itch.io

itch.io, founded in 2013 by programmer Leaf Corcoran (known online as leafo), is the open marketplace where independent developers sell games, tools, and game assets on their own terms — home to game jams, experimental work, and creators priced out of the bigger storefronts. That community, heavy with working artists and small developers, put itch.io on the front line of the generative-AI fight.

Mandatory disclosure

On November 20, 2024, Corcoran announced a “Generative AI disclosure” field on every project page: creators must declare whether a project contains generative-AI output, and if so whether it touches graphics, sound, text and dialog, or code. Projects answering yes are automatically stamped with an “AI Generated” tag; those answering no get a “No AI” tag that buyers can filter by. For game assets the policy has teeth — untagged AI assets, even if modified afterwards, are removed from indexing on itch.io’s browse pages, with the site’s quality guidelines citing “legal ambiguity around rights associated with Generative AI content.”

The move followed months of community pressure, part of the same artist-led backlash that produced the no-AI portfolio site Cara and the The Indie Game Awards’ ban on generative-AI entries. Corcoran framed the system carefully: for games it is “just a tag,” he wrote, with no penalty from itch.io itself — the filtering is left to users, like the site’s 2D and 3D tags. The hard enforcement is reserved for the asset marketplace, where unresolved copyright questions could flow downstream into buyers’ projects.

The policy made itch.io a reference point in the debate over AI provenance in games — stricter than Steam’s disclosure regime in its de-indexing of undisclosed AI assets, yet stopping short of the outright bans many of its artists wanted.