result is irrelevant. It is the process itself that is in question. Your example is kind of like saying "Yeah I know they steal their cars, but they do a really good job of fixing them up afterward." Or, "I know this company pollutes the environment, but I like their burgers."
It's your right to do as you wish and that's why the tag is there. I don't wish to debate more about this. It depends on if you think that training is theft or not, or if you think all the work is done by the machine or not. I haven't a simple point of view on any of those aspects, and distinguish shades of gray.
But there's already many ais that were trained and work ethically, and in 2025 there will be a major release of at least one that is fully trained, not on donations or similar, but on public domain images (classical art). So this is a debate that is already becoming old, soon will have no sense at all, and I think the existance of a tag has full sense so everyone does as they wish.
But about that: I think quality is important and I value more to avoid flooding of crap than how something is done. Anything with quality involves human work, no matter what tools were used. I saw sites completely flooded by crap that were not ai at all, and others flooded by ai. I value quality, inspiration and work. That's why.
Well said.
It is just not "the process" that is complained about or questioned. It is the result: cheap artworks. And instead of attacking this, they attack unethical ai systems or large power consumption. Both wich can be debated or remedied.
Especially the power consumption is a bit confusing. I can install a llm system on my desktop and churn out cheap artworks. This takes less power than me working on hand made art on that same desktop. Either ai is cheap to make or not. If it is cheap, it cannot suddenly be more costly in production when it suits the argument.
So better to "attack" the quality. Most AI works look AI. Why? Because they look the same. Uninspired, bland, out of place. And if they do not, you can bet that the developer put a sizeable amount of sweat into the work.
I do see parallels to painters and photographers. A painter takes days, weeks to paint something that a photographer can take as a picture in seconds without knowlege of paints and canvas and anatomy and so on. Yet photography still evolved to be considered an art. Curious, isn't it.
Power consumption is more of a concern when using company servers that you don't control, I agree that using a model locally on your own machine would be (probably) harmless. And by the same logic, training it on only data that you own should also be harmless.
In regard to tagging though, I would suspect that Itch wants to keep things as simple as possible. If you really need a disclaimer then you can add it to your page, each developer can be as specific as they want about their process.
Even when you use company server it is still more efficient as it does not really matter where you use energy - on your pc or on commercial server. (In fact, I believe commercial servers are more energy efficient). Because those networks use a lot of energy in a short period of time but alternative is to use average amount of energy for much longer period of time. Of course it is not always like that and just to be clear: I do not have exact numbers but it is how I assume the situation
But when we are talking about energy I always think people who really care about energy that much should not use x86 processors and services like Steam or Itch as they run their software on big commercial servers. Because where to put the line?
And by the same logic, training it on only data that you own should also be harmless.
And yet, I usually see all generative ai treated the same way in these discussions and with the handling of the tech. There is no differenciation at this point about any legally non-ambigous or ethically "clean" solutions. It is ai or not ai. And that is why I am lamenting that arguments against the tech should be solid and future proof instead of shortsighted and emotional.
With the current/initial filters provided there is also only ai yes or no with no practical information if it is content or just the code (yet?). Unlike artists, developers embraced the tech. Or at least that is my impression. It is the developers that create code with the tech. But with art, it is usually not the artists that use it to create more art, but people that could not draw at all to create images. Maybe it is, because in software it is a common concept to reuse other's code from templates, examples, and of course your own previous works and adapt it to new situations. In the visual arts that is frowned upon as "tracing".
There are many artists using AI. Also many painters, that generate references with it, or animate their own paintings in digital, and many mixed media artists, or hybrid artists. They all can draw and paint, as myself.
In one year or less, as public domain fully public sourced models appear and people identify the ones that are ethical, everyone will use it, except a few.
I marked my game with the AI tag, gladly. I hope the name changes to "ai usage", but it will be obvious that my work is a mix of traditional and generated skills as soon as people see it, so I don't really care. It's impossible to make a half decent game solely on AI.
The confusion about licenses, copyright, and polemizing on all this subject, fueled by the media, has damaged everyone. I understand the hate about the flooding of crap, but I hope it also becomes an old issue (exactly as when people got tired of DSL cameras and stopped annoying everyone making photos all day long).
I doubt you're still looking for an answer on this and I can't speak on behalf of site admins, but traditional TTS like Microsoft Sam I wouldn't consider AI, and Wikipedia doesn't use the term for those systems. Deepfake audio, such as getting a synthesised celebrity to voice your game without having to hire them, is widely considered AI.
I just posted on my devlog a post of my blog on how I make my graphics. Of course without entering into too much detail, but one can see how I go from a drawing by hand on pencil, then painting, then rendering in AI with my styles and concepts, and switch between that and painting a series of times, ending with hand made art again.
Hopefully some will appreaciate.
But that is not enough for extremists. I just had a rough weekend with some trolls.
Some people just won't tolerate ANY amount of AI. I am happy that the AI tag in my game keeps them away. I think that if that is for that, it's more than ok for me too. I am happy to use it.
By the way I love your game, and would love to network with other creators that use AI for art in a reasonable, quality way. I think those who are putting ethics, effort and quality do a good job, and I would love to meet and talk with others on the boat.
Hi Louis, nice to have you chime in on this. I have looked at your stuff and you actually start from a real drawing and apply a finish with the AI. For me, you're doing 70%-80% of the job and the AI is applying a final touch. Kudos!
As I said before AI slop is still slop. It needs the human touch to make it special. Quality first is my Motto. It's is known that a lot of AAA games companies have been making flops lately, I suspect a lot of their employees are not actually good at their job. AI give Indies a tool to create a full game in less time with more quality. It makes us compete better. I could bet money that the big studios are already using AI, but they have plausible deniability since they have art teams that can do the art. I suspect many employees there are keyboard warriors who bully small indies that use AI. They actually want your game to look like it was made in the 80s. Either that, or the trolls are mediocre indie creators with a crab in the bucket mentality. If they spend their day roasting other, they are not crafting games in the meantime! That's the point!
Thanks for the feedback on my game, I would also love to network with like minded creator. I will be following you.
Agree, and pleased to meet you! :)
There's a ton of people who post everything they do with AI, instead of posting only the best. But there's already also a ton of people who post every draft, every photo, and every spot of paint they do.
The state of this reminds me when everyone got a digital camera and was all day shooting photos, or later when everyone got a camera on the phone, and everyone was putting duck lips and posting every pic they did :D That can be very much more annoying than anything else for everyone and that's so understandable.
But for creative people, this is part of the skills and tools you can have to make things that otherwise may take ages or never be done.
About the kind of people who tolerate zero of generative arts, in my experience, not surprisingly they are never painters. Usually they belong to specific styles (I won't say which to not offend) or never do anything creative. That makes it even more annoying. Also, it seems the more beautiful you do, they feel more angry, even if you are not doing their style or genre at all.
Again, I think a filter is great, to isolate ourselves from that people, and they from us.
That's pretty much how I think I'll make my (point and click game) background images, too. I take photos of the city the game is set in, then I'm experimenting with using AI to give them more of a video game-ish look, like making them look like pixel art or drawings or something. For character portraits and whanot I'm using AI 100%, but I have a long-term goal/dream of using Kickstarter or something to raise money to commission human artists when the game is out.
Also, as Austin McConnell pointed out in his vid, in many cases you don't have a choice between human or AI art --I can't afford to hire human artists in the first place, so it's not as if human artists are losing work because of me. And as I said, AI is part of what makes lots of us indie and hobbyist devs these days able to make games in the first place.
Yes, you are styling your own work with AI. Only very fanatic people may see it differently from a classic filter or the work someone does with Photoshop.
About hiring, I think it's ok but if you are a solo developer, and you are not doing something (as a final resulting image) that is a plagiarism of someone's image, I don't see the problem.
I think the AI tag, although I may not agree with the "generated" part, is a great tool to keep your work separated between people that think it's just a way of working, and people that think it's not because some ai was used.
I assure you that many, many games are developed without any use of LLMs at all. That means they're not "essential."
The current tag is "AI-Generated Content." It sounds like you have some and therefore couldn't tag your content with "No AI." However, the new tag is only required for assets - not for ttrpgs or video games.
The way Itch implements AI disclosure is not quite satisfactorial. I think the textual disclosure as seen on Steam to be better. Also, the way these "tags" are shown, or rather not shown makes it feel like a hack. Also, some devs select those tags manually, adding to confusion of players and other devs. Not many people read this thread and understand how this really works. Maybe 5000 users read this thread. Probably less.
Itch currently has a yes or no and that might be ok for assets, but not for games. Customers look for different qualities in games and assets. Being AI free can be a vital quality for assets, so yes/no makes sense.
But players will have other standards for games. If they care for AI, it will be most likey be for the "content". To my understanding of language, content is what is shown, and not the method how it is shown. So, code is not content. It might be in some cases, but not generally. Using state of the art coding technologies and being lumped togher with ai slop creators is not really good for morale of developers. Not answering the AI disclosure might be prudent, but it is not elegant.
You don’t even realize why what you’ve done is wrong, and that’s sad. You’ve fed your entire creative process into a machine. There is a huge and fundamental difference between the two processes you described.
Google, stack overflow, and books… Reading something made by humans, learning from it, internalizing it, and making decisions based on your experiences. That’s an actual creative experience.
You said you “used LLMs every day and a lot.” That’s no longer your process. You simply outsourced your thinking to a machine. You asked your magic box god to help tell you what to think and what to do. A machine that was created by harvesting the blood and sweat of thousands of people who did actual work. And insatiable monster that has devoured everything into itself and regurgitates to you based on a sophisticated prediction algorithm what it thinks you need. But the process, the ethics, the morality, the environment, none of that matters because hey, it’s convenient right?
“These are still my thoughts?” No. They aren’t. And you don’t even realize it.
I wonder how you perceive photography. If you compare the creative process to create a picture between taking a photo and painting a canvas, there are some striking similarities. The photographer "just presses a button". Yet photography is an established art.
Sure, there is slop made with AI, because it is easy. Just as there is slop made with photograhy apparatus. Or slop made with cookie cutter templates on a premade game engine. Creating yet another pixel art rpg with a story seen so often there are tropes about it. There are even engines that advertise as needing no coding knowledge.
your entire creative process
You act like using AI helpers is like asking the machine: hey google, make a video game and put my name under it. Just like a photographer just pushes the button and "created" a picture. "No" creativity. If it is enough for the photographer to decide what's in the picture, why is it not enough for the AI operator to decide what's in the image? That's why I am asking how you perceive photography. What's the difference for you. Unless of course you have a similar opinion about the creativity of taking photos.
And what do you think about people using a magic box to have their game do things? Speaking of game engines. Someone using that engine relies on the blood and sweat of the people that programmed the actual routines to move pixels around. It's standing on the shoulders of giants.
What do you think about a movie director or an orchestra conductor? Are they "creative"? It's the actors that act, the musicians that play. The instrument builders built the instruments and the notes composed by a componist. The movie script was written by someone else, and the cutter puts it all together. Is the creativity of conductor and director outsourced?
Anyway, I suggest you read the post you replied to again, what was actually done with the llms. Googling an example from stackoverflow and adapting it to your needs is not really much different from asking chatgpt to generate a code snippet. Only, the chatgpt snippet might have bugs in it that are not obvious. In both cases, the coder did not spend days learning how that code fragment would be done from sratch. It is standing on the shoulders of giants, relying on previously done work. Googling it, is a huge improvement from digging through examples in written books. Summarizing it with the help of a llm is a further advancement, but with the risk of it being very wrong.
And refining text with llm is a glorified spell checker. I hope you do not use those when you write emails or texts. The knowledge in that spell checking relies on previous works of other people. You would be outsourcing your language skills.
Visual art is a bit different, as you do not need an image that is functional, as you would need a functional code snippet. That's probably why ai images look so bland. They fulfill the functionality requested. For code this is enough. So much enough, that one uses libraries full of functions and even whole game engines that do not even need coding knowledge anymore.
You can be against the usage of AI for all sorts of reasons. And we all should be, for things like the slop created with it. But things like spell checking and coding assistance, in terms of creativity, are state of the art methods, of what programmers are doing for as long as there has been programming. Reuse, rehash, copy, paste, do calls to things other people wrote.
"You act like using AI helpers is like asking the machine: hey google, make a video game and put my name under it."
That is exactly what vibe coding is for
The photographer “just presses a button”.
Spoken like someone who has no idea about what goes into photography.
I suspect it's the opposite. In a few years, LLM and image-based AI-generated content will collapse because it's all funded by smoke and mirrors; there's no actual profit plan, especially since the content made by AI isn't protected by copyright.
(How many studios will release a movie that's in the public domain the moment it hits the screen? How many game devs want their logos and characters to be free for anyone to copy?)
We're seeing a huge amount of it right now because there are lots of free and low-cost AI generators available, but when the venture capitalist firms that were chasing NFTs realize that the general public isn't going to pay as much for AI generation than they do for human-made goods, and in many cases will refuse to pay for them at all, the bubble will burst and all the public AI tools will vanish.
There'll still be plenty of self-hosted LLMs and art generators, but without the power of Google or Microsoft's servers behind them, they won't have anything like the same capacity.
how to report them if not.
Do not bother. The disclosure feature is only mandatory for assets. It says so in the OP. The plan is to delist all assets that have not filled out the disclosure. I have no clue how long that grace period is supposed to be. There are still about 20k assets without that info. After that grace period, you would just browse with the no-ai tag to avoid ai. But that's assets.
is there a way to tell from a store page
Maybe one day. When that grace period is over, they might complete the feature. It is rather crude to introduce a tag that is not a tag, but can be searched with the tag system - and is not even visible on the page. All the tags you see regarding ai, are manual tags. You cannot see the disclosure tags in the info box.
The only way to check, is to combine the tags of the game with one of the ai tags and see, if it appears.
Only about 20% of the games on Itch have filled out the disclosure question.
In my opinion those tags are not all that helpful for games. I would prefer an extensive and visible disclosure as is seen on Steam. If you just browse with ai-generated, you do not know, how ai was used. People that want to avoid ai, usually want to avoid ai "art". Sure, there are some purists that want to avoid all things that have anything to do with ai. While browsing on a browser that has ai assisted code in it, that would be marked as ai-generated on Itch. Speaking of, the Itch app is chromium based, is it not. So the Itch app itself would be marked as ai-generated.
If you release a new project, that would not even be a question. Just answer the disclosure questions on the projects accordingly.
If you "release" a bonus version on your existing project, you could go either way. Answer the disclosure question for your actual project and explain what the bonus version is. Or answer the disclosure question for the whole project page including all alternative/bonus versions.
Seeing the info that no ai was used in all game info boxes, just because they did not use it, is odd. It is a bit like seeing a non mature warning on a non mature game. It should be the expected way, so only give information, if there is information to give, like the rest of the things in the more information box. There is also not information about how a game did not use Unity for example. Only if it did.
I agree with you, I deliberated on the wording and I may remove it. The links in the game info panel do lead back to classification pages though, so I would like to make it easy for people to discover that itch.io has a No AI section, since I feel like people are seeking out stuff like given the current discourse around gen AI content.
If the goal is to unobtrusively give users the option to filter against or for ai, maybe remove the obsolete filter "type" and use the space to have the ai content filter visible, instead of only showing it, when one of the filters is selected.
A few thoughts about how things are currently.
The "ai-assisted" filter changes the browse section on the left side. The same way that clicking "released" does. A previously hidden filter option appears, where you can change released, in development and so on. For ai you can switch between the positive filters of code, text, audio, graphics and assisted - and the no-ai tag is linked.
While the release status filters are mutual exclusive, the ai filters are not. But the filter options switch between them.
It is unclear what "assisted" would mean. I know only because I read this topic and tried what it does. It is mapped to the ai-generated tag, so it means having at least one of the other ai filters. But do casual users understand what "ai assisted" means in the context of the filter or of the info box? Maybe I have a different perspective, since English is not my native language. But I would say, no, it is very unclear. At closest it would mean basically the same as the ai-code filter. Assisted game making. But that's not what it means. It means that one or more of the other options is true. Assets, code, any combination. That's not what assistance is.
It should read something to the effect of "any of the ai categories". And in the more information box, it is redundant and ads to confusion. "So the game does not only use ai images, it also was made by assistance of ai..."
The ai filter on the left side also contains the no-ai tag, but that does not map to a filter, just the virtual tag that is generated by the ai disclosure question.
The ai filter options on the left side do not appear, when using the no-ai tag, which matters little. But it also does not appear when using the ai-generated virtual tag.
About 1.1. million games did not fill out the ai disclosure question. Will casual users understand that an empty section on the info box means just that? Is that maybe even the intended behaviour, or what should be intended. Steam has no ai filter, as they have no tag or feature for it. But as far as I know they do have mandatory disclosure questions that are more elaborate than yes/no, and the answers to that are listed in game descriptions to games that do contain ai generated assets, and possible code.
To my interpretation of quality guidelines, it was always meant for developers to mention ai usage for assets on games, maybe except for code, even before the ai disclosure question.
Since I did read this thread I do know what it means if I see a no-ai tag in a game's tag list. But tags that are not tags but still in the tag list are confusing. And doubly confusing, since some developers do use them as regular tags. Just like some use Unity as a tag.
The no-ai and the ai-generated tag appear in the suggested tag drop down box and appear when typing ai. But neither will activate the ai filter on the left side of browse.
AI Assistance is really unclear as a name for a filter section, if you would show it regularly, like platform and the likes. Assistance? Like an input method? Who assists whom, with what? It's generative ai usage. Or something like that. ai generated content. Ai content. If you say "assistance" I am gonna think "installation wizard"
And the type filter is really outdated and could be removed to gain space for a permantent new filter, if need be. Html5 is included in web under platform. And there are games that have both on the same page, but the combination of html5 and downloadable has 0 games.
There is a fundamental question about what people expect from a no-ai filter/tag and what Itch can deliver. The tag can currently only show games that actually have answered the ai disclosure. Only about 40k games have answered with a yes. So using the no-ai tag will not simply exclude those 40k games, but it will exclude 1.14 million games. The 40k games that definitly have ai, and the 1.1 million games that have not answered. This might be what some hardcore ai avoiders would want. But will it be what the average user expects.
The solution would be to have two different "no-ai" filters. One that only shows games that have answered with a no to the question and one that only excludes games that have answered with a yes.
I’ve been enjoying the new field on project pages the past few days. I open the details box on nearly every page I visit— would be nice if we could select to have that open by default, by the way— and the link on no-ai projects is appreciated. That link is reassuring, because it means more to me than the AI-generated links do.
Without the no-ai link, old pages where the box wasn’t selected would be indistinguishable from projects where the No button was selected. We’d have to guess by the date of the last update. I don’t know or remember when the box was added for developers. Then there also wouldn’t be an easy link to see more no-ai projects.
It would feel like AI-using projects would be promoted— favored by itch.io— when developer- or team-made-only projects aren’t.
The AI stuff is supposed to be noted in the project descriptions, anyway. It often isn’t. When it’s there, the link under details is redundant to me. When there’s no mention in the description, I’m looking for the no-ai tag in details.