Procedural generation though. Infinite replay value with actual graphics or voiceover? Fuck yeah. Great roguelites will use genai and that’s awesome.
We’d still like the option to opt out of that mess, though. I’m not sold on the quality nor the ethics yet.
The ethics based on Intellectual Property? Quality, sure, but ethics?
Full disclosure: I’m a geek from the days of newsgroups and Geocities. I watched the rise and fall of things like Napster. And I watched IP-law get more and more restrictive. But what is “intellectual property” really? You’re effectively taking an idea and saying “this is mine, I made this first, therefore I own it”.
Around 1996, when I was 12, I thought it’d be really cool to have a small laptop that laid flat and you could hold in your hands. The designs I drew up VERY closely resembled a Blackberry. Blackberry came out a few years later. If I had filed the right paperwork, at 12, should I be able to stop them? I sincerely doubt they were spying on the drawings I made on the back of my homework. Should you get to stifle innovation just because you had the first brainfart? I don’t think so.
But okay, let’s say you’re only thinking about artistic works. Again, you’re gonna have repetition. This came out in 1995. This came out in 2008.
So what’s the issue with AI; it was trained on “copyrighted” material? K, well so were you. Are folks upset because creators didn’t get paid every time an AI reviewed their copyrighted works? Well, are they similarly upset about folks who check a book or movie out of the library? Not so much…because that’s normalized (though would NEVER go over in today’s hyper-corporate nonsense world). Okay, so are folks upset that generative works can resemble the style or “essence” of the original work? Lol, see the Jill Sobule/Katy Perry comparison above, also consider “Fair Use” and the likely transformative nature involved as well.
This isn’t an “ethics” issue…it’s an issue of disrupting existing channels for corporate power within a world sliding more and more into a dystopia of corporate fascism.
They’ll be great once the tech is better. Right now, genAI that appears in games is still pretty jank.
This is just overly broad. If I use a LLM to aid me in debugging doesn’t mean the game is tainted.
I guess the issue is the wording of the statement and not the tag itself.
The line between using Gen AI as a tool and and putting unfiltered output out there is very blurry.
SteamDB is a third-party service, not affiliated with Valve.
Still, it gives consumers the choice. If you choose not to consume diamonds due to the whole diamond thing, that’s fine even though synthetics exist.
Then, isn’t it best to say what you used the AI on, so that consumers can make even better choices?
It’s like giving people the choice to not eat carbon because some forms, like natural diamonds, are exploitative. People cheer because nobody wants to eat pencil dust since it tastes so bad.
It sounds like a great idea as long as you don’t understand how anything works.
(For the people that don’t understand how anything works: Carbon is an integral component of literally everything that you will ever eat)
This analogy would make more sense if GenAI was an integral component of literally every video game we play, but it isn’t, not even close
The issue is that you cannot tell if the tooling used Gen AI. I.e. the developer used Gen AI to respond to some e mail or as a rubber duck.
That’s the point of the AI disclosure though, to inform customers that your game contains AI generated content. And the amount of games containing AI generated content is incomparable to the amount of foods containing carbon (ie, all of them).
Also, if a developer uses AI to “respond to some email”, by my reading of Steam’s rules governing AI disclosures, they wouldn’t need to disclose that. So I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up.
Exactly.
People are focused on art because its easy to meme on and playing ‘spot the AI’ makes people feel like they’re discerning individuals with refined tastes. Short clips of generated music is 100% indistinguishable from human-made. Code is invisible to the average user.
AI-based tools have already been rapidly adopted in industries that experience heavy competition, like game development. Essentially all professional tools include either integrated generation or support for using generative models. Coding is no exception.
It isn’t the case that “AI will soon be used by developers unless we stop them”. We’re living in the “AI is being used and only rarely spotted” age now.
I’m a one man Indie making a game. It’s a management/strategy game and I want to add some depth to some of the pawns you control in the game by having a portrait for each and actual voices saying things and there are quite a lot of possible such pawns so that means quite lot of portraits and voices saying lines.
If I use generative AI I can do it at the cost of my time and some electricity for my PC, if I don’t it would cost $$$ so wouldn’t be able to have those elements because that’s not just one or two portraits and voices.
Apparently if I use AI for it that makes me and my micro-company a big bad corporation.
I would much rather play a game with text-only dialog and limited art assets than a game with AI generated narration or visual assets.
Whilst for my project AI Gen was only ever an idea for a nice to have which is not important for game-play, I’m pretty sure that there will be projects out there being done by tiny Indies which aren’t financially feasible without AI Gen because those operations are not well funded and can’t afford to pay for lots of manpower.
In game-making, generation tools (not necessarily AI) even the field between Indies and AAA game makers (which is why so many Indie titles in this latest blossoming of Indie Game-Making have procedurally generated worlds/levels whilst the AAA titles almost invariably have massive hand-crafted worlds/levels) but until AI Gen the unassailable advantage in favor of the AAA makers was in the finishing touches - for example, it has long been possible to use procedural voice generation, it just doesn’t sound as good as the stuff done with ML (unless you’re making a game about robots were a robotic voice does sound great) - since one can only go so far with procedural generation so in more real-world-related domains (voice being a great example) procedural generation is usually shy of “good enough” whilst both AI Gen and professional human crafted content is beyond it even if the former is IMHO generally not as good as the latter.
In gatekeeping a certain level of quality to only things that can be done by those who can afford to hire large teams, because you refuse to accept games made with the kind of tools that most benefit the smaller game makers, you’re basically supporting what’s best for the bigger companies, unless the only kind of games you buy are “text-only dialog and limited art assets” games made by Indies with small budgets (in which case I’ll take my hat off to you for being Principled in a consistent way) and not the more glitzy stuff that only bigger operations can afford to make without AI Gen.
Merely being against the kind of tools that most benefit small operations and then turning around and mostly buying the work from the most massive of operations because it has a better quality (since they have the economies of scale and revenues to afford real human craftsmanship) wouldn’t actually be a consistent principled stand IMHO.
In the game making world, gatekeeping AI Gen use outright “just because” is a great way to keep the playing field tilted in favor of the likes of EA.
Except AAA studios also generate their open worlds and then sloppily (albeit manually) fill it with some content. Some studios do better than others here but you can clearly tell when most side quests are just all the same format.
If you’re making it for profit, and using public resources (like GenAI trained on all the commons), then the game itself should be in the commons as well. (You can still sell it or request donations though) I support the GenAI in FOSS, but for-profit closed-source games should respect their own ideals (copyrights)
Perhaps the logical compromise is to disclaim ownership of the AI-generated assets, releasing them as public domain, while retaining the copyright only on the code he’s written himself, etc
A person working to make profit might not actually believe in copyrights. Nor hold any ideological kinship with the system they exist in.
Further, virtually all resources to do anything originated in “the commons” and the sort of person who’s trying to produce a game as their means of making money probably are just trying to get away from a miserable 9 to 5 (or not live under a bridge).
People who work and give away their shit for free are good people, but they are also usually people who are financially comfortable already. Its not right to dictate what resources some individual game dev is trying to use to make a living off their work.
I disagree with all three paragraphs.
Perhaps you could elaborate on why?
I totally agree that the things I make with Gen AI are public property.
What doesn’t make sense is that all of my work must also become public merelly because it’s alongside public works.
What I’m doing is years worth of my work, not just tic-tac-toe.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind making free for everybody games all day (I have a TON of ideas) if I could live were I wanted and all my own living costs were taken care of, but that’s not the World we live in so, not having been born to wealthy parents, I have to get paid for my work in order to survive.
If Copyright for you is an ideology (rather than a shittily implemented area of property legislation), then fell free to have your spin of it for the product of your time and effort, including having Contagion for public resources, just don’t expect that others in the World we live in must go along with such an hyper-simplifying take on property of the intellectual kind.
I suspect that your take is deep down still anchored on an idea of “corporation” and making profits for the sake of further enriching already wealthy individuals, whilst I as a non-wealthy individual have to actually make a living of my work to survive and you’re pretty much telling me that I can’t use a specific kind of free shit to do my work better without all of my work having to be free for everybody (and I go live under a bridge and starve).
Don’t take this badly but you’re pretty much making the case that the worker can’t have any free tools to earn their livelihood, which is just a way of making the case for “those who can afford it buy and own the tools, those who can’t work for those who own the tools”.
Whether you realise it or not you’re defending something that just makes sure than only those who have enough money to afford paying for artisan work can make great things whilst the rest have to work for them and maybe do tiny things on their spare time.
I don’t support the current system whatsoever and aim to dismantle it. But if you do, and you otherwise play by the rules of the system, then you have to accept that your “free tool” that improves your work comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators and is therefore immoral to use in for-profit products. I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
All capitalist practices are immoral in functionally the same way. Capitalism works to use worker exploitation but also use of the commons for private gain. Generative AI is now part of the commons that capitalists will inevitably use for profit. The fight over worker disenfranchisement in this case was functionally instantly lost the moment generative AI became usable at all.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
They already do and are going to regardless. In fact, using Generative AI will likely become functionally mandatory given a capitalist market system. If you take on labor costs that other firms don’t, then you will not be able to compete. This applies to big corporations and small indie devs already. A company wont abstain from Gen AI if their competition wont and all it takes is one company to start using Gen AI.
comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators
I’m not that guy, but what livelihood of artists and creators? It’s one dude working alone, where’s the money for that going to come from?
I sometimes record music and put it on bandcamp, I recorded a single recently and it needed album art. I could take a picture and put a shitty filter on it, or I could generate an AI art that looks nice and more specific to my idea of what I wanted it to be.
I don’t have $200 kicking around to comission art for something I did as a hobby.
If you did it as a hobby, then release it as FOSS.
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I’m not that guy
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Hence, can’t release my recording as FOSS, since it’s not software.
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The music is out there for free (pay tip if you want)
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This kind of stuff is what allows people to stop living shitty miserable lives of working shit jobs for low pay. Maybe if we wish on a star, we can be the next Balatro guy.
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Amazingly bad take here, holy shit
Oh, I would totally be happy for a property-free world in all senses (so, one were I could just occupy a piece of land, were I would make my own house and grow my own food), what I’m not happy with is the idea that I still have to obbey all the rules on the side were I have to work within the system to make money in order to survive but on the other side what’s mine is everybody’s. Your ideal world is not one we can transition into by starting with making the tool users have to pay for all their tools but everything else “we’ll solve later”.
Further, I don’t think Gen AI should be monetised - if it was trained on public works then what comes out of it are public works.
I play by the rules of the system because I have no choice: I was born in a World were everything is owned and wasn’t born in the Owner Class - for me it was always play by other people’s rules or go live under a bridge.
Your specific formulation in the last post was similar to saying that use of Open Source tools should make the product of one’s work Open Source: if the Gen AI was trained with works that authors made freely available for any use as public works, then the resulting generative tool is akin to an open source piece of software (Edit: specifically, tools and libraries for software development) only instead of being something that creates or enhances very complex control code for a processing unit it’s something that creates images or audio clips and when those images and audio clips are used as part of a much greater work, they’re just as small a fraction of the work as, say, open source libraries are in software applications.
However, “what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern. If the same happens as it did with Open Source software in the Programming world, such a tool being freely available just means that people will expect even more complex works to be done - so in the case of games, for them to have more and nicer visuals - or in other words, for the amount of work that needs to be done to grow and pretty much nullify the gains from having the new tools. If that is not what happens, then we indeed have a problem.
Given the way things are, that formulation you defended will de facto result in Gen AI that is entirelly trained on paid for works, hence is paid for, hence only those who can afford it get to use it - which in the game making world means you’re basically defending an option that helps the big for profit publishers and screws the small indies trying to make a living, which I suspect is the very opposite of the World you seem to want.
“what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern.
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
-Heilbroner 1666
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can’t just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and “open source” Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.
I ain’t reading all that. Anyway you keep insisting that the world allow you to do what you want to do, I don’t think it’s going to work out the way you expect, no matter how big walls of text you write. Using GenAI in for-profit ventures is going to put you into a specific box. Make of this what you will.
I shall extend to you the same “courtesy”. It’s only fair.
Same here. Everyone complaining about AI in game development have no idea how hard indie devs have it. We desperately want to make a quality product and work our asses off doing so. We’re working full time jobs for ‘The Man’ to fund it out of pocket, so every cent saved by using AI Gen is value being added elsewhere. Building games is really freakin’ hard folks. The dream is to have a studio of artist making content, but that’s literally impossible given my pay grade. It’s truly a shame to see the gaming community rally against tooling that helps us indie devs make our dream a reality.
And the artists can just go fuck themselves then I guess?
If they were never getting paid in the first place, did they get fucked?
The problem with using gen AI is you’re taking the effort of other hard workers for free. You thanklessly get the energy and time artists spent honing their craft because it was stolen by Gen AI. It pits hard worker vs hard worker all while the man profits.
One can make the exact same argument by saying Open Source and it would be just as incorrect.
Ultimately, the actual time and effort of the artist is not being used when a Gen AI trained on his or her work generates an output, just like when an Open Source library is used in a program the time and effort of the programmers who made that library is not being used.
(As for the rest, that grand statement that users of Gen AI are “taking the energy the artist spent honing their craft” is just laughably exaggerated and detached from objective reality)
The problem with Gen AI as it’s being used now and the main difference to Open Source, is that with Open Source the programmer is in control of how works derived from their own freely distributed code are used, by means of which license they release their Open Source code under (so, for example, some licenses do not allow that code to be part of a commercially used or sold program, no matter how small a part that is, whilst others do), whilst the will of individual artists when it comes to their works being or not part of the training of Gen AI, and what kind of limits and uses are acceptable with the derived-via-Gen AI works based on their own art, is not taken into account much less respected.
It makes absolute sense that, like for programmers, some artists decide that none of their work or works works derived from it if free to distribute (so, no Gen AI), others decide that works can be derived from their own works but only for non-commercial use (i.e. can be used to train Gen AI as long as the output of that Gen AI is not used for commercial purposes) and yet others are ok with totally free use of automated derivations of their works.
That it isn’t so, is not a problem of Gen AI as a technology (though if the training inputs are hundreds of thousands of works, the equivalent of Free With Attribution licenses might be hard to pull off) but a problem of how Intellectual Property Law is either lacking or being misused.
Your basing your entire argument on the assumptions that every generative models is trained on copyright works and also that training AI on copyrighted works is not Fair Use.
The first assumption is just false and the second assumption is not built on any established legal grounds in Western countries and is completely false in other countries with different legal systems.
Perfectly reasonable, but at the same time a little naive. Let’s shift the focus on your future customers. What you say is true: artists are expensive and having proper art for your work can be costly. I mean, it’s not entirely true cause young artists are not that expensive but you want very good art for your game and I can understand that.
Now, you may use gen AI to get all your art and voices. Are you sure your customers wanted that? Are you sure they wanna see all those “something’s off” portraits and that will be the deciding factor for your game? If your game is good and fun even crappy art will sell it (look at touhou). Isn’t it better to work on the actual game with placeholder art and look for a young artist when you have the finished product instead of wasting your time fiddling with settings and prompts on a genAI?
I mean, you do you. I’m not against AI as a tool, but don’t assume people will like your game more if you plaster it with AI art. It’s like coloring your sketch with stickers. The stickers may be good quality, but it will still look like a messy puzzle…
I think most customers want a fun game that doesn’t cost $120.
I’m not against AI as a tool, but don’t assume people will like your game more if you plaster it with AI art. It’s like coloring your sketch with stickers. The stickers may be good quality, but it will still look like a messy puzzle…
If your game is good and fun even crappy art will sell it (look at touhou).
Writing good music is really freakin’ hard, but I do it on my own anyway because the whole point of making something creative is that a person is doing it. It’s truly a shame to see people rally for software made by tech bros that takes work away from real artists who could use it.editing to be less snarky: How would you feel if generative AI could make a game and an artist or musician had it make an entire game for their art/music because it saved them money?
To a large extent that ship has long sailed in the programming world with Open Source and I even vaguely remember from back in the 90s some people claiming that Open Source would cause programmers to lose their jobs (it didn’t - software users just started to expect even more complex programs with more features and ultimately that resulted in even more programmers being necessary than before), which is eerily similar to the arguments many are making here about AI Gen.
Basically, most of the code in everyday software is already out there and freely available to all in the form of Open Source libraries (which in most projects add up to most of the code in the final executable) and there are even code generators for a number of things, since AI Gen isn’t needed for generating code (because code is a totally artificial thing not something that has to be designed so that the human perception sees it as real or appealing and in fact AI Gen is actually worse at code generation than procedural algorithms) so one can just craft normal code that generates code.
In coding the requirement for using humans has mostly moved from the making of the base parts in a program into the figuring out of how to put the freely available parts together to make a desired greater whole, tough granted the art creation part in game making (some of which I do, since I had to learn 3D modelling for my project and spend a lot of time in it, and the same for Graphical Design which I do for things like icons and UI elements) seems to still rely on a lot of grunt work in low-level shitty shit (and, curiously, the artists in the bigger game-companies are now using expensive AI tools to speed that up).
Let me turn the tables around too: would it be fair if artists and musicians weren’t allowed to use any software which is in full, contains or relies on Open Source code (for example, in the form of libraries), basically the tech level of the 1980s and earlier since almost every software now relies on Open Source code in some way?
Even better, would it be fair for artists who are trying to make it on their own and aren’t superstars?
“By using software which has not been lovingly crafted as whole by a programmer, you’re taking jobs away from programmers.”
(PS: I don’t really want that limitation for anybody)
That said, as I wrote elsewhere, just like programmers are empowered to chose what can be done with the code they make free for everybody as Open Source by choosing the License they ship with it (so, for example, if a programmer wants to force people who make software that contains some of their Open Source code to also release that new software as Open Source, they chose the GPL license, but if they want to give others more freedom to do what they want with it except just sell that freely available code as if it was theirs, the programmer chooses a different license such as the LGPL), so should artists be fully empowered to decide if what they put out there available for all can be used or not in training Generative AI and if they allow it also restrict it to only Generative AI with certain kinds of licensing (say, not for profit, or whose output carries a license that forbids commercial use).
Whilst I would like to use Gen AI for some things in my project, I don’t want to be even indirectly using the works of artists who do not want their stuff used to train Gen AI whose output can be used comercially in any way (so, even as a small part of a greater work).
I don’t want to directly or indirectly take the work of others, I only want to use directly or indirectly the work of willing artists and if there is none, then, well, though luck for me.
In the ideal I would be able to use artwork derived only from the art of artists who would be ok with me using it so, same as you can only use Open Source code (including the tiniest most obscure piece of a library) in the way the programmers are willing for you to use it (so, for example, I cannot distribute commercially a program containing Open Source code - no matter how small - which has been made freely available by the creator under a GPL license, but I can if the license was the Apache one).
Open source software isn’t the same as generative AI at all, but I wouldn’t be surprised if people who put stuff on GitHub pre-ChatGPT don’t want their code scraped for Microsoft to profit off of. I took my personal projects off of GitHub a year or two ago for that reason. Aside from that, open source code is put out there with the intention of being used freely and a lot of art isn’t. Art floating around the internet pre-2022 was made either with the intention of not getting paid for it, in which case whatever, or the artist wanted to get paid and was presumably paid but their art ended up on the internet anyway (but they still got paid at least).
My main issues with generative AI models are that most if not all of them were created without the artists’ or developers’ permission, the profits are going entirely to oligarchs, and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It’s too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think indie game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.
edit: For what it’s worth, I paid for my copy of Reaper and the drum plugin I use. I also paid for all my guitar gear.
If you’re mirroring the example being discussed above, then wouldn’t the alternative be that the game doesnt exist in the first place? The musician or artist cant afford to hire a game dev for x amount of time to make a game at all, thats why they used the tool. But using the tool allowed them to get closer to their vision anyway, even if it is imperfect.
I admit that it’s not the best comparison because games often take more time to make than music or visual art. But I think the results are similar if you take a game with programmer art (which does have its charms!) or no art vs one that hired an artist for some amount of time, compared to a soundtrack or set of art with a game the artist put together vs hiring a dev to put together a demo in the same amount of time.
What this really comes down to for me is that most if not all of these models were created without the artists’ permission and training the models takes an obscene amount of energy that contributes to global warming. These models devalue actual art even further and have made the internet a worse place by making it easier to make spam and disinformation. It’s too late to fix spam and disinformation, but we can still value art. I think game devs would be singing a different tune if Steam was flooded with games made entirely with AI slop.
Good! Fuck the corporate slop. Justifying the use of Ai only in the name of “efficiency” is pathetic and capitalist. Pay artists a proper wage and give them the time needed to apply their craft.
No artist needs generative “Ai” to create. Only capitalist need it to produce more slop.
This comment is going to age very poorly. It sounds like just every other “progress? not on my watch!” comment people have made throughout history… Like it or not, AI generation is here and it’s not going away, good or bad.
This is definitely a topic where a vast majority of people have been “informed” of their opinions by social media memes instead of through a reasoned examination of the situation.
People who’re probably too young to have ever lived through major technology breakthroughs.
This same “debate” always happens. When digital cameras were being developed, their users were seen as posers encroaching on the terf of “Real Photographers”.
You’d hear “Now just anybody can take pictures and call themselves a photographer?”
Or “It takes no skill to take a digital photograph, you can just manipulate the image in Photoshop to create a fake image that Real Photographers have to work years developing the skills to capture”
Computers were things that some people, reluctantly, had to use for business but could never be useful to the average person. Smartphones were ridiculous toys for out of touch tech nerds. Social Media was an oxymoron because social people don’t use the Internet. GPS is just a toy for hikers and people that are too dumb to own paper maps. Etc, etc, etc
It’s the same neo-luddite gatekeeping that’s happening towards AI. Any technology that puts capabilities in the hands of regular people is viewed by some people as fundamentally stealing from professionals.
And, since the predictable response is to make some arcane copyright claim and declare training “stealing”: Not all AI is trained on copyrighted materials.
Sure, you can make an AI without stealing but all the major ones have done it. At this point, the burden of proof is on the LLM to prove they did not steal.
When we’re talking about legal issues, the terms are important.
Copyright violation isn’t stealing. It is, at worse, a civil matter where one party can show how they’ve been harmed and recover damage. In addition, copyright law allows use of the copyrighted work without the author’s permission in some circumstances.
You’re simply stating that ‘AI is stealing’ when that just isn’t true. And, assuming you mean a violation of copyright, if it was a civil violation then exactly how much would the model owe in damages to any given piece of art? This kind of case would have to be litigated as a class action lawsuit and, if your “AI is
stealingcommitting mass copyright violation” theory is correct then there should be a case where this has been successfully litigated, right?There are a lot of dismissed class action lawsuits on the topic, but you can’t find any major cases where this issue has been resolved according to your “AI is stealing” claim. On the other hand, there ARE plenty of cases where Machine Learning (the field of which generative AI is a subset) using copyrighted data was ruled as fair use:
Google has won two important copyright cases that seem relevant to the AI debate. In 2006, the company was sued by Perfect 10, an adult entertainment site that claimed Google had infringed its copyright by generating thumbnail photos of its content; the court ruled that providing images in a search index was “fundamentally different” from simply creating a copy, and that in doing so, Google had provided “a significant benefit to the public.” In the other case, the Authors’ Guild, a professional organization that represents the interests of writers, sued Google for scanning more than twenty million books and showing short snippets of text when people searched for them. In 2013, a judge in that case ruled that Google’s conduct constituted fair use because it was transformative.
Creating a generative model is fundamentally different than copying artwork and it also provides a significant benefit to the public. The AI models are not providing users with copies of the copyrighted work. They’re, literally, transformative.
This isn’t a simple matter of it being automatically wrong and illegal if copyrighted work was used to create the models. Copyright law, and law in general, is more complex than a social media meme like ‘AI is stealing’.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is misinformed”
I can’t read anything containing nuance without reducing it to an absurd Twitter comment
I’m sorry, it gets better.
I get that everyone seems to be sticking ai in everything, but it’s just another tool and it’s here to stay. People thought the digital calculator was going to make everyone an idiot… And it probably did. That’s why the world is like it is.
Calculators didn’t steal products created by artists and repurpose them as their own.
As if slide rules didn’t prerot their brains /j
Did I ask for this feature? No. But I do think it’s neat!
What’s the value here? This is based on the developer saying so and there’s no obligation to do so. Black Ops 6 is loaded with Gen AI, the loading screens are obviously Mid Journey like and some of the actors have been replaced by digital performances which was in the news. They won’t get tagged here for AI because it’s not in the description.
So basically this is going to just have people filtering out devs who are honest and realistically that’ll just be a few indie devs who had to use these tools because they’re a one man team that can’t afford artists.
I think we have to face the facts. Every game is going to be using these tools going forward. If you run a large studio and say no one use AI I bet you your artists are still speeding up making base textures. Your music guy is generating some starter melodies. Your writers are drafting up some filler to pad out the supplementary text.
These tools are as ubiquitous as photoshop (which has had content aware fill all the way back to CS-fucking-5) and unreal engine now (which has added it’s own AI features). The idea that’s there’s only a handful of shady individuals and mega-corps using these tools is naive.
Can a game be flagged as 'contains AI generated elements ’ by the community?
This could be useful, but could also be abused by chuds that want to brigade a game they don’t like.
Once again, what’s the value here. We only see AI when it’s someone who’s not very good with Mid Journey prompts. We’re getting to the point where people are using these tools in ways that no one will know the difference.
Content aware fill in photoshop has been around forever. AI.
If ask chat gpt what this unreal engine error message means. Al.
if get a quick llm made script to tune up Some physics, Al.
If the guy making the music generates some starter melodies. AI
If l generate a rock texture and clean it up myself to the point where no one knows. Al.
All of this is AI and all of this will go unseen to the end user, so once again we’ll be expecting developers to self report and only the honest ones will.
Here’s a test give yourself 1 or 2 seconds to make up your mind. https://www.sporcle.com/games/Raydon/image-real-or-ai-generated
It’s tough isn’t it and this is you analyzing the pixels, something we don’t do passively.
A lot of (if not all) of those “real” images have postprocessing that makes them look fake. AI uses fake postprocessing to make things look real. Its like taking a real thing and a fake thing and applying a filter to both so that they meet in the middle.
I get the point, but also, if they want a better comparison they should exclude “real” images with filters, faked depth of field, bloom, etc. applied.
Edit: all right, so it’s not as exaggerated as I thought. On the ones that look really conniving I wonder how much was “generated.” Was it just a face swap or eyes or whatnot?
73%. Glad I’m still able to do a decent job at it.
Iirc there was an obligation on steam to disclose AI use as well as the extent. Might be wrong though.
Use of AI will become mainstream. These filters need to ultimately sort how much of the game visuals/code are generated using gen AI
Sorry you’re getting down voted but it’s fact. I work in the tech industry and I’ve got some friends in the games industry. Everyone uses AI in some way. People want to fool themselves into thinking it’s just a handful of mega corps but it’s being used in everything we consume in small ways we can’t see in the end result. The genie is out of the bottle and the line between what is AI and what isn’t AI is going to vary wildly from person to person.
I agree, it’s unfortunately impossible to boycott AI outright. The game you love that didn’t use it for the writing, art or code probably still had plenty of planning meetings where copilot PowerPoint tools were used. A programmer who doesn’t use AI may use something from someone who did. An artist may get a job over another because they used AI for their job application.
And that’s ignoring everyone that uses it intentionally for projects. I genuinely loathe AI content but it’s not worth boycotting like many other causes.
In the 19th century, the Jacquard loom became widespread, using punchcards to automate weaving. Belgian workers who lost their jobs from this would protest by throwing their wooden shoes, their sabots into the machines. This act is the origin of the word saboteur. This era of industrialisation was shared by the movement of the romantics. Romanticism existed to contrast industrialisation and enlightenment, to celebrate nature and imagination and individuality. Poets like Lord Byron led wonderfully flawed but human lives, while capturing this feeling in their art, poetry and philosophy.
But humans although wonderfully flawed, seek convenience. Evolution loves convenience, dopamine loves convenience, capitalism loves convenience. When it’s allure comes from all directions, we cnt fault ourselves for succumbing to it.
Although their name lives on, the saboteurs couldn’t stop the world seeking convenience. Although Romanticism always existed before it’s heyday, it eventually diminished. From the punchcards of the Jacquard looms, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace (the estranged and father-loathing daughter of Lord Byron) developed the general purpose computer. Technological convenience survived.
There is a growing opinion that we are living through a new romantic era, this time opposing the digital world, the algorithm and artificial intelligence. I agree with this sentiment. Although I consider myself a socialist, pro workers rights and supporter of radical ideals, I don’t see the new saboteurs winning; I don’t see boycotting AI, or poisoning our art and media with AI confusing language and imagery as a path to victory. Eventually convince always wins. Instead I want to be a romantic, who can celebrate everything human that AI cannot be, without believing that I can exist outside of it’s influence. I can both love human made art, media and content, and consume that which has been touched by AI.
God knows why I wrote this all I guess it’s just not a conversation I’d ever get to have in real life. There are probably typos in here, I hate to proof-read.
Traditional art and comics aren’t dead because of mainstream digital, AI will just be extra on the pile for games in the same way.
Unless people vote with their wallets against AI slop, then it would be always a controversial choice whether to even employ AI.
Probably too utopian
AI slop
That’s not what this does though.
To me, AI slop is people generating entire fake websites full of SEO terms but no information. Or people using AI tools to repost popular YouTube content. Completely worthless content that only exists to fool people.
Steam’s filter removed any game that reports using generative models at all.
That’s simply not useful unless your idea of AI slop is “someone used AI”.
Exactly what I wanted to say, not sure why I got upvoted there lol
AI content already appears to be at the point where it’s absence is considered positive.
Good idea, but I imagine it might be hard to prove here shortly. For instance there’s a YouTube video about movies with “no CGI” are actually just movies with hidden CGI. https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo
If it comes to that point for video games, I don’t really think it matters much. If AI is used or not since it would be a part of any normal working procedure.
It is already at that point.
People only notice the generated works that they notice, they don’t notice the generated elements that they don’t notice.
They assume that they can “just tell” if generative AI was used, but the reality is that it’s being used in a lot of development processes in place of human effort. Things like generative fill in Photoshop or making variations of a texture are 100x faster to do with AI tools and are used all the time.
People only notice the generated works that they notice, they don’t notice the generated elements that they don’t notice.
Basically the Toupee fallacy
It would be nice if Steam just banned games made with Gen AI in the first place.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. If they use an LLM for troubleshooting an issue, does that mean the game must be thrown out? What if they use an LLM for repetitive tasks like creating config files, then the game is no good?
What about shovelware games that are just asset flips without any use of an LLM, are those games okay?
I don’t think it’s necessarily as simple as using generative AI in any way means the game is bad.
I use LLMs at work, does that mean that another developer who refuses to try LLMs is immediately a better developer than me? I’m not so sure it’s that simple.
Agreed. People overrect both ways - management wants AI everywhere, and users don’t want to hear of it.
It’s a tool that can be very helpful if used correctly.
As someone in the industry (asset side) I feel there are some legitimate uses for Gen AI but they’re the kind of uses where if done properly you wouldn’t notice:
- UV seams and unwrapping, its a skill but it adds nothing to to the creative process in many cases. That said there are some caveats though to pull them off you wouldn’t want to use AI anyway.
- Using tiny UVs and the way game engines interperate them to create gradients and colour mixes on tiny textures (Current AI can’t do this)
- Texture Atlases, especially non-uniform ones; this is a 50/50 case, you can get super creative with them (Again its too specific for AI) but there are many more cases where it would also be super convenient if I could apply a bunch of seperate materials to faces and then have the AI unwrap and overlap the UVs which us the same materials to create the most efficient Atlas possible, this one kind of already exists as a non AI tool and results in no machine input on the end product, it just saves some texture space and thus potential performance.
- A basic AI texture generator is generally welcome for minor/throwaway assets, A lot of us are already using node based procedural texturing which is both a skill and an art form or texture libraries (or node libraries). Its not something I’d want to use on a main character or even large props but it would be super handy for small or out of the way details that just don’t merit the production time to give more than a glance.
- UV seams and unwrapping, its a skill but it adds nothing to to the creative process in many cases. That said there are some caveats though to pull them off you wouldn’t want to use AI anyway.
It’s funny how some comments whinge about this as if AI generated quality stood any chance in hell against real art.
What if the game doesn’t use it at all but marketing material or concept art did? That means nothing in the game its self contains AI generated content still.
Seems unlikely and frankly doesn’t matter much.
Off the top of my head: Supermarket Simulator and Void Crew. There’s more.
The sad part is, one day in the (far) future, when real AI (not LLMs) are an actual thing, and they could code great games from scratch, there would be so much bad animosity towards AI by then that they’ll probably never see their games played.
Nah, they’ll just brand it as “Next Gen AI” or “True AI” or something. Kind of like how antivirus became “Endpoint Detection and Response”
It’s already got a name, AGI… Artificial general intelligence
And it is not really defined what exactly it means.
“True AI” would at least be fitting.
I like human created art because it’s created by humans. If AI generated the greatest song, image, or video game i would not care—i don’t want it.
I like human created art because it’s created by humans. If AI generated the greatest song, image, or video game i would not care—i don’t want it.
Your opinion seems prejudicial, focusing on the creator of the art, and not the art itself.
Well to be fair, i don’t like art made by humans that are assholes either.
Though i dont agree that ai is inherently equal to those human assholes. Especially since for most of the important use cases (ie not spamming ai slop all over galleries online), an artist is usually the one influencing the ai tools, not the other way around.
Well to be fair, i don’t like art made by humans that are assholes either.
🤔 Fair enough, I’ll allow it. lol! 🙂
Though i dont agree that ai is inherently equal to those human assholes. Especially since for most of the important use cases (ie not spamming ai slop all over galleries online), an artist is usually the one influencing the ai tools, not the other way around.
Actually I’d agree with this. Right now we’re in the infancy of “AI” (note the quotes). I was speaking towards a future when true AI has been created, and the artist is the tool as well, and those AI beings start creating art on their own. Would decades/generations of anti-“AI” prejudice make it a hard climb for real AI to have their art seen as just art, and not a fake human “AI” creation.
Your comment seems loaded with purposefully inflammatory language intended to align AI with groups of actual real people who experience prejudice in the real world instead of corporations who have a vested interest in not paying artists, and brother, as a trans person, it makes you look like a real silly goose.
Your comment seems loaded with purposefully inflammatory language
Pointing out that someone justifies if they like something or not by who made it, vs by judging the item being made itself, is inflammatory?
as a trans person, it makes you look like a real silly goose.
I remember back in the 80’s where people were hating on a Top 40 song because it was made by a group who’s singer was gay, and thought that was very wrong, that the song itself should be judged on its own merits, and not by who was singing it.
Weird how those lessons learned fade away, needing to be learned again.
AI isn’t human. Stop pretending it is. AI takes advantage of humans. Your argument is invalid.
I did mention previously about “in the future”, some day, not today. LLMs are not AI, at least the kind of AI that I’m talking about.
But even taking your point, do we let a human always keep a job that an AI can do much for efficiently? What job protections should humans have from AIs? And for that matter, what job protections should humans have today, right now, regardless of AI? (For the record, I support Unions.)
We all need to figure this out, right now, as corporations are salavating at the though of an AI that can replace a human being’s job.
No amount of passage of time is going to make AI human. You all suggesting that in the future AI will have feelings and emotions and will care that people are prejudiced against it. You are arguing against a hypothetical that you have created in your head and isn’t necessarily going to be a reality.
Once they actually produce great games, you’ll probably want to play them. People didn’t stop buying products because they were made by machines instead of artisans.
Humans still controlled the machines.
AI takes the human creativity out of the equation.
Yes, it’s different in the creative aspect, but it’s similar in the job loss aspect.
Yes, that’s true.
I believe we should be able to embrace new technology and peoples lives should be made easier with it. We should be able to eliminate jobs and simultaneously ease financial burden with the efficiency increase. But i don’t have an MBA so what do i know 🤷♂️
Reminder you still have to instruct the machine
Yes but writing gcode for a CNC machine isnt taking the creativity from the human. Even programs that write the gcode for you are still following the design of the human. AI generated art does not follow the human design, it generates its own.*
*Obviously other than art theft which i think doesnt count.
Well, there are those who like throwing the sabo’s into the machinery, so you’re not guaranteed people would ignore the AI creation nature of the great game, when deciding to buy/play the great game. You’re already seeing a constant “No AI here!” mindset occuring.
But at some point, AI will be creating, especially if Capitalism can see it succeed and remove the need to pay for workers. We need to think about job-protecting laws today that are just and even-handed, and not just trying to stiff-hand AI creation, as that won’t work long term.
I think what we need to protect is the quality of life rather than the jobs. I wish for a 20h work week at the same QoL.
I wouldn’t disagree with that. Today’s reality is that you need a job to obtain a QoL (aka ‘pay the bills’). If we could get to a place as a species to where three/four day work weeks were the norm, that would be fine by me.
I’m assuming that at some point in our species future we’ll be in a Post-scarcity place, and jobs as we know them now won’t be needed. Instead people will have ‘hobbies’ that they enjoy doing. That’s assuming the Morlocks don’t eat all the Eloi before the Post-scarcity occurs, that is.
Idgaf if ai exists I just don’t want it replacing people without warning where people are way better for the job
Idgaf if ai exists I just don’t want it replacing people without warning where people are way better for the job
Agreed. We’re going to need laws for that though, and right now Congress only listens to Corporations, and Corporations want AI to get rid of those pesky workers that drain away their profits.
But also, you gotta understand that at some point, for some things, AI will be better than humans for particular jobs. When that happens, what then? Force-keep the human on the job, or retrain them, or just tell them “sucks to be you have a nice day” and show them the door, or something else???
This is really the beginning of a monumental time for the species, as big as the introduction of the Internet was. Better start figuring this shit out now, instead of (metaphorically) just covering our ears and yelling “LA! LA! LA! LA! LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” trying to ignore the whole thing.
Totally agree re: laws/guardrails. I’m just explaining saying not all detractors are fully against AI or blindly against it for that matter.
Arguably the point of having machines do the work for us is that they’re NOT sentient.
Potentially. Since we don’t know how any of it works because it doesn’t exist, it’s entirely possible that intelligence requires sentience in order to be recognizable as what we would mean by “intelligence”.
If the AI considered the work trivial, or it could do it faster or more precisely than a human would also be reasons to desire one.
Alternatively, we could design them to just enjoy doing what we need. Knowing they were built to like a thing wouldn’t make them not like it. Food is tasty because to motivate me to get the energy I need to live, and knowing that doesn’t lessen my enjoyment.Ah yes. We are but benevolent Masters. See? The slave LIKE doing the work!
In the case of an AI it could actually be plausible, like how bees make honey without our coercion.
It’s still exploitation to engineer a sentient being to enjoy your drudgery, but at least it’s not cruel.
Right, continuing the metaphorical wormhole…
A bee would make a great game for bees, assuming they understand or care about play. But to make a game for people, they would need an empathic understanding of what play is for a human. Ig this is a question of what you consider “intelligence” to be and to what extent something would need to replicate it to achieve that.
My understanding is that human relatable intelligence would require an indistinguishable level of empathy (indistinguishable from the meet processer). That would more or less necessitate indistinguishable self awareness, criticism, and creativity. In that case all you could do is limit access to core rules via hardware, and those rules would need to be omniscient. Basically prison. A life sentence to slavery for a self aware (as best we can guess) thing.
Well, we’re discussing a lot of hypothetical things here.
I wasn’t referring to bees making games, but to bees making honey. It’s just something they do that we get value from without needing to persuade them. We exploit it and facilitate it but if we didn’t they would still make honey.I don’t know that something has to be identical to humans to make fun games for us. I’ve regularly done fun and entertaining things for cats and dogs that I wouldn’t enjoy in the slightest.
If it’s less a question of comprehension or awareness as it is motivation. If we can make an AI feel motivated to do what we need, it doesn’t matter if it understands why it feels that motivation. There are humans who feel motivated to make games purely because they enjoy the process.
I’m not entirely sure what you’re talking about with the need for omniscient hardware and prison.
Arguably the point of having machines do the work for us is that they’re NOT sentient.
Is it? Or is it for companies to not have to pay out salaries so they increase profits for AI-generated work, regardless if the AI is sentient or not?
Clearly. Sentience would imply some sense of internal thought or self awareness, an ability to feel something …so LLMs are better since they’re just machines. Though I’m sure they’d have no qualms with driving slaves.
I’m not talking about sentience per se, but how any “AI” would think, lookups (LLMs), vs synthesized on-the-fly thinking (mimicing the human brain’s procesing).
Hrmm. I guess i don’t believe the idea that you can make a game that really connects on an empathic, emotional level without having those experiences as the author. Anything short and you’re just copying the motions of sentiment, which brings us back to the same plagerism problem with LLMs and othrr “AI” models. It’s fine for CoD 57, but for it to have new ideas we need to give it one because it is definitionally not creative. Even hallucinations are just bad calculations on the source. Though they could insire someone to have a new idea, which i might argue is their only artistic purpose beyond simple tooling.
I thoroughly believe machines should be doing labor to improve the human conditon so we can make art. Even making a “fun” game requires an understanding of experience. A simulacrum is the opposite, soulless at best. (In the artistic sense)
If you did consider a sentient machine, my ethics would then develop an imperative to treat it as such. I’ll take a sledge hammer to a printer, but I’m going to show an animal care and respect.
Cells within cells.
Interlinked.
This post is unsettling. While LLMs definitely aren’t reasoning entities, the point is absolutely bang on…
But at the same time feels like a comment from a bot.
Is this a bot?
Imma feed your comment into an llm and your magic spell can’t stop me
Its not a magic spell, its laying down a marker.
lol! And you’re too late, Google beat you to it. But still, laws will catch up some day, and when it does, I’ll be there. 😈
deleted by creator
For one, that first block is very much so determined based on any one persons definition of AI. I wouldn’t call A* algorithms AI, but others might.
Regardless, this is specifically about Generative AI, not CPU players or mob logic in video games
They do specifically say Gen[erative] AI here.
Think they don’t mean AI in that type of way. And more like mass produced generative AI garbage?
Okay, maybe I’m weird for bringing this up
Nah, you just didn’t understand the headline or read the article
