PieFedIndie Devs Have Begun Adding a No Generative AI Stamp to Their Store Pages
ThefuzzyFurryComradewww.gamingonlinux.com/2025/02/indie-devs-have-b…
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I can dig it. For me it's similar to seeing physical products described as "handcrafted" to denote quality versus something mass produced. A lot of indie devs pour enormous amounts of time and energy into animation, scripts, music, etc. that a derivative gen AI would just spit out in seconds.
Yes that is a good comparison. Similarly, indirect use of handcrafted or no gen ai is impossible to trace / verify / do. You can't handcraft each component for every tool you will be using. Similarly, you can't write your own library / compiler for every software component.
Such a label will indicate only on a high level, 'that technology' is not used. Which I think is fine.
Handcrafted can still use any sort of (power)tool. The actual difference is that it is low volume instead of mass production, even if the same tools are used.
Man, some real pathetic, deflated bullshit in this comment section.
This badge fucking rules. Let's make it a huge problem for the first game that uses it dishonestly.
RedSnt 👓♂️🖥️I wonder if LLM companies will use that stamp as a way to identify original ideas they can scrape.
More likely they just won't bother putting any effort into preventing their AI from copying the badge.
I meant to reply to you earlier and accidentally replied to the whole thread - I agree with the sentiment below. Honestly, using AI as a coding partner when learning is actually a pretty great use for it, if you're reviewing it properly, testing, and know its limits. This initiative is much more focused on the same sorts of low quality content farms and c-suite "cost cutting" initiatives that have been making gaming suck since long before AI. If you're the sort of developer doing game jams, focusing on learning rather than volume, and taking pride in your work the quality will show through regardless.
Hey man, don't get discouraged. AI isn't hated on because it doesn't have valid uses - *assistive* language-based problems are a great candidate for AI help, and coding is language!
What people are rightfully concerned about is AI being used to replace skilled work - especially artists - or use in establishing facts, not help teach newbies. Someone using AI to help word their resume or provide some help when stuck programming is not the issue - a game dev laying off artists and coders to let AI do the job worse but nearly free is.
Also, screw the independent developer who doesn't have artists to lay off nor the budget to hire them.
If they want to make a game then they should spend decades learning to program and decades learning to create art and decades learning to create music.
If they use AI to make code or assets then it completely invalidates their work and the fun that I'm having with their game is just fake fun.
The only Real Games are those made by giant corporations with the capital to hire artists, programmers and musicians that can lovingly hand craft the loot boxes for the next major children's casino.
e: Honestly, it's embarrassing that I have to add a /s for people to understand
You've started on a completely false assumption.
TBH some of the best art, music and creativity in games comes from small indie studios and developers. Who put creativity and skill into their project. They make it good by actually making it all. Games with a unique style and fun ideas come from small indie studios who need supporting.
AI is a shortcut to stealing others work by proxy. It creates content that is non-novel by its very design and by the very limitations of the tool.
artists, programmers and musicians that can lovingly hand craft the loot boxes
What are you on about? It's the companies churning out loot box after loot box that are programmatically producing them. You're actively invalidating your own point in your rant.
At this point, reading your comment again. I'm really hoping I just missed some dry sarcasm.
ChozoAnd who is verifying it?
It says it right on the stamp. "This developer". So themselves.
Users will end up verifying it. Activision just got caught using gen-ai in call of duty and had to come clean.
If developers are caught lying they will lose credibility.
EarMasterThere's absolutely no way this can go wrong.
It's fine guys, "we investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong" and "we will police ourselves" is always a surefire way to ensure accountability.
A very few bad games will put that badge, and in a few months no one would ever remember it. Like any other ridiculous anti-AI campaign. You can quote me on July.
If a gamedev want to use Stable Diffusion to render some art, or tortoise to make some voices/sound let them be. As it was predictable anti-AI people would began to pursue actual artist in the name of art.
I take the occasion to promote a really good indie game whose devs used AI to make some art for the game.
https://bitfans.itch.io/innsmouth
100% recommend.
Owl
Sunshine (she/her)
Hal-5700XOkay, but are the games good?
Sentient LoomWhy wouldn't they be? We hand-wrote all our good games until, like, yesterday.
Does this include code
Does it include human handpicked sentences that where gend.
Generate a dialogue script vs How could i rephrase this sentence to..
There is so much in between possible i feel like this label is more marketing then meaningful.
Of course i do know what they meant. They imply they did not cut corners with ai and put effort in delivering quality but i imagine there will be both low effort works using this label because they can and high effort works scrutinized after its found technically some gen ai was used.
Lem JukesAlso, not using AI in no way precludes you from producing low effort work.
kemsatI don’t think I would care if they did use AI. I would care about the game being fun. There are lots of games out there that suck even though no AI was used.
merari42This 80s metal band is making real music without synthesizers!
I just know people are going to flock to my novel that I manually typewritered each copy myself.
This feels discouraging as someone who struggled with learning programming for a very long time and only with the aid of copilot have I finally crossed the hurdles I was facing and felt like I was actually learning and progressing again.
Yes I’m still interacting with and manually adjusting and even writing sections of code. But a lot of what copilot does for me is interpret my natural language understanding of how I want to manipulate the data and translating it into actual code which I then work with and combine with the rest of the project.
But I’ve stopped looking to join any game jams because it seems even when they don’t have an explicit ban against all AI, the sentiment I get is that people feel like it’s cheating and look down on someone in my situation. I get that submitting ai slop whole sale is just garbage. But it feels like putting these blanket ‘no ai content’ stamps and badges on things excludes a lot of people.
Is this slop?
https://lemjukes.itch.io/ascii-farmer-alpha
https://github.com/LemJukes/ASCII-Farmer
Like I know it isn’t good code but I’m entirely self taught and it seems to work(and more importantly I mostly understand how it works) so what’s the fucking difference? How am I supposed to learn without iterating? If anyone human wants to look at my code and tell me why it’s shit, that’d actually be really helpful and I’d genuinely be thankful.
I am pretty sure this is not what the people who made the seal are talking about.
Read their site. They're talking about "pictures, movies, audio (music or voice action) and writing". Code in itself, especially for simple tasks like basic game logic, is not art, and I am saying that as a developer.
I am still very doubtful AI can write quality code, but I really don't care. I am sure it becomes a mess if you try to write very complex systems, but that's not the case for most games. And if AI generated code is good enough for your use case, good for you.
I'm not quite sure I'm following.
Are you saying that AI trained on the output of humans is unethical, unless those humans are programmers?
Or, as a professional programmer, you understand the limitations of AI in your field so you don't feel threatened by it while simultaneously assuming, on behalf of another profession, that AI in "artistic" fields is somehow far more capable and an actual threat?
Terrible programmers don't become professional programmers because they subscribe to Copilot. It provides a crutch to absolute beginners, allowing even the least skilled individual to create some low quality output. For professionals, AI allows for some aspects of existing tools to perform slightly better but cannot replace the knowledge, experience and practice of a human when it comes to applying those skills in novel and interesting ways.
Terrible artists don't become professional artists because they subscribe to Midjourney. It provides a crutch to absolute beginners, allowing even the least skilled individual to create some low quality output. For professionals, AI allows for some aspects of existing tools to perform slightly better but cannot replace the knowledge, experience and practice of a human when it comes to applying those skills in novel and interesting ways.
I am not "assuming" anything on anyone's behalf. There is a clear difference that's practically not even about AI at this point.
You're not stealing from a programmer by frankensteining bits of their freely available code. As someone else said, it's basically stack overflow with an extra step. There's no secret sauce in coding, you can evaluate code quality, you can exchange tricks and techniques, but you're not expressing yourself through code.
However, if you take bits of one or several cultural products without the creator's consent and pass the whole thing as your own, that's called plagiarism, and this is a special thing for a reason.
For AI, I don't think anybody cares about a random beginner using it as "crutch". People care about big entertainment companies deciding they need 90% fewer artists because AI does "good enough" (even when it does quite poorly, and even when it's trained on the work of people like the ones they're replacing).
Buddy, using AI as a coding crutch is not the issue for the same reason it’s not an issue if you rely on stack overflow for learning how other people do things. The issue is when generative AI is used to generate assets for a game.
So would you think I’d be welcomed to join a game jam with a ‘no AI’ rule or would I be disqualified? Based on the amount of downvotes both iterations of my original comment it genuinely seems like most people think I don’t belong.
In the game jam? no, because the point to write something yourself from scratch. You’d join the game jam once you no longer require the AI as a crutch. It’s ok to not be ready for a game jam.
That's the thing, i will never be able to write a complete project unaided, full stop. I banged my head against that process for 10+ years trying to teach myself. I've tried classes, books, tutorials and i always end up failing out because i am incapable of actually writing code correctly, even when i know what im doing is the way its supposed to work. I struggle enough with just spelling english words, my native fucking language, correctly half the time. So remembering where the semi colon goes or that you need to use : instead of = in these specific cases but not these specific cases, is something my brain is simply incapable of accomplishing.
I'm not applying for jobs, i'm not trying to build any kind of major infrastructure, i just simply want to participate in a community and not be shunned and ridiculed because i use a tool that allows me to participate at all.
You’re not going to be shunned or ridiculed for using an AI helper when coding. It’s not appropriate for use in a game jam generally, but that’s not the same as being shunned or ridiculed.
Like if you go into a big weightlifting gym, there will be people there on various chemical substances that augment your bodies natural abilities. These people aren’t going to be shunned or ridiculed from the weightlifting community just because they’re not 100% natural. But that doesn’t mean they’re going to be allowed into most competitions and they understand that.
I’m sure if you look hard enough you’ll even find some that allow the use of AI as long as you disclose what it is you use and how. But if the point of a given game jam is to demonstrate natural ability, why would they allow AI when that isn’t your natural ability?
Are you learning something when making something? Could you make an app similar to one you already made, but without using AI? Are you having fun?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, congrats! I recommend mentioning if you make something where a huge pert of the work was made with the help of AI on the page where it is posted though
Awesome! Glad there is still some artistic integrity in gaming.
I am never going to believe this tag, because if your game has code and was written since the start of 2025, you will not convince me Gen AI wasn't used in the coding process at bare min. I work with devs, I know how much people will just grab and use it without even thinking about it. IDEs come with features pre-enabled to help with autocomplete powered by Gen AI, basically everyone is using it in one way or another.
The chance that none of your team of developers on your project arent even at minimum doing basic querying gippity on stuff, is... so low
IF you tell your devs they cant use it, they'll still use it but just not tell you they are using it, they'll just open up gippity on a second laptop and use it that way if forced to.
Now to be fair, there is a massive difference between using the fancy "AI" autocomplete to fill out the rest of a line when writing a function or something. And actually generating music, voice acting, art, etc.
That's at least where I personally draw the line between proper generative content and not. Partly because the autocomplete is possible without any form of ML. Some of the suggestions are often of similar quality as ones I got in Dreamweaver over twenty years ago.
Jep, that's something that bothers me now, every algrorithm or autocomplete is now also branded as "with ai support". I don't need ai to add the 'if _name_ =="_main_" stuff in my python file IDEs (or even lightly advanced text editors) can add that stuff since long before LLMs where a thing...
If you label your stuff as ZERO gen ai being used in it, I would damn well expect you truly mean that.
Otherwise it is 100% false advertising.
And, as a result, I classify everyone who uses this label as false advertising, and as a result am 0% interested in buying their stuff.
There's a huge difference between AI Slop churning to produce a garbage product, vs trying to outright lie to me and try and pretend you didnt use AI at all to make your thing, in any way.
Thats just not how reality works.
You used it, admit you used it, everyone uses it, and thats fine
But theres a difference between using AI to make the output, vs making the output with AI
I give zero fucks if your team used, for example, AI to generate placeholder images for your game development to act as sort of templates for the developers, so you can make your game way faster, and then replaced them with real actual art made by humans, ensuring key things in the art are roughly in the same spots so stuff like hitboxes and etc still line up.
Or using AI generated music placeholders so you can asap start testing your sound engine actually works, as well as a way to convey vibes and what you want to your music engineers so they can make something better.
Or using AI to assist with generating the code for your project, because everyone already does that and you are huffing copium if you think the industry isnt rife with that already
This is a bit of a tangent but this is a big part of why I didn't get back into software dev after my team was let go. My old company is basically just a genAI shitshow these days and the entire culture in that industry is fucked.
I'm still in a role adjacent to what I used to do, but I'm much happier here even if it pays substantially less.
Everyone is using it for a reason, as long as you arent doing anything esoteric or bleeding edge, gen AI is about 60% accurate at producing pretty useable results for code. And I say that as a developer with 15 years experience.
If you try and point it at some niche library or framework, or a new version with stuff that just came out, yes, it shits the bed.
But if you just prompt it to do an extremely bog standard task that is already a very well solved problem, 99% of the time it mostly gets it right, right enough that all you gotta do is clean up the formatting and maybe organize it better, make it tighter or better looking, etc, but it'll complete about 90% of the work up front.
Its extremely good at when all it has to do is just replicate code you already wrote but slightly different, like when you need to just invoke some logic for 1,2,3,4,5.... You do it once for 1, start typing for 2 and it'll just autocomplete it.
Mind you, in neovim Shift+A can do the same pretty well too if you know what you are doing.
But nonetheless, everyone uses this stuff because it works, not amazing but its really really good at doing a lot of the boring/repetitive/easy boilerplate kind of stuff.
If you arent using it, you're going to start falling behind as other people get better and better at using it.
So just... fuck indie devs? What's the point you want to say?
More that this is lip service.
This is like the indie label itself.
There's companies with 50 employees calling themselves Indies alongside the solo developers.
I've kinda wanted to make a game with as close to all AI as possible while still being something possible to play to completion. In my head its like userinyerface.com but more of a game and tons of ai hallucinations