The labeling thing
Got asked last week why we even bother with labels. "Just let people play games." And honestly? That's a reasonable take.
Here's why I can't quite get there, though.
Someone I know does voice work — has been at it for over a decade. Last year she found out some of her old recordings got scraped into a training dataset. No email. No courtesy heads up. Nothing. She found out at 2am doom-scrolling Twitter, watching clips of "her" voice saying things she never actually recorded.
Took her weeks to shake that off.
That's why labels matter to me.
Our actual position
We're not rejecting games because they touched AI tools. And we're not featuring games just because they didn't, either. How you built your thing? That's between you and your dev setup.
What we care about is honesty.
AI was involved? Just say so. Players can filter on that if they want — some skip AI games entirely, others specifically seek them out, most probably won't bother with the filter at all. Doesn't really matter which camp you're in. The option should be there.
What counts
Art — sprites, textures, backgrounds, characters. If a model did the heavy lifting, mark it.
Audio — music, effects, voices. Text-to-speech falls under this too.
Writing — dialogue, story, item descriptions. Basically anything players actually read.
Code — procedural systems or logic coming from ML tools.
Levels — maps or environments generated by AI.
AI helped you prototype but you shipped human-made assets? That's fine. We're looking at what's in the final build.
Why this keeps coming up
Steam games with AI disclosure labels are up 700% this year — something like 8,000 titles now. Can't really ignore numbers like that.
Developers are pretty split on the whole thing. Nearly half think AI is actively damaging games as a medium. But here's the weird part — AI-disclosed games still moved $660 million on Steam. People buy them. They just want to know what they're buying first.
And then there's the Fatal Fury trailer situation. Voice actors discovering cloned versions of themselves in Tomb Raider remasters. Expedition 33 getting pulled from the Indie Game Awards over placeholder assets.
It keeps happening. People got tired of the surprises.
What we won't ask
We're not auditing your process. Don't need to see your prompts or know which models you ran. Your workflow is yours.
The label just needs to match what's actually in the game. The whole filtering system kind of falls apart if it doesn't.
Different places, different rules
Steam requires disclosure now. Games Workshop went with a full ban on AI for Warhammer content. The Indie Game Awards took a middle road.
Us? Label honestly. Let players decide for themselves.
More: The bigger AI conversation · Creator info · FAQ