Any plans on making it a requirement for games?
Actually, it was a "requirement" for games even before. It was and is in the quality guidelines.
https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-uploading-excessive-amoun...
If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description and that it adds substantial value to the user experience.
Though one can misread it to mean live generated AI stuff. There are games that do that. But in context it talks about AI content, such as images.
But in many cases, it was not necessary to bother either way. The usage of AI in games is often very blatantly obvious. Problematic are only the cases where the developer is activly lying or hiding the AI usage. And as has been discussed above, the usage of some AI generated code is not the same as AI generated images and story, so most people do not even think about this, when talking about "AI", in my opinion, because code != content.
While some developers did use the tagging system to state their usage of AI, there was no commonly agreed upon tag for that or the reverse.
The new feature adds the capabilities to give the information in the meta section and generate a standard tag and anti-tag and even sub-tags and hopefully more anti-subtags. And as soon, as the AI info is given in the actual information box on the project page, devs need no longer worry about that "clearly stated in your project description". (The meta info "tag" is currently is not shown. If you see an ai tag, it was manually added by the dev, not by the system. You do can search by that tag, but you do not see the ai meta info on the project page, like you do see engine info or session length and such)
With the current filtering options, a no-ai tag is also very handy, although only to be trusted for assets after the grace period, because the AI info is strictly enforced for assets due to legal ambiguties. Assets are meant to be used in other projects after all.
I do hope there will be a no-ai-content tag to exclude the code usage, because I suspect there are many developers that use ai tools for their code and most people that want to browse for "no-ai" would not mind ai code, but only ai story, images and voices.
We have a strong disagreement in our team in regards to the current state of the system.
On the surface, its goal seem to be to filter blatantly AI-generated assets which is reasonable and understandable. But in reality and based on leafo's answers, projects should be marked as AI-generated even if we used something like Chat GPT / Copilot for writing portions of the code. Our game is built by experienced and professional programmer but some scripts (small percent) were generated to save time on a game jam.
With desire to be honest we marked the game as having AI-generated parts in its code, but it leads to our game being in one big pile with more blatantly AI-generated projects. Currently it is not possible to opt-out without "lying" about use of AI in project page settings.
It does not seem fair that games with small part of AI code in technical side are put in one category with less crafted projects. It especially hurts feelings of our artists because the game is hand-drawn and a lot of effort was put into visuals. "AI Generated" tag is too broad.
It seems that games should either be give options to opt-out (which is not possible once tag is selected) or being forced to opt out (after all games are much more complex project that art assets) or categorization should be improved. It seems like "No AI" tag is made so people could filter low quality projects or assets with questionable legal status, not nice games with some chat-gpt-generated generic code under the hood.
I honestly do not see how marking code in games as being partially AI generated helps anyone. I understand that it is more reasonable in regards to assets, especially paid ones though. But my post is about games. Perhaps there should be different tagging for games or it should be disabled for now until better way is figured out?
Please advise.
(our game is Headquarters, first game in AI-generated tag currently...)
So yeah, I marked some of our games that were developed with a small portion of usage of ChatGPT/Copilot, and now we are the top-1 game on itch with the tag “AI generated.” From a user perspective, this may look like we just generated our game, which is, of course, not true, and a lot of effort was put into it
At the same time, @leafo includes in all his examples that it’s fair to say such projects should be marked as I did, which leads to a situation where the tag, from the user’s point of view, is not entirely misleading, but many would misunderstand what it actually means. So the system, in its current state, seems not to be working properly for user experience as it puts games where 1% of the content is made with assistance of AI and games where 90% of the value was made with not-so-good-looking AI into the same bucket
I wish we could either remove that tag entirely for our games, as it unfairly puts us into the odd company of fully AI-generated content, or have a green light to put “No,” as the portion of AI-generated content is as small as if we simply copied it from Google (which I believe also uses AI-generated content somewhere inside). Therefore, the first option is not available in the interface, and the second is basically a road to de-listing our game as it looks like we are breaking the rules, which I also cannot do
Moreover, people who see the “AI generated” tag probably won’t look at what exactly was generated (actually, itch does not provide a very easy way to do so as the only possible way, as I see it, is to open each tag separately and check whether the game is listed in them). So, from the average user’s perspective, people may think that we generated game art (which is mostly what people think about generation in game dev), which reasonably upsets our artist, yet I upset him even more with my scareness of getting delisted
P.S. If possible, I ask the itch.io administration to remove that tag from our games, as it was not mandatory, but now we cannot do it ourselves, if it is, of course, possible
P.P.S. Want to make it clear - we as a team do not intend to hide anything, we just don’t want to be judged as people who generate our games heavily. If there was tag “ai-assisted” that would be much more appreciated
It is only enforced for assets. Unless you lie about the gen ai nature of things and claim you made it yourself, I do not think this will be a problem.
For games, the question is, how or if players will use or not use the new infos. There are catalogues of items where you would have check boxes to select which attributes the items you will see can have. Itch only has one such check box that I know of, and that is the adult content checkbox.
The rest is just tags. And those stack up to an url. However that works under the hood. In comparison, on Steam you have several account settings and when browsing games you do have check boxes. But they also have a limited pool of tags and so on. So you could check boxes for pvp, languages, some tags, the os, controller support and so on. Adding a filter to that layout to filter the 4 gen ai categories would be trivial in concept.
But on Itch with the tags, the only tag currently is no-ai and that is a catch it all. (Yeah, there are 5 positive tags, but I somehow suspect, the negative tag(s) will be used much more often).
Oh, and objectivly telling if something is gen ai or not is simple. Did you make it with a prompt of a llm gen ai system and optionally modified it afterwards? If yes, then it is "ai".
That is why all the coders are very concerned, because asking a gen ai system to spit out some code snippet and integrating it in your code is business as usual, but would qualify the whole game as "ai" under that no-ai tag.
It can be used and abused like any tool. Personally, I wouldn't be able to make the slice-of-life RPG I'm working on right now without AI-generated art. I don't have the artistic experience to make the assets I need myself, I don't have the money to hire artists (who thus aren't missing out on work anyway), and I doubt there's free art assets that fit what I need for the game. If my game miraculously takes off, I'd love nothing more than start a Kickstarter to raise money to hire artists who could replicate the ingame art from Midjourney, but as it is, on a student budget and making a freeware game, it's a pretty big ask to hire professionals to do the art for me.
tl;dr, it's a bit black-and-white to claim AI hurts artists when I literally couldn't have made the game I've dreamt of making for a long time without the assistance of AI. Again, all AI generators are tools that can be used or abused, they're not inherently good or bad.
I really liked Austin McConnell's take after he received a lot of criticism for using AI-generated art and voices in a video he made.
Also feel it's grasping at straws to use AI-generated articles on WP as an argument against AI-generated assets in games.
Sure you could. You could draw some crap art, plenty of fucking fantastic RPGs have taken this approach in the past and it didn’t hinder them at all. Working with and around your limitations is part of the craft.
I can only speak for myself, but I find projects with visuals that have poor technical quality significantly more impressive than ones with AI art–regardless of how you feel about the financial aspect, in the former case it’s immediately clear that the creator actually gave enough of a shit to try.
you should check out these two games if you think AI is just blanket bad:
https://jameshillten.itch.io/strange-journey-2
https://jameshillten.itch.io/megami-tensei-neuroheroine-2
creators like this shouldnt be punished over some moralistic nonsense.
Hold on–I’d urge you to stop and consider the implications of your last sentence.
creators like this shouldnt be punished over some moralistic nonsense.
This is about disclosure, and allowing people to select what they want to see and not what they don’t (after all, games with and without AI content are all visible by default).
Yes, personally I don’t want to see games made with AI content. I’ve given my reasons, and I assure you that a couple of fangames that couldn’t be arsed to even come up with an original setting aren’t going to sway my opinion. It’s your right to argue about whether you feel that’s unfair, try to change people’s minds, etc. But at the end of the day, it should still be peoples choice to make.
In short, contrary to what a shocking number of people in this thread seem to think this isn’t a fucking punishment–it’s about letting people decide what kinds of content they do or don’t want to see. And look–if you still feel like it is a punishment because people don’t want your content once they find out it’s got AI stuff in it…maybe stop and think about the implications of that fact.
EDIT - Just realized you’re in this thread not advocating lying about this so I guess you not only have thought about the implications, you came to the conclusion that ‘it means you’re lying to your players’ was cool and good. Christ.
Tried replying directly to Hughes and got an error message for some reason.
Fair enough. I'm considering trying my hand at tracing photos of the places I'm taking photos of and seeing if I can make backgrounds that way (unless I just slap filters on the photos and call it a day), but drawing people? I think that's too high a hurdle for me, thank you. Also there's the slight issue that I want my game to actually be done at some point. So far I've written 20 000 words (or roughly 44 pages) of dialogue and narration and I've only covered a fraction of the scenes I'm planning to make. If/when the game is done, it'll probably be novel-length in terms of narration/dialogue. Then there's all the time to spend coding, testing, bug fixing, taking photos of locations, etc. Learning to draw people on top of that sounds unrealistic, to say the least.
Sure, you could say people should work around their limitations, but I'd rather my game looks good. And I mean, I'll also be sourcing my music from others, probably a combination of free and licensed works, yet I don't think anyone is going to criticize me for not trying to make my own music, you know? To be frank, I don't understand why the moment we talk of AI, suddenly there's this expectation that creators are supposed to do everything ourselves, or gatekeep creativity by saying it has to be done a certain way, otherwise it shouldn't be done at all.
Also, see the vid by Austin that I linked to.
Yeah, I think it's too simplistic to just have a binary "AI Generated" or "not AI Generated" toggle. There's a big difference between using AI to generate most/all of your game and just using it for help with code, the occassional feedback on writing, or for some of the art assets, for example.
That is terrible advice. And apart from violation of Itch guidelines might be grounds for legal action of customers. The reason for mandatory ai disclosure for assets are of a legal nature.
AI disclosure was requested before this new feature, in the quality guidelines: https://itch.io/docs/creators/quality-guidelines#avoid-uploading-excessive-amoun...
Please ensure that your content brings something new and valuable to the community. If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description and that it adds substantial value to the user experience.
The tagging feature just formalizes the method you can desribe your content having gen ai.
What I see critical is the usage for game filtering. For assets it is clear. Any AI usage has to be known and filtering is a big help. But for games there is a fundamental difference if the content is gen ai based or if only code is gen ai based.
So I would prefer to see a no-ai-content tag. Gen ai code is not content. It is not story, it is not assets. The few people that hate AI with a vegan mindset should have their no-ai thingy, but it is not helpful for people that just want to support human made art. Code is not art in this context, but non developers might not grasp this at first sight.
If you search positive, you can use the sub tags for graphics, sound and writing.
In the suggested box there currently is only no-ai and ai-generated. Both include code, something most people will not care about. The games where you did not see which part was ai might have had "ai code".
But code is not content! Not to my understanding of language and not to the current description of what the tag means.
Featuring content created or edited through generative AI, such as AI-driven narratives, character interactions, and generated assets.
Also, "AI Generated" sounds like the game was made by an AI or the gameplay is AI driven. There are games like that. They either have a llm on your computer or connect to a llm service to let an npc act.
The tag should be named ai-content or similar and exclude code. Respectively no-ai-content. The "full" tags could be named no-ai-usage and ai-usage.
The absolute majority of users will not have read this thread and have no idea that code is included in "ai generated". It must be usable intuitivly by tag name and description. I mean, it is a popular thread, but only has 10k non unique views.
"no-ai-usage and ai-usage." That sounds more precise and right, IMHO.
I actually use Microsoft Copilot as assistant. It behaves like a person. It makes mistakes, bad coding, and all. But it's great for ideas, for formatting, and when you don't remember how something was done it tells you an unusable example that you have to adapt.
So I suppose I have to use the ai coding tag, if it existed. Or not? As you see the real life practice is not at all as people think.
Then the ai art part. It also means making source images from scratch, then using my own styles, then rendering concepts and people I've created, then retouch and possibly iterations, paint parts, paint on top, recreating other parts by hand... Not at all as people think.
So the use is more like ai-usage than ai-generated. I know many other people work this same way, specially if they already had artistic and coding skills before ai.
So in my opinion that is how the tag should be named, exactly as you suggest.
Why does the quality of the end result matter? For those of us who want to support developers who refrain from using AI, the end result is irrelevant. It is the process itself that is in question. Your example is kind of like saying "Yeah I know they steal their cars, but they do a really good job of fixing them up afterward." Or, "I know this company pollutes the environment, but I like their burgers."
It's your right to do as you wish and that's why the tag is there. I don't wish to debate more about this. It depends on if you think that training is theft or not, or if you think all the work is done by the machine or not. I haven't a simple point of view on any of those aspects, and distinguish shades of gray.
But there's already many ais that were trained and work ethically, and in 2025 there will be a major release of at least one that is fully trained, not on donations or similar, but on public domain images (classical art). So this is a debate that is already becoming old, soon will have no sense at all, and I think the existance of a tag has full sense so everyone does as they wish.
But about that: I think quality is important and I value more to avoid flooding of crap than how something is done. Anything with quality involves human work, no matter what tools were used. I saw sites completely flooded by crap that were not ai at all, and others flooded by ai. I value quality, inspiration and work. That's why.
Well said.
It is just not "the process" that is complained about or questioned. It is the result: cheap artworks. And instead of attacking this, they attack unethical ai systems or large power consumption. Both wich can be debated or remedied.
Especially the power consumption is a bit confusing. I can install a llm system on my desktop and churn out cheap artworks. This takes less power than me working on hand made art on that same desktop. Either ai is cheap to make or not. If it is cheap, it cannot suddenly be more costly in production when it suits the argument.
So better to "attack" the quality. Most AI works look AI. Why? Because they look the same. Uninspired, bland, out of place. And if they do not, you can bet that the developer put a sizeable amount of sweat into the work.
I do see parallels to painters and photographers. A painter takes days, weeks to paint something that a photographer can take as a picture in seconds without knowlege of paints and canvas and anatomy and so on. Yet photography still evolved to be considered an art. Curious, isn't it.
Power consumption is more of a concern when using company servers that you don't control, I agree that using a model locally on your own machine would be (probably) harmless. And by the same logic, training it on only data that you own should also be harmless.
In regard to tagging though, I would suspect that Itch wants to keep things as simple as possible. If you really need a disclaimer then you can add it to your page, each developer can be as specific as they want about their process.
Even when you use company server it is still more efficient as it does not really matter where you use energy - on your pc or on commercial server. (In fact, I believe commercial servers are more energy efficient). Because those networks use a lot of energy in a short period of time but alternative is to use average amount of energy for much longer period of time. Of course it is not always like that and just to be clear: I do not have exact numbers but it is how I assume the situation
But when we are talking about energy I always think people who really care about energy that much should not use x86 processors and services like Steam or Itch as they run their software on big commercial servers. Because where to put the line?
And by the same logic, training it on only data that you own should also be harmless.
And yet, I usually see all generative ai treated the same way in these discussions and with the handling of the tech. There is no differenciation at this point about any legally non-ambigous or ethically "clean" solutions. It is ai or not ai. And that is why I am lamenting that arguments against the tech should be solid and future proof instead of shortsighted and emotional.
With the current/initial filters provided there is also only ai yes or no with no practical information if it is content or just the code (yet?). Unlike artists, developers embraced the tech. Or at least that is my impression. It is the developers that create code with the tech. But with art, it is usually not the artists that use it to create more art, but people that could not draw at all to create images. Maybe it is, because in software it is a common concept to reuse other's code from templates, examples, and of course your own previous works and adapt it to new situations. In the visual arts that is frowned upon as "tracing".
There are many artists using AI. Also many painters, that generate references with it, or animate their own paintings in digital, and many mixed media artists, or hybrid artists. They all can draw and paint, as myself.
In one year or less, as public domain fully public sourced models appear and people identify the ones that are ethical, everyone will use it, except a few.
I marked my game with the AI tag, gladly. I hope the name changes to "ai usage", but it will be obvious that my work is a mix of traditional and generated skills as soon as people see it, so I don't really care. It's impossible to make a half decent game solely on AI.
The confusion about licenses, copyright, and polemizing on all this subject, fueled by the media, has damaged everyone. I understand the hate about the flooding of crap, but I hope it also becomes an old issue (exactly as when people got tired of DSL cameras and stopped annoying everyone making photos all day long).