I strongly believe itch.io needs to separate game asset listings into clear categories:

- Game Assets (AI)  

- Game Assets (NO-AI)

The current situation is not sustainable. Right now, AI-generated asset packs and hand-crafted asset packs are mixed together in the same marketplace sections. This makes discovery worse for buyers, damages trust, and creates an unfair environment for creators who spend significant time making original assets by hand.

This is not about banning AI. This is about transparency.

Buyers should be able to clearly choose whether they want AI-generated assets or non-AI, hand-made assets. Creators should also be able to compete in a category that properly represents their work. If someone wants to sell AI-generated assets, they can do so in an AI-labeled section. If someone is selling hand-crafted pixel art, UI, sprites, tilesets, or animations, those products should not be buried under large volumes of AI-generated bundles.

The current mixed-category model may increase short-term upload volume, but long-term it is harmful to itch.io.

It reduces buyer confidence. It makes high-quality human-made assets harder to find. It discourages serious creators from publishing on the platform. It creates confusion and frustration for customers. It risks turning the asset marketplace into a low-trust environment.

A simple category separation would help everyone:

Game Assets (AI) Game Assets (NO-AI)

This would not punish AI creators. It would give buyers clear choice, protect human-made asset creators, and improve the long-term health of the marketplace.

If itch.io wants to remain a trusted platform for indie developers, game artists, and asset creators, this issue needs to be addressed clearly. Transparency should not be optional. It should be part of the marketplace structure.

If you agree with this proposal, please press the Like button so itch.io can see that more creators and buyers care about this issue.

When browsing, you absolutely need to turn on the No-AI tag. This filters out all everything that has disclosed AI usage, and everything that hasn’t filled out the AI disclosure. Unlike most other tags, this does not filter out assets that don’t have the tag in its tag list. The AI disclosure tags are special that way. If it’s too much of a pain to turn on that tag each time you browse, try bookmarking the browse page with the tag already selected. There, problem solved. Unfortunately this does not work with text search because there is no way to combine text search with tags.

Actually, itch is one of the very few asset stores I even bother with anymore, precisely because it makes it relatively easy to filter out AI slop. Most other asset stores I tried have don’t have AI disclosures at all.

There’s already a filter option sidebar on the https://itch.io/game-assets page

I understand the options for filtering on the search page are very limited right now but hope to address that soon.