Developers listing their games on Itch.io now need to reveal if they’ve used generative AI in their creations. Leaf Corcoran, the platform’s founder, announced in a recent post that creators must specify whether their game incorporates generative AI technology, detailing its use in areas such as graphics, sound, text, dialogue, or even the game’s code.
Once developers indicate that generative AI is part of their game, it receives a specific tag. Additional tags are available to highlight AI’s role in producing graphics, sound, text, dialogue, and coding content.
Generative AI, as described on Itch.io’s updated quality guidelines, refers to systems capable of creating new content—be it text, images, or music—through learning from extensive datasets. This encompasses various models like ChatGPT for language processing and image generators such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, which all create new outputs based on their training data.
Itch.io emphasizes the importance of correctly tagging any materials developed through generative AI via the AI Disclosure section found on a project’s edit page. However, it points out that if your project employs traditional game AI that doesn’t lean on massive external datasets—like NPC pathfinding, enemy behavior algorithms, or procedural level creation— there’s no need to apply the generative AI tags. Techniques such as fuzzy logic systems and dynamic changes in both game difficulty and music are also exempt, as they rely on inbuilt algorithms rather than expansive data models.
