Does this apply to GitHub Copilot as well? I don’t think code should be part of this policy. Nearly every software developer uses AI tools now - whether for code completion, debugging, or generating boilerplates. It’s simply an efficiency tool.
30 days ago (+7)
Use your best judgment. Every Gen AI tool can be reduced to “simply an efficiency tool.” If your project contains code synthesized by a Large Language Model trained on a large, opaque corpus of data, then I think it’s fair to conclude that your project includes content from generative AI. There are many “autocomplete” tools out there that don’t use this type of technology. Just because GitHub Copilot is ubiquitous and convenient doesn’t really change the nature of what it is.
I think there are a lot of people overthinking it: the tagging exists so that users have the power to filter the content they want to see.
Any expectation you have on how those tags may affect the visibility of your project is a bias you carry. itch.io itself doesn’t apply any penalties or automatic filtering of this content, in the same way that we have tags for “3D games” and “2D games.” If someone wants to look at 2D games, I think it would be unreasonable for a creator of a 3D game to feel excluded if their page isn’t showing in that user’s results.
Hope that explains.
30 days ago(+2)
Thanks for your response! I still think including code under this policy doesn’t make practical sense, considering the current state of software development.
Considering that almost every dev today uses AI tools like Copilot, even generating a single function with Copilot would require us to use the AI tag, according to your reply. It basically means that almost every project will need the AI tag.
This makes is less useful for anyone wanting to filter content based on AI usage, since many users do not understand the difference between Github Copilot which is used as an efficiency tool, and something like Midjourney where it’s being used to generate full assets like artwork.
This will lead to either:
- Devs not being honest about using AI
- Overusing the AI tag where 90% of projects are marked as AI which kind of misses the point because filtering out AI will return very few results
30 days ago(+1)
Overusing the AI tag where 90% of projects are marked as AI which kind of misses the point because filtering out AI will return very few results
I don’t see how it’s missing the point. If the reality is that 90% of pages are using Gen AI, then I would expect the tagging to reflect that.
The way I’m interpreting your post is that you want your projects, which I’m assuming contain the output of Gen AI (but subjectively not as “bad” as some other forms of Gen AI), to appear in front of people who have explicitly filtered out Gen AI. Honestly, my opinion here is to just let those people filter how they want and don’t worry about pushing your work in front of them when they’ve clearly expressed what they want to see.
A quick look over your account shows that you don’t even have any game assets for sale. I primarily expect the majority of those using the “No Gen AI” filter will be those browsing for assets to include in their own games. I believe the average “gamer,” for better or worse, doesn’t really care about how a game was made.
30 days ago(+2)
It is only mandatory for asset creators, but we encourage everyone to fill it out at their convenience.
30 days ago(+3)
tl;dr If this is implemented with tags, consider a tag that encapsules the three content types. Just like "no-ai" encapsules the three content types plus code.
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It will depend on the implementation/user interface to apply the ai filters for browsing.
If people want to browse for "non-ai games" and devs honestly disclose the usage of their helper's outputs, many games might fall under the "ai" branch because of code, but the player browsing for games might not care for mere code, only for art as in pictures and story.
This is a language and definition thing. But in a game, the code is not the content. It is the means to display the content.
There currently are those 4 sub filters to positivly select ai content.
1 AI Generated Graphics 2 AI Generated Sound AI 3 Generated Text & Dialog 4 AI Generated Code
"no-ai" is !(1||2 ||3||4)
"no-ai-artworks" would be !(1||2)
"no-ai-content" would be !(1||2||3) - on the basis that code is not content.
My point is, people browsing for assets would use "no-ai" to select apropriate assests for their no-ai project. Or select the positive sub tags for their AI-containing project.
But people browsing for games might prefer "no-ai-content". If there is only the full "no-ai" filter they would filter out lots of games that feature only human made art, but might fall under ai because of code.
I mean, people already use full engines to deliver their content. Coding is just not the same as content and art. I do not see much discussion about people wanting to filter out all the games that use a game engine, or code made with help of generative ai. But I do see people wanting to not play games that have AI pictures and AI story writing.