Developers Required to Reveal AI Usage in Games on Itch.io

Developers on Itch.io now have a new responsibility: they must reveal if their games incorporate generative AI. In an announcement, Leaf Corcoran, the platform’s founder, emphasized the importance of transparency regarding the use of this technology. Game creators need to clearly indicate whether they’ve implemented generative AI and specify how it’s been utilized—whether that’s for graphics, sound, text and dialogue, or even coding.

Once a developer marks their game as using generative AI, it receives a corresponding tag. Moreover, there are distinct tags available depending on whether AI is employed for aspects like graphics, sound, text, dialogue, or code.

Itch.io elaborated on this in their updated quality guidelines. They described generative AI as systems capable of creating fresh content, such as text, images, or music, by learning from extensive datasets. This category includes technologies like ChatGPT for language, and DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion for images, all of which produce novel outputs informed by training data.

Creators are encouraged to use the AI Disclosure section on their project’s edit page to accurately label any content derived from generative AI. However, not all AI usage requires tagging. Projects that utilize self-contained algorithms, such as those handling NPC pathfinding, enemy behavior patterns, procedural level generation, fuzzy logic systems, dynamic difficulty adjustments, or dynamic music, are excluded. These are considered traditional game AI and don’t fall under the generative AI umbrella, so no tagging is necessary.