Thank you deleting your first reply. Sincerely— that was a distressing response that other creators don’t need to read.
As for my question: you misunderstood. I am asking about the manually added tags. Those are visible when opening the arrowed meta box on a work page. I look at tags regularly. I would like to use them, but on other sites #noAI has been explicitly targeted by scrapers. So I was wondering about the history with the tag on this site.
As far as we know this has not happened on itch.io, no. While your concern is understandable, I do think you may be over-thinking it a bit. Unfortunately, just as spambots are an inevitability on the internet in 2025, AI scrapers are, as well -- and if someone really wanted to use your project as material for AI scraping, whether or not it's tagged "no-AI" doesn't really have much of an effect. With the way that AI scrapers are utilized on the internet, many of them are not discriminating as to whether or not content has or doesn't have AI before scraping from it.
If you believe that a project on itch.io may be a result of AI scraping of your own content, please reach out to us and we will work to get your case handled.
Sorry for distressing you. But I am afraid you will get only opinions and guesses here. The real scrapers are unlikely to show up here and talk business.
On that other sites the situation might be vastly different due to how they handle tags and how accurate those tags are. Filtering for the #noai might be their most reliable option.
On Itch the manually added tags would not change filtering in the case that someone were to filter for no-ai. Things will appear in the tag no-ai either by manually selecting no-ai or by filling out the ai disclosure with "no".
If a scraper bot looks for tags onpage on Itch, that means the bot creator knows about Itch tags and can just as well use inbuilt tag filter system to prefilter the input for the scraper. Would be a lot more accurate too, since the 11 tags are not really meant for meta information.
And from a player's perspective (mine), seeing no-ai (as a tag) is not informative. That's the default. It is not information. If any, I want to see detailed info about ai-usage and not about non-ai-usage. I do also not see that a renpy game was not made with unity and not made with rpg maker and that no puppies were hurt in the making of it. I like the ai disclosure information on Steam with the detailed info, and that is only shown, if there is ai things going on.
If a dev cares for these things and want's to make a statement about how no ai was used, I would prefer this to be positivly worded. Saying that it was hand crafted by the developer. Or commissioned with links to the artist, or whatever. no-ai can also mean pictures drawn in sweat shop by child labor, to exaggerate. A lot of people that want to avoid ai, do so for ethical reasons. Not having used ai does not equate that the things done there were created ethically. And I know a professional studio that was very unethical like not paying artists and such. At least that's what I heard about that studio.
