A Unity Asset Store publisher who sells Editor tools asked r/gamedev where the AI disclosure line should fall. His own workflow: occasional code generation, optimization suggestions, code reviews, testing, and docs — while he designs the tools, reviews the implementation, tests everything, and maintains what ships.

His framing is the useful part. When the thing a customer buys is the generated artifact — an image, a track, a 3D model — disclosure tells them something real. When they buy software, they’re buying functionality, reliability, and accountability. Unity’s rule, which labels an entire asset if any part of it was generated, is what pushed the question.

The thread accepts that in principle and then argues about scope:

  • Steam already drew a version of this line for games — its policy says built-in IDE AI tooling and “efficiency gains through the use of these tools” are explicitly not the focus of disclosure; player-facing generated content is
  • Verifiability is the sharpest objection — art, music, and models can be tested or probed for provenance, code cannot, so a code label punishes developers honest enough to disclose and catches nobody who lies
  • Label inflation — once AI completion lives in the OS, the IDE, and every graphics app, an “AI assisted” tag applies to nearly everything. The comparison made in the thread is California’s Proposition 65 warning: universal, therefore unread
  • Unity’s actual submission rules are harsher than the debate assumes — copy code out of a prompt and the whole asset carries the label; tab-completing lines you were going to type manually is not generation. Working advice given: if in doubt, label it, or keep prompt-derived code out of the tool entirely
  • The strongest counter-argument — for a game the player never sees the code, so Steam’s content-facing scope holds up; when the product is a dev tool, the code is the deliverable. One buyer put it plainly: he wants to know whether the developer had to lean on AI to close gaps in their process
  • Scale makes disclosure ambient — Unity is built with in-house AI programming tools, most editors ship completion by default, and commenters reckon nearly every tool released in the last year contains AI-assisted code

Two side arguments are worth keeping. One programmer objects that “AI art bad, AI code fine” treats programming as lesser craft purely because the seams don’t show, and others counter that code is authored work too — the difference between how Mario 64 and Bubsy 3D handle a jump is a coding decision — so lowering the labor never needed the same protection. Then the consistency challenge: if using AI is fine, saying so should cost you nothing; refusing to disclose is itself an answer.

The takeaway is that this was never a question about honesty. Nearly everyone in the thread agrees transparency is reasonable — the disagreement is about whether the label can carry scope and whether anyone can audit it. For assets, it can. For code, not yet.

So expect the two-tier split to hold until either marketplaces ship tiered disclosure — what was generated, how much of it, whether it’s player-facing — or quietly drop the code question once IDE-native AI makes “no AI was involved” unverifiable for everyone.