Developers now have a new guideline to follow on Itch.io: they must declare if they’re using generative AI in their games. In a recent announcement from the platform’s founder, Leaf Corcoran, game creators were informed that they need to be transparent about the use of generative AI technologies. This applies across various aspects of a game, including graphics, sound, text, dialogue, and even coding.
When a developer indicates that their game utilizes generative AI, the game is tagged accordingly. There are further specific tags to highlight what exactly AI has been used for, whether it’s graphics, sound, text, dialogue, or code.
Itch.io elaborated on this in their updated quality guidelines, explaining that “generative AI” refers to systems capable of creating new content like text, images, and music by analyzing large datasets. They highlighted examples such as ChatGPT, for generating text, and DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion, which generate images based on historical data.
The platform urges creators to use the AI Disclosure section on their project’s edit page to accurately tag their games if they incorporate materials made by generative AI. It’s important to note, however, that self-contained algorithms that don’t rely on expansive datasets—like traditional game AI for NPC behaviours or dynamic difficulty adjustments—aren’t categorized under generative AI and therefore don’t need this specific tagging.
