Over the past few months, it seems that the drudge of AI in gaming has continued it’s march forward in various forms. Whether that’s been the concerningly problematic amount of Generative AI in the latest Steam Next Fest, or the sheer amount of decompilations and recompilations dropping across the internet; its really been just about everywhere recently. Well, it seems like, despite this at least one platform as taken a bit of a harder stance on “AI Slop” specifically, and that’s the Indie game darling; itch.io.
In a recent set of posts from the company’s Bluesky page, they’ve not only announced that they’ve “Just deleted a couple terabytes of AI slop.” but that they’ve also added a filter on their search page to filter out any content that has placed a Generative AI disclosure on the page of their game. Thus making it easier to tell whether a game was handmade with love, or pushed out like a can of spam.
In a sense of clarification, it should be obvious that this means itch.io isn’t just outright banning any use of AI in any game or project on their website. First off that would remove hundreds of additional projects that had used AI as an assistive tool rather than the full creator, but you would also start to run into more people that simply ignore adding any disclosure before uploading their project anyways.
Instead, itch is focusing on the AI projects that they’re defining as “Spam.” Games and other projects where its obvious the thing was created top to bottom with “vibecoding” and its content is not well understood by its creator, and the internals look like a proper mess of coding spaghetti.
With the recent announcement that the amount of game pages being created per day has double in the last two months on itch.io, it’s obvious that the amount of AI produced projects is only going up with that count. And while that’s an inevitable downside to the trends going on recently, it’s important to remember that it will still be a useful tool for those that still know what they’re doing when it comes to development.
For now, though, keep an eye out, use those filters how you see fit. And if you really don’t care about “Vibecoding,” I’d implore you to make the move over to Epic Games instead. Their launcher is only marginally more messed up because of it.
