itch.io

Linux is not, in fact, AI-free

I'd be happy to continue this discussion with you in an appropriate thread.

You're a mod. You're supposed to react to reports. You're not doing that. Calling you out in public is the only recourse you give me.

When will you ban happystoner5420?

Because the itch.io forums are very bad at displaying images, here are some choice quotes:

"lol piss off u fucking faggot (smiley) holy fuck your pfp is unbearably retarded"

"cause youre a faggot and dont belong here"

"Lmao the mental illness that faggots have really effects their braincell count"

"Fag central" (above a transphobic picture)

"This phonk owns you lil bro 😂✌️ and all GAEs" (misspelling "gay" as "GAE" in order to mask homophobia is a favourite of this guy)

This is a behavioural pattern stretching over multiple months; almost all content on this person's profile is homophobic or transphobic hate speech.

Reported them months ago, no reaction.

"AI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Sounds, Text"

so basically you did nothing. congrats. Even the description stinks of AI.

It's not my type of game - my type of game is "stuff somebody actually cared about".

Calling your AI slop anything but AI slop ignores the work you refused to do and instead outsourced to the codestealing machine.

Capital Clash isn't a game, it's AI slop.

I'm not sure why we are even having this discussion, because itch.io has repeatedly demonstrated that you can just mark your game as "No AI" and they won't care. But if you keep calling out the person who is doing the lying, you're gonna get banned for "harassment" because this website and forum are run by people who love scammers.

Okay, so you do not know what "likeness rights" are.

Is there any AI advocate on this forum who knows how anything fucking works?

It's because itch.io is a shitty platform that sucks, run by people who do not have any values whatsoever. Itch.io tolerates homophobic hate speech, it tolerates racism, it tolerates intellectual property theft, it tolerates fraud. It tolerates fraudsters making entire games to harrass people who call them out on their fraud. The one thing itch does not tolerate is being called out on how much their shitty platform sucks.

Well, thanks for the confirmation that you actually don't give a shit

"That explanation makes it easier to understand. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to know which parts of the database are protected by copyright and which aren’t; in that sense, there isn’t much that can be done."

There is something very easy to be done: You just do not use the model unless all of the material that went into it was properly licensed.

If you know that a box of stuff contains some stolen material, and you buy the entire box knowing that some of the content is stolen, it doesn't suddenly become morally just or acceptable or even legal just because you do not know exactly which parts are stolen.

I am not sure what part of "stealing pixel art is exactly as bad as stealing other kinds of art", "if you use AI, that means you are using AI", or "the thing you put into an AI and the thing that comes out of an AI are different things that can have different copyright statuses" is an "emotional argument" and I am honestly sick and fucking tired with the continued intellectual dishonesty and utter refusal to actually engage with any argument from you. And y'all being a bunch of liars who get offended when confronted with facts and whine about having to disclose that you are doing the thing you are doing  is, if anything, making me hate AI more because its cultists are so goddamn deeply unpleasant to have to share space with.

I'd also like to invite you to look at the likes on my posts about AI. Clearly, there are a lot of people here who are just as fed up with the AI bullshit as me. It just seems like most of them have been cowed into silence by the constant namecalling, harrassment and insults towards people who dare point out facts like "almost all generative AI models were trained on stolen art". So I do not consider being called the "resident AI hater" an insult, I consider it a title of honour and it only confirms that someone needs to keep calling y'all out.  

YMMV, but my analytics say that most people find my games via tags, not via the "main genre". So don't worry about it too much, just pick one and make sure to add tags for all the genres your work fits into.

A studio is a company that makes games. They don't buy games from outsiders, generally. What you are looking for may be a publisher.

If a publisher is looking for submissions, they are going to tell you how to reach out. Example: https://www.team17.com/pitch-your-game

The answers to questions 3 and 4 are, of course, "it depends".

I might do it in the future if, and only if, I have a game in whose market appeal I am reasonably confident. Publishers are unlikely to be interested in something as aggressively unmonetizable and unmarketable as Collared Maid, but that might be different for future projects. I'd also need to have confidence in my ability to actually deliver a finished project on a fixed deadline, which for this project I do not have due to my job and various personal circumstances.

For the seven-hundredth time: if you are modifying your work by merging it with material stolen from other people, there is no fundamental difference between that and just stealing outright. No stupid analogy is going to fix that.

Because computers are complex machines and games use a wide array of their abilities. Games are some of the most complex software in the world.

Learning how to develop any kind of software takes time and effort - games, doubly so.

Personally, I would recommend you grab some books (ideally, ones from 2023 or earlier as the game-making book market is flooded with AI slop these days) about Godot, and possibly on programming on general because gamemaking books tend to gloss over the basics. Really work through these books, type in the example code yourself and mess around with it. That's the only way to gain a structured understanding and the ability to actually do things, in my experience. A tutorial from YouTube cannot give you that.

And nobody is claiming copyright to animation in general, only to those animations that were stolen from their authors to train the AI models that are creating animations for you.

Again, if the animations you are generating with them are so simple and generalistic that they couldn't possibly be copyrighted, you should be able to just do them yourself. You aren't doing it, because you aren't able to, because it is nontrivial creative work, and therefor it should be protected by copyright just like any other nontrivial creative work.

So, again: why should this be treated differently and more lightly than stealing other kinds of nontrivial creative work?

Allow me to repeat myself:

I am not aware of any precedent when it comes to pixel art, but in music, landmark US cases have upheld copyright for musical motifs consisting of as little as four (that is the number that comes after three) notes because even that constitutes enough creative effort (the actual standard that is being applied) to constitute copyrightable material.

I would also argue that, if making pixel art doesn't take enough effort to justify copyright, surely you can just make your own without using AI. Right? You'd have to be a pretty big idiot if you need AI to generate the artistic equivalent of a single musical note.

The illustration you are feeding into the AI is. The animation that comes out of the AI is *not*. Surely you understand that an animation is a different thing from an illustration?

Also, not a man.

So now we've gone from "i respect pixel art and don't think of it as lesser" to "pixel art is so simplistic and stupid that it couldn't possibly be copyrightable".

You're wrong, of course, pixel art absolutely is copyrightable. I am not sure if the snippet of a larger tilesheet (from a larger game) is in itself copyrightable, but larger pieces of pixel art absolutely are. Even with mine, judgement is gonna depend a lot on legislation and on who has the better lawyer. As per ownership, I am actually pretty confident that my "paper trail" of my creative work, including aseprite files in a timestamped git repository showing my progress, would hold up to establish ownership in court. It doesn't really matter if you, personally, are able to recognize a distinct style in a work. That is not the standard the law applies to check if a work is copyrightable. I am not aware of any precedent when it comes to pixel art, but in music, landmark US cases have upheld copyright for musical motifs consisting of as little as four (that is the number that comes after three) notes because even that constitutes enough creative effort (the actual standard that is being applied) to constitute copyrightable material.

Could you get away with stealing my snake profile pic? Probably, because suing you is more trouble than it is worth. Would stealing my snake pixel art and passing it off as your own make you a thieving little asshat? Yes, absolutely. (Speaking purely in hypotheticals here, of course.)

To conclude:

* you have no clue about AI

* you have no clue about copyright

* your ethical framework consists of "if i can get away with it, it is morally acceptable"

It is pretty clear that itch.io should not take any advice from you. Now kindly stop embarrassing yourself.

I understand just fine what animating something means: It means creating a bunch of similar images that are played in fast succession to create the illusion of movement. I literally did that yesterday.

If you don't make the animation, you don't own the animation. Simple as that. And no amount of obfuscation or insulting me by insinuating I do not know what words mean is going to change that.

The whole AI industry runs on the principle of "you can never prove that this output stole from this specific input, so what we are doing is totes legal". It's theft that's being legalized through fancy math - which is why I reject AI models that are trained on copyrighted data without the consent of the creator as immoral outright and do not want anything to do with people who use those models.

That doesn't make it ethical to do so, which is why we have AI disclosure - so that I, as a consumer, know that you are willing to steal from others as long as you know that you can get away with it, and can then decide that I do not want anything to do with you.

No, I'm calling you a thief for stealing the work of the others whose work your AI input is blended with.

If you put your own work into generative AI and have it modify it, what comes out is a hybrid of your art and the many, many stolen pieces of art that were used to train the AI. That's a fact. That's how the AI works. The thing that comes out of it is NOT your work.

You have the right to modify your own work, but if you modify your work by blending it with stolen stuff, then the result is a derivative of this stolen stuff. And you do not, in fact, have a right to do that without being accused of stealing.

"we conducted an online survey (n = 42) with game design professionals, followed by in-depth online interviews (n = 9)"

I don't have to read more than one page at all - just the introduction tells me this has nothing to do with what players want, and even if it did, n = 42 is not remotely statistically significant. This study is blatantly unrelated with my claim, and even if it wasn't, it could easily be dismissed.

You want to label your game that was made using AI as being made without using AI, because according to your judgement you didn't use it all that much. That's deceptive. Sorry.

"I don’t think pixel art is inferior, but since it’s art made with pixels, it’s more limited, and that makes it harder to have a recognizable style in small works. As sad as that sounds, it’s a reality.

I'm sure I could show you any 48x48 pixel art from anywhere in the world, and you wouldn't be able to tell who made it."

That doesn't make it more acceptable to plagiarize it.

"I’ve been wondering if that’s somehow a coincidence."

See, the fun thing about AI is that nobody can ever say for sure if it is a coincidence or not. Therefor, it is completely morally acceptable!!1! 

If you use AI only for some specific things rather than for everything, that is not a "grey area". The question "Do you use AI or not" is very simple to answer, and in your case the answer is "yes". If you feel offended by the idea that your game is labelled as using AI, you probably should not be using AI.

The thing with AI is that a lot of people want to argue that their way of using it, or the area where they are using it, is perfectly fine. I disagree, and as a consumer (for whose benefit this disclosure exists), my definition of the word "using" is in line with the one provided in the OED, not with whatever definition you want to come up with so you can carve out an exception for yourself.

In another thread, you argue that you just use AI for generating pixel art (where I do not see why that is fundamentally different from using it for any other kind of art, unless you think that pixel art is "lesser" and stealing it is therefor more morally acceptable) and for animating your own art (where you are still using a machine that steals from every animator on the planet in order to make something you are not able to do yourself). I absolutely reject the idea that these usecases are somehow more okay than other uses of generative AI models trained on stolen content. Plus, copyright infringement is not the only concern around AI; artistic integrity and quality are also of note. I do not believe AI animation is good, and I do not want to be tricked into buying AI animations believing they are made by humans.

If itch.io ever allows creators to claim they haven't used AI when in fact they have, I would stop buying anything on this platform. Period. Requiring vendors to be truthful in their product descriptions is the literal bare minimum for a usable marketplace, and allowing creators to lie because telling the truth might hurt their sales numbers, their reputation or their ego is flat-out unacceptable.

I really do not understand why this is so hard to grasp for some people.

Decompilers usually output massively unreadable code that needs a lot of decyphering and manual cleanup in order to be workable again.

Then again, some game engines do not even compile the game code to begin with.

We'd need more detail on how the game was made to give helpful answers - although I am reluctant to help here because tomas1235 does not have games on his account so I am immediately suspicious if he actually wants to recover his own game or steal / rip off someone else's.

"As an artist, I  want good art."

As an artist, I also want good art. I also want to live in a house, eat food and have access to medical care, which requires money. If you end up bankrupt and unhoused because you gambled your entire existance on a project whose success chances you vastly overestimated, you will not be happy about that.

I'd also argue that being housed, fed, medically cared to is a prerequisite for making art - especially video games. If you freeze to death under a bridge, you will not be able to make art afterwards.

If you dump 11k of money you just have lying around somewhere and don't need for anything else into your passion project, that is one thing. But from what you describe, it sounds like you do not have any income stream and are selling off vital items because it is your only way of funding your passion project, and that is a dangerous path.

Personally, I'd care more about my perspective on an engine - do I feel comfortable working with this? Does it help me, or does it stand in my way? Could I make something better with other tooling? - than about the perspective of the very small subset of players who actually care about the engine.

Sure, Godot is a far better game engine than RPG Maker, mostly because it has a completely different scope, and it doesn't carry the same stigma as RPG Maker (which is somewhat deserved because RPG Maker makes cheap asset flips easier than any other engine). But if you cannot deliver your game with Godot, or it takes you three times as much work as it would have in RPG Maker, or the finished game in Godot sucks because you don't really understand Godot as well as RPG Maker, avoiding the stigma of RPG Maker is not going to save you.

(But if you do stick to RPG Maker, you absolutely need to know how to use its scripting to build custom UI and mechanics if you want to build something that does not feel like every other RPG Maker game out there.)

The problem with RPG Maker is that it is just very limited in some ways so you can't fully avoid that your game will look and feel like an RPGMaker game to some extent, no matter how much effort you put into it.

But I think that's okay - yeah, there's definitely some stigma around RPG Maker, but I've seen some very fun games made in it, and there's some very critically acclaimed RPGMaker games too.

I have spent maybe 100 or 200 bucks on various third-party game assets and tools over the years, and my build server costs me 6 bucks a month. I work on my games in my spare time while working a full-time job, so I do not have any labour to factor in.

This is going to get me insulted again but you should look at your failed crowdfunding campaign and seriously consider how much more money you want to throw into your project. You're extremely unlikely to recuperate that cost, to be honest, and if you do not have income outside of your game, you could end up in a very nasty financial situation.

AI is not "just another creative tool", it is a "tool" that can only exist by stealing from every artist in the world and that can only create soulless, worthless slop. It is a tool for art in the same way that a crowbar is a tool for managing your finances.

You're right, most artists ARE just trying to make stuff and survive. Meanwhile, AI slop spammers are slapping dozens of games onto storefronts, often actively lying about the involvement of AI (that includes you, Mr. Gamecraftor, and I am still waiting for you to get permabanned from this website for that), destroying consumer trust in platforms like itch.io and making it so much harder to get any attention as an actual creative actually making actual art. It hurts even worse because I work in a niche where monetization means complete removal of any itch.io visibility so I cannot even set up a tip jar, and meanwhile the AI sloppers who do not give a single damn about their product whine just because some people do not give them their unconditional admiration.

That's why I am "aggressive" about AI: it is slowly ruining everything I care about. Literature, visual art, movies, anime, programming and game development, all of these spaces are aggressively being invaded by AI spammers who insist they are artists in spite of their products being obvious garbage to everybody who is not an AI cultist. I will not accept that quietly and I will not be polite to the people who are doing it, especially when these people are lying about what they are doing (again, that means you), obfuscating what they are actually doing with cheap rhetoric tricks (like the "just a tool" nonsense line) and sucking all of the air out of art spaces.

I sincerely hope that this post kills your motivation, because your slop game that you are actively lying about (which, again, violates the site's ToU, not that anybody cares) is flat-out a detriment to this platform.

A significant portion of players do not want AI slop at all.