I first want to say that it's okay to be with or against AI. I don't have a problem with discussing a controversial topic like this one as long as we RESPECTFULLY agree and disagree. I am stressing on the term "respect", because sometimes disagreeing can be in the form of a spamming bully. 😔

My friend and I are software engineers and we love games. Playing them, designing them, developing them, thinking about them...whatever involves games we love it. ❤️

We made our first game after 4 months of hard work; learning about game design with courses, tutorials, and trying our best understanding the whole process of publishing a game on Itch.io. Then someone just comes and redefines all our efforts to "AI(p)" or "AI-made". Not only that but he spams us with his comments in our jam comments, in our game comments, replies to people who supported our game, and I won't be surprised if I learn that he/she has more than 1 account while doing this. 

We clearly tagged the game as AI-assisted and gave it credits in our description, but there's some confusion out there that I want to clear up. AI-made and AI-assisted are two different terms (AI slop is a whole 3rd different thing). In my opinion these are the definitions of the 3 terms:

• AI-made: means someone used AI to create a game with an initial general prompt, then kept accepting everything  (idea, asset, story, mechanic, etc..) from AI. Control is mostly given to AI in this type.
• AI slop: the terrible horrible result of "AI made" product that relates to anything like media, image, video, game, etc...
• AI-assisted: using AI to execute some tasks with human in the loop and human reviews and guidance. Control is mostly given to human in this type. 

Our game is the last type, but forget about our game because this is not the case. The thing is there are some people strongly against AI-assisted games because where is your effort when it is all AI-made? Which is something hard to experience because it's just like going against Unity-made games? I'm not sure what we're fighting over here. You love games, I love games. We both do games our own way, what's the problem here?

And some might think: 

"Oh so it's okay for you to steal someone else's art rather than just pairing up with an artist?". 

I'm already pairing up with an artist, but both of us are beginners here. And by the way, I'm an aspiring writer. You know the first people who got affected by AI because AI is originally based on text-generation? I'm one of them! I felt pissed at first but then I thought, people really use it out of need and it'll never replace a human speaking to human. Then I made a choice of writing my everything that can take sometimes hours, just because I like writing. They also said that emojis and "—" are usually used by AI, but who cares? 🙄

I don't know if you read this far but seriously people are forgetting that there are actual humans behind the screens they keep writing comments to. I appreciate anyone who respectfully turned out trying our game because that's totally cool, as I said, it's not about the game. It's about your way expressing yourself.🫥

I think I generally agree with your take, which is well considered. Maybe I am outside the norm, as I don't have any strong feelings about how others choose to use tools that are available to them, and how they choose to focus their creative abilities. 

it’ll never replace a human speaking to human

I wish that were true. In reality, people are forced to or are choosing to talk to a LLM instead of another human being every day.

I’m a bit concerned you haven’t noticed that. Maybe you’re sheltered from abusive “customer support” systems (which stopped providing interactions years ago) and the “meat puppets” who’ve stopped participating in actual conversations beyond acting as a speaker for a chatbot.

Lucky you, if that’s the case. I’ve seen something else happen these past ten years.

There’s not only the theft. The lies. Sociopolitical manipulation. CSAM. Growing wealth gaps. Wasted essential resources. Pollution. Ignoring the many other ethical issues around what’s currently called “AI”, including how the AI industry contributing to mass deaths and irretrievable cultural destruction, there is the mounting evidence it’s like an addictive drug.

Some people can shake off the effects with only short-term harm. Some people can’t.

The consequences of even a little “assistance” often includes cognitive impairment and a decrease in healthy social skills.

However, this site has a policy to allow works made with “AI” industry products and related systems. Even when games are mislabeled (not saying yours are), harassment about it doesn’t make any sense under the contracts we’ve agreed to. This is a site where everyone will find something they consider harmful or offensive. Looking away from those games when picking through search results or collections is a requirement to finding the good stuff no longer kept anywhere else.

The best response here to “AI-assisted” games is to move on (and periodically send Leafo a reminder that we need more exclusion tools). That’s my opinion, anyhow. You may feel you need to skip learning or asking for additional help, and you may prefer the projects like yours.

The rest of get a choice about supporting that or to focus on everyone else who continues to hold onto hope that the near future returns to pre-OpenAI human-to-human collaboration (to build up trust for later generations).

As for any harassment like described: Report. Block.