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Is a game ai made, because the assets are ai made? No, of course not.

Are you making some sort of weird distinction between “ai made” and “ai assisted”? Because that’s quite literally what AI disclosure is about. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the graphics, then the graphics (and by extension the game) are AI-assisted. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the sounds, then the sounds (and by extension the game) are AI-assisted. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the text, then the text (and by extension the game) is AI-assisted. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, any other asset, then that asset (and by extension the game) is AI-assisted. And distinct from that, if the AI made, or contributed to, any code in the game, then the code (and by extension the game) is AI-assisted.

And in the end it’s all “assisted”. A human told the AI to make the game. Even if the entire game was made by an AI from a prompt as generic as “make a game”, the prompt still contributes. No prompt, no game. Even if the AI is programmed to not need a prompt, there’s still the programmer.

Or are you going for some sort of distinction between third-party “assets” and first-party “non-asset graphics/sound/text”? I cannot interpret your statement, because every interpretation I can come up with is absurd. But that has been the pattern of this thread for a long time, so perhaps one of the absurd interpretations is the correct one.

But your level would not be a level in the level kind of sense. It would be visuals.

It’s being used in an outdoor RTS game with a real-world setting. There are impassable mountains, hills that offer the advantage of high ground, river crossings and narrow mountain passes to defend. It’s a playable level, not just something to look at. The unit placement is not part of that level. Initial bases are randomly placed at the start of the game; everything else is up to the players to build.

Or, another example: the player cannot see any of the level. There are no visuals whatsoever, just audio and force feedback. The game is an educational game about the challenges blind people face navigating the world. You can call the game a walking simulator if you like, but you cannot call the level (or any other part of the game) graphics.

quite literally what AI disclosure is about. If an AI made, or in some way contributed to, the graphics

No. AI disclosure is about tagging, specifically tagging the assets in a game if they are the output of a gen ai system. Which would include parts of an asset and does not exclude hand edited things. A hand drawn picture where you add an item in the background with photoshop ai filler would also qualify.

And what is literally asked is this:

Please disclose if this project contains content produced by generative AI tools such as LLMs, ChatGPT, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc., even if you hand-edited it.

What kind of AI generated content is used?

Classification of AI-Generated content is mandatory. Your classification will be used to add additional filtering tags to your project.

https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#ai-disclosure

We ask that you accurately tag your project if it contains materials produced by generative AI by utilizing the AI Disclosure section on your project’s edit page.

And no, in some way contributed is not the same as produced by. If that is your premise, your premise is wrong.

Also, please do not read any meaning into "ai assisted". That term has no separate meaning in the tagging system. If Itch wants it to have a seperate meaning, they need to clarify it to developers in the ai disclosure, and more importantly, make it clear to players what it means. I voiced concerns about the "assisted" phraising somehwere above. What it actually is, it's the mapping to the virtual tag  https://itch.io/games/tag-ai-generated . And the tag is given, if you answered yes in the disclosure question and the disclosure question continues to tell you that it is mandatory to check the classifications.

So it only means that your game would contain one or more of graphics, sounds, text/dialogue or code, that is the output of those generative ai systems. Nothing more, nothing less. What it does not mean is: in some way contribued, influenced, inspired or other things that could be considered causal or adjacent.

As an analogy, children are produced by parents. If you were matchmaker of those people, you contributed to the parenthood. But you would not be credited on the birth certificate of the children.

It’s a playable level, not just something to look at.

Did you geneate that level with a visual generative ai system, then tag the game as having ai graphics. Did you generate the description of the level in a text generator, than tag text or code or both.

Did you generate the audio description of the audio level with ai, then tag ai sounds. Did you generate the description of that level with text ai but made the sounds some other way, you might get away with not tagging sound, but you still have something to generate the sounds on the fly. So you will have text or code.

Haptics is an interesting bit, but I would default it to code or text. If we one day have those actual virtual reality things were you can plug in, there might be additional categories beyond graphics and sound.

If the ai gave you general guidance on how to do this audio level and explained details to you, even gave you the idea of doing it by pure sound, instead of visuals, then there is nothing to tag. The ai did contribute to the game, but did not generate any game content. 

Context matters. Perspective matters. Semantics matter. You can subjectively think about things in several ways, depending on how you chose those things. You only call it a level, because you consider it a separate entity. Other people would call the actual "level" to be the idea to fight a certain army at this time of the game under specific conditions. They might not consider the playing area as the level, but simply as the playing area.

Maybe this is a language thing. I am not English native speaker and from what I could find, neither are you. Unfortunately, the wordings Itch uses are at many places vague and ambigous. That's not specific to this ai disclosure. My favorite example is the "Select a tag" box. It fails to mention that you can write a tag in there and since you can click it as a dropdown box, that's easy to miss.

Also read here https://itch.io/post/11423405 what leafo had to say about this.

You’re going to have to use your best judgment here. If you asked ChatGPT a question about something solely to inform yourself, then it sounds like your project doesn’t contain content from generative AI. If you used ChatGPT to generate some code that you then inserted into your project, then I think it’s fair to say your project does contain content from generative AI.

You are making a distinction that does not exist, between “generated” and “contributed”. Creating art is a multi-stage process. These stages are generative in nature. If an AI does one of these stages, the result is (partially) AI-generated. That’s the meaning of “even if you hand-edited it”.

Use an AI to create the sketch, hand-edit it? AI generated. Draw the sketch yourself, have the AI turn it into a full painting? AI generated. AI created a 3D model of a brick, I used it to build a 3D house? AI generated. AI came up with the character design, I redrew it from scratch, but it’s clearly the same character, in a “if the sketch came from a human, I could be accused of plagiarizing their design” sense? Also AI generated. AI drew the background, I drew the characters? AI generated. AI drew the characters, I drew the background? The final artwork is a composite of several smaller works, and it counts as AI generated if any of these smaller works are the output of generative AI. That’s what I mean by “contributed”, not any vague “the robo taxi took me to the art supply store, therefore it contributed” sense.

Inspiration obviously does not count. The distinction is also quite clear. If the inspiration came from a human, would i need to credit them? Could they sue me? Would my work count as a derivative work? Only if I go beyond mere inspiration to outright copyright violation and/or plagiarism. Inspiration is not contribution.

You are making a distinction that does not exist, between “generated” and “contributed”.

No, you are trying to make them the same. Generated is a subset of contributed. Things that are generated are always also contributed. But not the other way round. You can contribute without generating. Equating them is a formal fallacy.

And the ai disclosure specifically asks about generated content. Not about contributions or assistance.

Inspiration is not contribution.

It is. You seem to make a distinction by agency or some other arbitrary criteria. Agency is not necessary. Relevance is. Without that specific inspiration, the work would be a different work.

So what about creating a character by ai? The characters traits, background story and so on.

The idea of the character is obviously ai generated. But does it fit the question for content produced by? If you copy things word by word, it would fit the text category. If you only use general behaviour and create your own interpretation of that character, no. But it would fit a contributed/inspired by classification.

What if you used an ai to give you a plot summary of a book. But you would write the book yourself? Is that AI content?

Interestingly enough, searching for this question tells me, that this is supposed to be "ai assisted" instead of "ai generated". And the irony is, that Itch specifically asks for "ai generated", but a year later mapped the ai-generated tag to something called ai-assisted. Much to the confusion of players and developers alike.

Assisted is much too vague to be of use as a label. And about the true intent, I can only recommend reading this thread again, especially the answers from leafo, how certain things are to be regarded. 

If you learn coding by asking ai and pester it about your coding problems, the game you create would be ai assisted. But it only contains ai code, if you actually put generated code into it. That's what I read from here https://itch.io/post/11423405

Generated is a subset of contributed.

Actually…

If I say that I contributed to an anthology, I don’t mean I was the inspiration for it or any subset of it. But I also don’t mean that some stock art I created was used by one of the works in the anthology, or even that a whole work of mine was included in the anthology without my input. I mean that I created a work and intentionally submitted it to the anthology for inclusion, and that it was accepted.

Same thing for other works. I contributed to a piece of open source software if my name is on one of the commits or an accepted pull request. I contributed to a potluck if I actually brought food. I contributed to a fund if I put my own money into the fund, not if some of the money in the fund was in my hands at some distant point in the future.

So, I agree that contributed was a poor choice of word. Not because it is too broad, but because it is far too narrow.

You seem to make a distinction by agency or some other arbitrary criteria.

Inspiration is not copyrightable. Inspiration is not controllable. And, yes, inspiration is not intentional. But most importantly, inspiration happens entirely on the side of the inspired. If I look at AI slop and say “this is crap, I can do better”, I am “inspired” by that AI slop to do better. You can say that there is a causal relationship between me seeing the slop and me making the work. You can even use the word “contribute” if you want and say that seeing the slop was a contributing factor to the fact that I am making the work. But neither the slop itself nor the AI that generated it has contributed to the work itself.

Do you see the difference between “the fact that I am making the work” and the work itself? Do you see that the word “contribute” works slightly differently when I am talking “contributing factor” than when I talk about a “contribution to a work”? Do you understand basic English?

The idea of the character is obviously ai generated. But does it fit the question for content produced by? If you copy things word by word, it would fit the text category. If you only use general behaviour and create your own interpretation of that character, no. But it would fit a contributed/inspired by classification.

Do you claim ownership of the character? Would you sue someone else for using the same character? Could you?

Big media concerns certainly treat their characters as entities worthy of legal protection independently of the works they appear in. You can write a story about a rich guy who dresses up as a bat and beats up criminals instead of using his money to address the sources of crime, but you can’t write a story about Batman. At least not if you want to sell it. There’s an important legal distinction here.

So, did you use a character generated by an AI, or did you use a bunch of general traits, generated by an AI, to create your own character? You can always claim it was the latter, and nobody would know the difference in practice. And unless you’re an AI bro who thinks that claiming that the character was AI generated makes them look cool to other AI bros, you probably should. So it’s a non-issue in practice.

If you learn coding by asking ai and pester it about your coding problems, the game you create would be ai assisted. But it only contains ai code, if you actually put generated code into it. That’s what I read from here https://itch.io/post/11423405

Yes, “assisted” isn’t the best word here, but it’s one that Itch uses, so we’re kind of stuck with it. And in the context of AI disclosure on Itch, assisted and generated mean the same thing. That’s the context I’ve been using. Words means different things in different contexts. You can make one distinction, I can make another one, and neither distinction makes a bit of a difference if Itch uses one wording to communicate with developers and another wording when communicating with players.

The “assistant” is the guy who fetches coffee for the director, but nobody is talking about robot butlers here.

One distinction one can make, however, is in which capacity the assistant is assisting and if it contributes (there’s that word again) to the work. The robot butler, and the AI search engine, are a totally different type of assistant than the assistant animator who draws the in-between frames. Itch is talking about the latter: AI assistants who actually generate work of their own that makes it into the final product instead of fetching coffee and looking up documentation.

Sigh. What you do here is reading things into words that were not said. You bascially do a sort of false strawman. You misrepresent a position by using a similar other position and then attack that other position. Like exchanging generated by with contributed. Or assisted.

The word assisted was never used in the ai disclosure and not in the discussions going on here, except by users.

leafo responded to a question where ai was used in an assitive manner, but clarified that this would not be the generative usage. What more do you need?

(1) So, if I use ChatGPT to debug and help me with code, do I also need to include a tag indicating it was made with AI?

You’re going to have to use your best judgment here. If you asked ChatGPT a question about something solely to inform yourself, then it sounds like your project doesn’t (2) contain content from generative AI. If you used ChatGPT to generate (3) some code that you then inserted into your project, then I think it’s fair to say your project does contain content from generative AI.

(1) Debugging is a way of assisting.

(2) Indirect way = not content

(3) Direct way = containts content by generative ai

So yeah, using "ai assisted" as the name for the meta filter was a very confusing choice of words. It does not reflect what people can read into that word, and what the ai disclosure intends to reflect.