itch.io

Yeah, like I don’t want to pretend that it’s gonna be over in a jiffy or that the situation doesn’t extremely suck.

At the same time, as much as I’d love that visible genAI labeling I doubt it was actually that high on their priorities list–more of a declaration that they’re going to do it as part of their ongoing work on the site. By contrast, I’m pretty sure this mess is priority #1 for Itch right now since it represents a major threat to their business (for both market share & PR reasons).

It’s still going to take a while, way too fuckn long, just due to the volume of work–but I don’t think they’re being actively deceptive or acting in bad faith here, which is a vibe I kinda read from your OP. It seems more like they got taken by surprise and are trying to simultaneously deal with the immediate PR fallout from their base while also sifting through thousands of games by hand.

And you know what, coming back to your original post: I think this is exactly the sort of scenario the AI checkbox is trying to avoid. If they had imposed similarly strict tagging requirements for types of NSFW content (one of many possible ‘measures’ I’ve alluded to in my past post) the number of games brought down by this would’ve likely been far lower.

I agree that AI being treated as copyright infringement is unlikely at this stage (I think it should’ve been, but that’s neither here nor there), but with the number of lawsuits flying around in different jurisdictions it’s not a settled fact yet either. If even one of those went a certain way, itch would be in a similar bind as today–just with ‘everything from the past 2-3 years’ instead of ‘everything with NSFW tagging / matching a couple keywords in the description’.