I know it's a lot to ask, but have you ever thought about banning AI-generated games from Itch?
Ofc there can be some exceptions, such as games made by 15% of AI, and the remaining 85 of human art.
But I really hope you're going to prevent this, because I think trend is about to increase after The Scam before, and looking at what happened in the last few days on Steam I've really got a lot of bad, and I mean REALLY BAD VIBES about this.
Right now, creators who use AI are required to mark them accordingly. (It's already possible to filter by the no-ai tag.) After a grace period, projects that use AI will be clearly indicated and there's going to be dedicated filtering if I remember correctly what our admins said. But creators are being given more time.
https://itch.io/t/4309690/generative-ai-disclosure-tagging
This field is now required for all asset creators on itch.io. If you have a public asset page on itch.io and you view your dashboard, you will now see a blocking dialog instructing you to classify your pages.
There is ambiguity around AI disclosure in non assets. This part of the faq was there before the new feature.
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.
It should be obvious that one should not lie about it and brag about human art that is not made by humans. But the tagging mechanism and subsequent filtering is not quite what suits all. I prefer the detailed information like seen on Steam and not a yes/no.
The introduction of that feature as tags is quite botched anyways. People are manually tagging both tags which makes users uncertain about the feature. It should be a meta-info only and not also a regular tag. It is the same desaster as with the unity tag and the made with unity meta info. Both filters exist and they do not overlap 100%.
Did you seriously just compare genAI, which is used by people to create "art" without bothering to develop the skills for it, to goddamn wheelchair access, something designed to help people who are unable to move around "normally" to exist in society at all? Really? You don't think that's in any way a disingenuous comparison?
I keep seeing that argument. Apparently it's ableism to ask people to think for themselves or something, or at least it is according to these folks. It's always hypothetical too! They rarely have an example of how someone COULDN'T come up with their own games or do the labor of thought themselves that isn't borderline at best. It's gap in several arguments, like how we want people with something like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to not suffer from something outside of their control but we also don't want people becoming the citizenry of the space ship on Wall-E. And all of that is alongside whether or not these generative tools are even good enough to justify throwing away a huge chunk of human endeavor for.
You're forced to ask what it is we really want out of life: perfect convenience at the cost of our agency or agency and striving but also some degree of inequality.
If you were to want to ban a thing like gen ai you would need to clearly define what you mean by gen ai and why you would want to ban it.
If it boils down to banning computer assisted creation of things, that is hard to argue, since already digital art creation is a lot different from analog creation of the same art. People just could not be bothered to develop the skills to do it with ink and brush. They just click buttons to draw a circle. They can even undo their mistakes, unlike drawing on paper. Or just look at a photographer that does not even draw at all, but creates a picture by just capturing what is there - and later modifying it with digital tools.
If it is by source of learning materials, that is an easier case and actually part of the reasoning behind mandatory asset tagging on Itch. There is ambiguity and discussion about copyright, legality and whatnot. But this is also short sighted, because in the future there could be computer systems that output the same workload by other means. Other training material. Procedural generation. Actual intelligent systems that actually learned. Whatever. Does not matter.
If it is a site ban, that is the easiest to argue and there is a lot of precedent in terms of quality arguing. Itch has an arbitrary file number limit in web games for this very reason. And a lot of ai gen creations look not really good and can be put out very fast, so overal quality can suffer. On the other hand, overall quality on the lower end of popularity ranking is, well, lower. All without help of ai. Humans do not need ai to create bad art in games.
What I see in practise in the indie sector is games being created by people not having a budget or talent for doing art, but for creating a game. So it enables them to create a game. Just as the existence of game engines like Godot does. They can partake in that hobby. It is not overcoming a disability, but it is overcoming a barrier.
For games in particular, things like rpg maker do enable hobby creators to put out games far more, than gen ai images do, in my opinion. So if we prevent ai slop on Itch, why stop at ai slop. There is regular slop as well.
We can't seem to get a large hobby site that isn't monetized in some way. It'd be one thing if folks had the time, resources, and space to just put stuff out in the world but not everyone can afford to. Because of the constraints of the current economic system, folks who don't have some sort of fallback are forced to compete over very little just to get by. There's nothing stopping some large, already wealthy company from creating or even funding content spammers, whether they use AI or not, to flood the space to eliminate competition from indies. They could weather the onslaught but small time game creators would have to fold, unable to pay their bills because their products are mostly getting buried under an avalanche of slush.
I have no problem putting out the casual, lower quality games that I do because I THOUGHT it was no big deal, that this was basically a hobbyist site. Honestly wondering if I should leave though, if I'm not contributing to the slush flow.
You lost me there. Itch aint youtube with the content farms that mass produce shovelware clickbait.
Content here is not monetized by existing and generating traffic. The games do not make money by being on Itch, so there is no leverage to spam low effort things.
People vote here with their purse. If they like something, they buy it or "donate" to the project. So if they give money to a project involving ai, that is what they want. For whatever reason. Possibly because it is a good game and the ai is either seen as an enabling factor or actually looks good enough, because effort was put into it. Yeah sure, some naive people put out cookie cutter template games with ai slop and hope for some pocket money. But do they get it? Does such slop appear in here? https://itch.io/games/top-sellers
I do not know the threshold to appear in that list, but over 90% of the games here do not make it. And I have an inkling that anything "slop" is usually not in that list. No matter why it is slop.
