A group of jurors for the 2027 Independent Games Festival (IGF) awards have today issued a statement saying they will not vote for any game that has made use of generative AI in its development.
The group, consisting of 19 named jurors (which is not everyone, and the group’s statement notes that other jurors "voiced concern about their ability to safely sign without professional blowback") including Austin Walker and Sam Barlow, say their aim "is to state solidarity with those who despair over the future of their art, their craft, and their industry".
Importantly, they make no distinction between visual assets, sound and code, saying of the latter that "Programming is a creative discipline whose labour deserves the same respect we extend to any part of making a game. This extends to the past work used to train these models without the creators' consent."
The statement has in part been made in response to "a significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools", something we're seeing across the video game industry in 2026.
The group's full statement is below:
This year's IGF entries have been incredible. We've been lucky to play games that surprise, connect, and challenge us, and we're excited to vote for our favorites.
Unfortunately, there has also been a significant increase in the number of submitted games developed with generative AI tools. This has set off some fairly intense discussion and disagreement across the judge and jury pools, and at this point there is no universal consensus on what (if anything) is to be done.
The IGF has affirmed that we may cast our votes according to our own tastes and values. But we, a contingent of IGF jurors, feel that this trend and the games embracing it deserve stronger pushback than a vote in silence.
While IGF leadership has approved the release of this statement, it's important to note that we do not speak for IGF as an organization, or for all IGF jury members. Many jurors had differing perspectives and significant reservations about this statement. Some jurists additionally voiced concern about their ability to safely sign without professional blowback, and we do not intend this letter to serve as a censure of those who were unable to sign.
Above all: Our goal is to state solidarity with those who despair over the future of their art, their craft, and their industry—including those who have experimented with these tools in the past, but who now believe they are not in our best interest.
We know that change does not come at the individual level, but as independent developers, we also know firsthand the value of pushing back on what an industry has deemed "inevitable." As jurists, we feel a responsibility to push past defeatism and aspire to a higher ideal.
The future is not yet settled. You are not alone. We can stand together.
We, the undersigned IGF jury members, believe the following:
1. That generative AI has these negative effects:
Ecological harms at community and planetary levels
Economic harms to working developers and artists
Cognitive and psychological harms to its users
Harm to the increasingly fragile information landscape
Harms to labor and worker power in creative fields
2. That these harms do not depend on what is generated, be it music or writing, art or VO, marketing assets or code.
3. That AI-generated code is not an exception to these harms. Programming is a creative discipline whose labour deserves the same respect we extend to any part of making a game. This extends to the past work used to train these models without the creators' consent.
4. Finally, that the use of these tools is neither a foregone conclusion in our industry nor that their adoption has been wholly voluntary. We stand in solidarity not only with those developers who have the freedom to unilaterally reject them, but also with those who have been compelled by their employers to adopt their use, those working to establish or improve their workplace policies, and especially with those in positions of precarity who are so often those most pressured to abandon their values.
For these reasons, this year we are declining to vote for any game that uses generative AI in any capacity. We urge the IGF to adopt a strong anti-AI policy for future years that disallows games containing any AI-generated work.
A.M. Darke
aurahack
Aura Triolo
Austin Walker
Brendon Chung
Brent Arnold
Dan Floyd
Everest Pipkin
Gianna Ruggiero
isaac io schankler
Johnnemann Nordhagen
Lena Raine
Marielle Kho
Megan Fox
Noel Berry
Osama Dorias
Sam Barlow
Tamara Duplantis
Taylor Mccue
Update 7:30pm: Post has been updated to reflect these are jurors, not judges.
