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Generative AI Disclosure tagging

A topic by leafo created Nov 20, 2024 Views: 30,218 Replies: 154

Viewing posts 41 to 48 of 48 · Previous page · First page

AlSoKnown327 days ago(+5)

To be honest, given the amount of heat the topic of AI usage tends to generate, I plan to always mark my games as AI regardless of actual AI usage, just to avoid those pitfalls.
I think this is a good strategy for most developers, since people who care deeply about the 'AI purity' will find a flaw anyways (just about any graphical editor more powerful than MS Paint has some AI elements for example). So ultimately the 'AI-pure' niche will become self-contained, while the rest of us will have our freedom outside of it, and everybody will live happily thereafter :)

ButtFartMonthly311 days ago(+2)

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/level-5-ceo-says-games-are-now-being-made-80...

Developers of Prof. Layton:

"Currently, around 80~90% of codes are written by AI and then fixed up and finalized by human programmers. In other words, it means that right now, around 80~90% of games are made by AI."

I'm not saying that codebases centered around AI shouldn't be tagged as such, but don't you think it's ridiculous that using AI to debug your code, or using it to help with creating heavy-duty physics aspects of your game automatically lumps it in with the run-of-the-mill ones with AI-generated visuals etc?

I think killing the nuance is inevitably going to lead to people lying about usage of AI within their development, just like many other developers have said in this thread. But hey, that's just the reality I'm seeing.

aXes Quest250 days ago (1 edit) (+3)

LLMs are now essential tools in development — they’ve effectively replaced traditional search.

I built my game from the ground up. I chose the tech stack myself, created all the UI components from scratch, and optimized everything for performance. My UI runs faster than most modern React apps — because I’ve been building software for over 20 years and witnessed the evolution of web technologies firsthand.

This is not a game cobbled together from boilerplate or template code. I made it myself. Yes, I used LLMs — every day, and a lot. Just like I use Google. Just like I read books. Just like I talk to real people to learn and improve.

The current “AI-generated code” category is misleading. It needs to be updated. Don’t devalue human effort just because modern tools are part of the process. My game is 99% human-made.

If that tag is required, maybe also add tags like “No Google”, “No Stack Overflow”, or “No Learning” — because that’s the level of gatekeeping it implies.

I wrote this reply myself, but used an LLM to help refine the text. These are still my thoughts — I just made them more readable. I also wrote the game’s documentation this way.

Does that really make my game “AI-generated”?

Eris Lord Freedom249 days ago(+5)

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.

redonihunter249 days ago

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.

Treskatay63 days ago(+1)

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.

redonihunter63 days ago(+2)

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.

Eris Lord Freedom62 days ago(+1)

"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

mid52 days ago(+1)

The photographer “just presses a button”.

Spoken like someone who has no idea about what goes into photography.

redonihunter52 days ago

I am not sure how your statement is meant. Also, you quoted me, but replied to someone else.

I hope you do know what the " mean. Because you answered like you do not.

mid36 days ago(+1)

Spoken like someone who’s terminally online on Itch, lolulolulolu

Digital Phoenix UG (haftungsbeschränkt)240 days ago(+3)

It might be good to integrate a small description field to basically give people a way to honestly describe their AI use. There is a difference between "I used AI for absolutely everything" and "Out of curiosity, I used AI to create 3 experimental textures and among my 600 self generated textures, I also used 3 AI generated textures".

Dana Muise164 days ago(+2)

This is not going to age well. in a few years AI will be so ubiquitous there will be no way to participate in the development pipeline with out it. Just embrace it as another tool in your toolbox and exploit it's power. If a game looks and plays like garbage then it will not succeed, same as it ever was.

A Fals Fiction164 days ago

For now, keep using the AI use disclosure according to the site’s TOS.

Eris Lord Freedom164 days ago(+2)

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.

KuroOneHalf50 days ago

Sorry that I'm giga late to the discussion - I don't visit Itch often. However, I was just searching up some games, and I'm having difficulty finding a way to tell if games have been correctly tagged as being AI or not (is there a way to tell from a store page?), and how to report them if not. I included the "No AI" tag in my searches and I'm still getting some results that are clearly using AI art.

redonihunter49 days ago(+1)

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.

A Fals Fiction36 days ago

Go to the bottom of the project page and select the “Report” link. Choose the option that you feel best fits, note that the page showed up under the “No AI” tag, and send.

Melinda242441 days ago

Hello! I'm planning to release a version of my game with AI-generated graphics. However, I'm going to release it as a separate version so players can choose. What should I do in this case?

Should I mark the entire game as AI-generated, or should I just issue a warning in the corresponding version?

redonihunter41 days ago

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.

redonihunter5 days ago(+1)

So. The disclosure question answers finally show up in the info box. And it links to the real filters, it seems.

https://itch.io/games/ai-assisted

https://itch.io/games/ai-code

https://itch.io/games/ai-audio

https://itch.io/games/ai-graphics

About 15k assets still not answered the question, so the grace period is not over, it seems.

The area seems to be named Content, if no ai was used (but still talks about ai) or AI Disclosure, if there was.

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.

Steam does it like that. They will only display info about ai, if ai was used. They will not advertise on a game page, that no ai was used.

I think the real issue or non issue is, what will people that do not read the message board (most of them), think about the new information there. Will they understand what it means. Will they be annoyed by the constant reminder that games did not use ai and see it as an advertisement for the no-ai tag. Things like that.

leafoAdmin18 hours ago (1 edit) (+1)

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.

redonihunter11 hours ago (1 edit)

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.

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