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Itch.io outlines what the limit is for AI-generated content after its spree of mass deletion

After an influx of AI games, itch.io is cutting down on the spammers
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Itch.io outlines what the limit is for AI-generated content after its spree of mass deletion
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The indie games platform recently posted that game page creation has doubled per day in the past two months. With the rise of AI being used in the creation, it has really sped up development or even allowed more users to create games, although with questionable quality. Especially as it also reports that downloads and purchases haven’t followed suit.

As such, the brunt of hosting and the image costs of doing so have increased for itch.io, and so it’s taking steps to mitigate that. On its socials, it posted that it had just deleted a couple of terabytes of AI slop, thinning out the list and reducing how much data it has on its store. But with that, concerns have been raised as to how it’s deciding what counts as slop and what can fall foul of deletion.

itch.io’s new guidelines for AI-generated content

Simply posting “Here is the boundary, don’t be a spammer” there is a new section in its content creator quality guidelines to read up on. You can find the new information below.

While we understand in some cases automatically generated or AI-generated content can be useful or interesting, do not use automated systems to mass produce product pages. We will consider this spam and may remove your pages from our browse and search pages.

This includes but is not limited to:

  • Games or projects that are predominantly created by algorithms or AI with minimal human intervention.
  • Content that is randomly generated with no or minimal curated design.
  • Multiple iterations of essentially the same content that are generated by AI or algorithms.

Please ensure that your content brings something new and valuable to the community. If your project involves automatic or AI generation, make sure it’s clearly stated in your project description and that it adds substantial value to the user experience.

The new guidelines outline ensuring there is some human interference and not posting too often. Curating the work and following some sort of design, without the same project being uploaded but just reskinned.

That is also followed by the fact that any use of generative AI needs to be disclosed in the posting. Much like Steam, which also had an influx of AI games, users will get to choose what projects they want to support and whether they want AI-generated games or not.

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With a fascination for technology and games, Seb is a tech writer with a focus on hardware, news, and deals. He is also a tester and reviewer for the site. Contact him @ [email protected]

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