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.