Indie game developers have a new sales pitch: being 'AI free' (www.theverge.com)

After Nexon CEO Junghun Lee declared it’s “important to assume that every game company is now using AI,” indie studios pushed back by turning anti–generative AI claims into a marketing tool. Developers led by Polygon Treehouse cofounder Alex Kanaris‑Sotiriou created a freely available golden cog seal reading “This developer assures that no gen AI was used in this indie game,” and numerous indie store pages (Rosewater, Astral Ascent, Quarterstaff, etc.) now display similar declarations or bespoke statements stressing that every asset and line of code was human‑made. For many indies the move is about ethics and provenance — objection to models trained on other creators’ work without permission — and about brand differentiation in an industry increasingly quick to adopt AI. The trend highlights a growing bifurcation in game development: large publishers are rapidly integrating generative models for art, dialogue and gameplay (EA’s Stability AI tie‑ups, Microsoft’s AI features, Ubisoft’s Neo NPCs/Ghostwriter), while smaller teams emphasize human craft as a selling point. Technically this debate centers on training data provenance, copyright risk, and the tradeoffs between speed/cost savings and creative constraints. Even as budgets and time pressures make gen AI attractive, indies argue those constraints spur distinct creative choices, and their anti‑AI badges could shape consumer expectations, disclosure norms, and provenance standards as generative tools mature.