Game Developers Required to Reveal AI Usage on Itch.io

Developers are now obliged to reveal the involvement of generative AI in their projects when they upload games to Itch.io.

In a recent announcement from the platform’s founder, Leaf Corcoran, it’s been made clear that game creators must specify if they’re incorporating generative AI into their work. This requirement extends to whether the technology is being used for graphics, sound, text, dialogue, or the underlying code.

Should developers indicate that their game utilizes generative AI, the game receives a specific tag. There are further tags available for pinpointing the use of AI across graphics, sound, text and dialogue, and code.

As explained on Itch.io’s updated quality guidelines page, “Generative AI involves systems that produce new content—be it text, images, or music—by analyzing extensive datasets.”

This definition encompasses large language models such as ChatGPT and image generation models like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, all of which craft new outputs based on their training data.

The guidelines further instruct developers to “accurately tag your project if it contains materials produced by generative AI by utilizing the AI Disclosure section on your project’s edit page.”

Moreover, projects that employ self-contained algorithms without relying on external large datasets don’t need these generative AI tags. Examples include traditional game AI mechanisms like NPC pathfinding, enemy behavior patterns, procedural level generation, fuzzy logic systems, dynamic difficulty adjustment, and dynamic music, all of which aren’t considered generative AI and thus don’t require tagging.