On Itch.io, a new guideline has come into play that asks developers to be open about the use of generative AI in their games.
Leaf Corcoran, the founder of the platform, recently announced that game creators must now indicate if their projects incorporate generative AI technologies, detailing specific areas such as graphics, sound, text, dialogue, and even coding.
Should developers confirm the use of generative AI, their games will carry a tag marking it as such. Additional tags are available for different applications of AI, whether it’s in design elements like graphics and sound or in crafting text and dialogue, and constructing code.
Itch.io clarified on their updated quality guidelines page, explaining, “Generative AI involves artificial intelligence systems capable of producing new content—be it text, images, or music—by learning from extensive datasets.”
The platform further elaborates, “This encompasses large language models like ChatGPT and image-generating systems such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which produce new content based on their training data.”
Creators are urged to accurately assign AI tags to any project integrating generative AI through the AI Disclosure section found on their project’s edit page.
However, it’s important to note that not all AI usage requires tagging. Projects that rely on algorithms which operate independently of large external datasets fall outside the generative AI category. For instance, traditional gaming AI applications such as NPC pathfinding, behavior patterns for enemies, procedural level generation, fuzzy logic systems, and dynamic difficulty adjustment or music are not regarded as generative AI, thus negating the need for tagging.
