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.