Would TTS be considered use of AI?
I doubt you're still looking for an answer on this and I can't speak on behalf of site admins, but traditional TTS like Microsoft Sam I wouldn't consider AI, and Wikipedia doesn't use the term for those systems. Deepfake audio, such as getting a synthesised celebrity to voice your game without having to hire them, is widely considered AI.
I have started making games last fall I use AI for both graphical and music. I think AI is a wonderful tool for indies like us, it allows us a chances to rival the big studios by making the process quicker for a lone devs. That said, I am entirely for the Generative AI disclosure tag. If some assets came from stable diffusion, midjourney, suno, declare it! even if it's just one little graphic or logo.
In my latest tile puzzle game that's coming out on Steam, all the UX/UI was made by me (No AI), but the puzzle images and music were AI made.
If you're gonna go 1% of content on AI, might as well go 5-10-20-40%. And slop will still be slop no matter. Human oversight is absolutely necessary. I have seen some video: "Put up a video game in one hour with ChatGPT". That's terrible. The danger with AI is that the market will get flooded with garbage that look good on surface because of AI graphics. When you start to play it, you find out it's terrible.
I just posted on my devlog a post of my blog on how I make my graphics. Of course without entering into too much detail, but one can see how I go from a drawing by hand on pencil, then painting, then rendering in AI with my styles and concepts, and switch between that and painting a series of times, ending with hand made art again.
Hopefully some will appreaciate.
But that is not enough for extremists. I just had a rough weekend with some trolls.
Some people just won't tolerate ANY amount of AI. I am happy that the AI tag in my game keeps them away. I think that if that is for that, it's more than ok for me too. I am happy to use it.
By the way I love your game, and would love to network with other creators that use AI for art in a reasonable, quality way. I think those who are putting ethics, effort and quality do a good job, and I would love to meet and talk with others on the boat.
Hi Louis, nice to have you chime in on this. I have looked at your stuff and you actually start from a real drawing and apply a finish with the AI. For me, you're doing 70%-80% of the job and the AI is applying a final touch. Kudos!
As I said before AI slop is still slop. It needs the human touch to make it special. Quality first is my Motto. It's is known that a lot of AAA games companies have been making flops lately, I suspect a lot of their employees are not actually good at their job. AI give Indies a tool to create a full game in less time with more quality. It makes us compete better. I could bet money that the big studios are already using AI, but they have plausible deniability since they have art teams that can do the art. I suspect many employees there are keyboard warriors who bully small indies that use AI. They actually want your game to look like it was made in the 80s. Either that, or the trolls are mediocre indie creators with a crab in the bucket mentality. If they spend their day roasting other, they are not crafting games in the meantime! That's the point!
Thanks for the feedback on my game, I would also love to network with like minded creator. I will be following you.
Agree, and pleased to meet you! :)
There's a ton of people who post everything they do with AI, instead of posting only the best. But there's already also a ton of people who post every draft, every photo, and every spot of paint they do.
The state of this reminds me when everyone got a digital camera and was all day shooting photos, or later when everyone got a camera on the phone, and everyone was putting duck lips and posting every pic they did :D That can be very much more annoying than anything else for everyone and that's so understandable.
But for creative people, this is part of the skills and tools you can have to make things that otherwise may take ages or never be done.
About the kind of people who tolerate zero of generative arts, in my experience, not surprisingly they are never painters. Usually they belong to specific styles (I won't say which to not offend) or never do anything creative. That makes it even more annoying. Also, it seems the more beautiful you do, they feel more angry, even if you are not doing their style or genre at all.
Again, I think a filter is great, to isolate ourselves from that people, and they from us.
That's pretty much how I think I'll make my (point and click game) background images, too. I take photos of the city the game is set in, then I'm experimenting with using AI to give them more of a video game-ish look, like making them look like pixel art or drawings or something. For character portraits and whanot I'm using AI 100%, but I have a long-term goal/dream of using Kickstarter or something to raise money to commission human artists when the game is out.
Also, as Austin McConnell pointed out in his vid, in many cases you don't have a choice between human or AI art --I can't afford to hire human artists in the first place, so it's not as if human artists are losing work because of me. And as I said, AI is part of what makes lots of us indie and hobbyist devs these days able to make games in the first place.
Yes, you are styling your own work with AI. Only very fanatic people may see it differently from a classic filter or the work someone does with Photoshop.
About hiring, I think it's ok but if you are a solo developer, and you are not doing something (as a final resulting image) that is a plagiarism of someone's image, I don't see the problem.
I think the AI tag, although I may not agree with the "generated" part, is a great tool to keep your work separated between people that think it's just a way of working, and people that think it's not because some ai was used.
To be honest, given the amount of heat the topic of AI usage tends to generate, I plan to always mark my games as AI regardless of actual AI usage, just to avoid those pitfalls.
I think this is a good strategy for most developers, since people who care deeply about the 'AI purity' will find a flaw anyways (just about any graphical editor more powerful than MS Paint has some AI elements for example). So ultimately the 'AI-pure' niche will become self-contained, while the rest of us will have our freedom outside of it, and everybody will live happily thereafter :)
https://automaton-media.com/en/news/level-5-ceo-says-games-are-now-being-made-80...
Developers of Prof. Layton:
"Currently, around 80~90% of codes are written by AI and then fixed up and finalized by human programmers. In other words, it means that right now, around 80~90% of games are made by AI."
I'm not saying that codebases centered around AI shouldn't be tagged as such, but don't you think it's ridiculous that using AI to debug your code, or using it to help with creating heavy-duty physics aspects of your game automatically lumps it in with the run-of-the-mill ones with AI-generated visuals etc?
I think killing the nuance is inevitably going to lead to people lying about usage of AI within their development, just like many other developers have said in this thread. But hey, that's just the reality I'm seeing.
LLMs are now essential tools in development — they’ve effectively replaced traditional search.
I built my game from the ground up. I chose the tech stack myself, created all the UI components from scratch, and optimized everything for performance. My UI runs faster than most modern React apps — because I’ve been building software for over 20 years and witnessed the evolution of web technologies firsthand.
This is not a game cobbled together from boilerplate or template code. I made it myself. Yes, I used LLMs — every day, and a lot. Just like I use Google. Just like I read books. Just like I talk to real people to learn and improve.
The current “AI-generated code” category is misleading. It needs to be updated. Don’t devalue human effort just because modern tools are part of the process. My game is 99% human-made.
If that tag is required, maybe also add tags like “No Google”, “No Stack Overflow”, or “No Learning” — because that’s the level of gatekeeping it implies.
I wrote this reply myself, but used an LLM to help refine the text. These are still my thoughts — I just made them more readable. I also wrote the game’s documentation this way.
Does that really make my game “AI-generated”?
I assure you that many, many games are developed without any use of LLMs at all. That means they're not "essential."
The current tag is "AI-Generated Content." It sounds like you have some and therefore couldn't tag your content with "No AI." However, the new tag is only required for assets - not for ttrpgs or video games.
The way Itch implements AI disclosure is not quite satisfactorial. I think the textual disclosure as seen on Steam to be better. Also, the way these "tags" are shown, or rather not shown makes it feel like a hack. Also, some devs select those tags manually, adding to confusion of players and other devs. Not many people read this thread and understand how this really works. Maybe 5000 users read this thread. Probably less.
Itch currently has a yes or no and that might be ok for assets, but not for games. Customers look for different qualities in games and assets. Being AI free can be a vital quality for assets, so yes/no makes sense.
But players will have other standards for games. If they care for AI, it will be most likey be for the "content". To my understanding of language, content is what is shown, and not the method how it is shown. So, code is not content. It might be in some cases, but not generally. Using state of the art coding technologies and being lumped togher with ai slop creators is not really good for morale of developers. Not answering the AI disclosure might be prudent, but it is not elegant.
It might be good to integrate a small description field to basically give people a way to honestly describe their AI use. There is a difference between "I used AI for absolutely everything" and "Out of curiosity, I used AI to create 3 experimental textures and among my 600 self generated textures, I also used 3 AI generated textures".