I don't think OP is asking for what you're saying they're asking for.

There are vegans who gatekeep and exclude people who eat plants/fruits/vegetables fertalized with animal manure. Richard Stallman approved of using proprietary operating systems to build Free Software in some cases. There's probably no end to how deep you can go down such purity rabbitholes. And the same is true of AI.

In the vegan example, most people don't think of not eating manure-fertilized plant products as a requirement for being a vegan. Similarly, I don't think anyone expects "no AI was used in the making of this product" to mean they built it on an operating system free of generative AI. (Particularly because, as you rightly say, it's nigh infeasible to escape generative AI entirely, at least right now.)

That said, a website like Itch.io that explicitly forbids projects that include AI-generated code, story, assets, etc, (not as in was built completely without the influence of generative AI, but just the game/project/whatever itself includes no AI-generated stuff), will consider strong-enough evidence of a violation of that policy a bannable offense, and offers a way to report offenders would almost definitely meet virtually everyone's (including OP's I'd wager) definition of "AI-free". And that would accomplish probably 99% as much benefit (over sites that indiscriminately allow slop) as the purest possible approach without the drawback of a 99% smaller catalog. I don't think a rule that earlier versions of a game must not have contained AI-generated content is necessary either, really.

Yes some slop would slip through. Some people are bad actors. And I'd think generative-AI boosters are more liable to try to scam people for profit than the average person. But also, most scams are fairly low effort. And I expect that if a site like what I'm describing existed, the majority of dishonest submissions would be pretty transparent. Even those that actually managed to get listed would get removed fairly quickly.

Every broker has rules. (Including Lemmy.) And every sufficiently complex ecosystem has parasites. And so every broker has rule-breakers. Ebay and Amazon and Steam and Itch.io etc etc etc exist despite the difficulty in enforcing whatever particular rules they might have. Yes rule violations slip through and affect customers on all of the above platforms and every other platform. Doesn't mean there's no point in having rules at all.

Exactly. For example, consider video creation. Maybe someone asks an AI for video ideas and chooses the dozen that sound the best to them. Then they ask an LLM to generate not scripts, but highly detailed sentence-by-sentence outlines. They then take those AI-generated outlines and actually, completely in their own words, then write the script themselves (possibly aided by a tool like Grammarly.) They then take that script and record real narration of their own voice, cleaned up through various audio software.

Where does the human end and the AI begin? How would you prove AI was used at all in this process? The final product was entirely human-driven, yet AI provided basically the entire idea and a detailed structure of the whole thing.