Developers who publish their games on Itch.io now face a new requirement: they must disclose whether their projects incorporate generative AI. This announcement came from the platform’s founder, Leaf Corcoran, who emphasized the importance of transparency. Creators will need to specify if they use generative AI technologies in various aspects of their games, such as graphics, sound, text, dialogue, and code.
Once a game is marked as using generative AI, it receives a tag, and additional tags can be assigned depending on the specific applications—be it graphics, sound, narrative, or programming-related. The updated quality guidelines outlined by Itch.io describe generative AI as systems capable of creating new content, like text or images, by learning from extensive datasets. This includes sophisticated models such as ChatGPT for language and DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion for images, each generating content based on previous training data.
Developers are urged to precisely tag their projects within Itch.io’s AI Disclosure section if their game features generative AI-produced elements. However, games employing traditional game AI—such as NPC pathfinding, enemy behavior algorithms, procedural level design, fuzzy logic, and dynamic adjustments like music or difficulty—do not fall under the generative AI category and therefore don’t require these specific tags.
