The disclosure by meta information is only mandatory for assets. And the grace period is not over, obviously.
But you now at least see in all projects information about the disclosure in the more info box. It's either yes, no or nothing. Nothing means the ai disclosure was not filled out.
And you are right, the no-ai only works with new games that bothered to fill it out. It is not the negation of ai-generated.
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? /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.
That’s exactly what I don’t want. I don’t want to see AI slop. I don’t want to see a checkbox that reminds me that AI slop exists. I don’t want to make a decision to include or exclude AI slop each time I go browsing. I want that crap gone - from search results, from the front page, and from the community forum.
Because despite all of the focus on tags and the obvious problems with the text search, I still often get better results when looking for specific types of game assets through the text search than through tags. For example, I can find a lot of castle tilesets by doing a text search on game assets for “castle tileset”, many of which are not tagged as “castle”.
Actually I can’t, because using text search takes away the ability to filter by tag. After using text search, the only options to narrow down the search are to filter by type, platform, or price. If I could, narrow down the search by tag, I would be able to use this to filter out AI slop by picking the “No AI” tag.
The other problem with narrowing down by tag is that not every project uses tags consistently, which means that most tags filter out more than I want. Tags like “castle” and “tileset” and “pixel art” and “16x16” can cause me to miss genuine pixel art 16x16 castle tilesets. That’s not a problem for the “No AI” tag though!
Only for games. Or rather, you only seek games by title if you know the title. You do not seek "castle defense game". That is because regular search is literal title search.
And assets usually do not have proper titles, but descriptive titles, so searching something like 16x16 will find projects that did not bother to tag 16x16.
Disable your nsfw setting. Nsfw is opt in. If you see those games on the front page, it will be your recommendation section on the front page. Itch does not feature nsfw games in their fresh and hand picked section.
User tags are a fine idea, but there is a huge problem there. About 1.2 million games on Itch have 0 ratings. I do not think many users will take the effort to give tags. And the tags given by the few users that bother, might be just as inaccurate as the developer tags.
The annoying thing about ai slop is, that some creators spam it. They release many, many games or assets. And if you try looking at a particular nieche, it can happen that all you see is garbage of one spammer on a page. I guess no one would care, if a developer releases 1 sloppy game, be it made with ai or not. But some of those release 30 projects in a month.
Slop essentially means low effort. Outside of software it can mean certain types of quickly made meals. It can also mean drainage water and waste.
If a dev releases 30 projects a month with ai, that is mass produced and ai slop. And you will find such "developers" that release even more than that. Though I have seen people do that without ai.
I have no issues with a hobby dev using ai to help on their hobby project. But there are accounts that use ai to churn out several projects a day and even with a price tag. This is not what Itch was made for. This garbage is not only ai slop, it is spam that clogs up Itch services.
One of those ai slop creators even has the audacity to post ai response to topics here in forum. Itch needs to ban this kind of behaviour. And ban it hard. With ai agents this is gonna get worse, if Itch does not take action.
