Skip to main content

Indie game storeFree gamesFun gamesHorror games
Game developmentAssetsComics
SalesBundles
Jobs
TagsGame Engines
(+1)

https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging

This field is now required for all asset creators on itch.io.  ...  We’ll have a grace period for people to update their pages

You missed how this is only mandatory for assets.

Also, those are not tags to see, but tags to filter. This means you will not see the AI tags in the info box. It is a very bad implementation of that feature. Terrible design. Making the info a tag, but not a tag.

It is very confusing. Therefore I will explain in detail:

Every tag you see in a info box ("More information") on a project's page is manually added by the developer.

Tags are things in the tags list and in the genre list. Itch has freestyle tagging, so people can chose to use basically any tag, even https://itch.io/games/tag-unity , despite there being https://itch.io/games/made-with-unity  meta information. 

Same goes for any ai tags. They are meta information, but this type of meta information is not displayed on the game page's info box. But it can be filtered by the tag system and two of the new tags appear in the tag filter drop down list. Did I mention how terrible a design that is?

You cannot directly check, if a game has the new meta information. You will have to use ai-generated and the tags of the game to see if it appears in the results or not. If it does not appear in ai-generated nor in the negation tag no-ai, the ai disclosure was not answered. If you see any of those tags in the more information box, it was used manually by the developer as one of the 10 tags.

(1 edit)

You missed how this is only mandatory for assets.

I did mainly mean assets, sorry I wasn’t clear

This means you will not see the AI tags in the info box. It is a very bad implementation of that feature. Terrible design.They are meta information, but this type of meta information is not displayed on the game page’s info box.

after stewing a little more on my original post that is the main point I’m running with

Did I mention how terrible a design that is?

Yes

If you browse for assets, use the no-ai filter. That is implemented as a tag filter, but all the results will have filled out the ai disclosure question with no.

---

The reasoning for the disclosure are indeed legal concerns. "due to legal ambiguity around rights associated with Generative AI content".

 It is one thing to have a game with ai elements, but having assets that involve ai and unknowingly use them in a project to then claim the project does not have ai would be false advertisements. There might also be platforms that ban ai content which put the creator of the new project at risk. And of course that legal ambiguity, as there is dispute about who holds the copyright, if any, for ai results, as some think there is no humans involved and only humans can hold copyright. So if the ai operator might not own the copyright, that publisher might have problems with that part of the tos: "Publishers affirm, represent, and warrant that they own or have the rights, licenses, permissions and consents necessary to publish, duplicate, and distribute the submitted content."

My opinion is, if a photographer can own copyright of a taken photo, so can an ai operator of a prompt result. But there is also the notion of a minimum level of creativity. This is more apparant with written texts. I dimly remember some companies trying to "copyright" their business emails by claiming so in the mail. This is not only bogus, the business communication just does not meet that criteria of minimum creativity in most cases to even qualify for copyright. And neither would prompting an ai to give you a pic of an apple and using the first one to sell as an asset.