Speaking as a creative who also has gotten paid for creative work, I’m a bit flustered at how brazenly people just wax poetic about the need for copyright law, especially when the creator or artist them selves are never really considered in the first place.
It’s not like yee olde piracy, which can even be ethical (like videogames being unpublished and almost erased from history), but a new form whereby small companies get to join large publishers in screwing over the standalone creator - except this time it isn’t by way of predatory contracts, but by sidestepping the creator and farming data from the creator to recreate the same style and form, which could’ve taken years - even decades to develop.
There’s also this idea that “all work is derivative anyways, nothing is original”, but that sidesteps the points of having worked to form a style over nigh decades and making a living off it when someone can just come along and undo all that with a press of a button.
If you’re libertarian and anarchist, be honest about that. Seems like there are a ton of tech bros who are libertarian and subversive about it to feel smort (the GPL is important btw). But at the end of the day the hidden agenda is clear: someone wants to benifit from somebody else’s work without paying them and find the mental and emotional justification to do so. This is bad, because they then justify taking food out of somebody’s mouth, which is par for the course in the current economic system.
It’s just more proof in the pudding that the capitalist system doesn’t work and will always screw the labourer in some way. It’s quite possible that only the most famous of artists will be making money directly off their work in the future, similarly to musicians.
As an aside, Jay-Z and Taylor Swift complaining about not getting enough money from Spotify is tone-deaf, because they know they get the bulk of that money anyways, even the money of some account that only plays the same small bands all the time, because of the payout model of Spotify. So the big ones will always, always be more “legitimate” than small artists and in that case they’ve probably already paid writers and such, but maybe not… looking at you, Jay-Z.
If the copyright cases get overwritten by the letigous lot known as corporate lawyers and they manage to finger holes into legislation that benifits both IP farmers and corporate interests, by way of models that train AI to be “far enough” away from the source material, we might see a lot of people loose their livelihoods.
Make it make sense, Beehaw =(
Here’s my view: I like games, I want to make games. Not only do I want to make games, there are games I want to make which would require a massive team of people to accomplish. That’s not cheap and I don’t, nor will I likely ever have, the money to make them.
If I take it to a studio and say, “here’s this game I want to make, here’s a prototype showing how it’ll play, the basic mechanics, here’s some sketches show the general artstyle” and so forth, if they decide they like it (which is a huge if), my understanding is that they typically expect to receive ownership of the copyright for the game and all associated IPs. That means the game is no longer my game, it’s now owned by the company. If I want to take that game to another company because I’m not happy with how the current company is handling it, well, that’s too bad, it’s not my game anymore. I don’t even own the characters, the name, none of the stuff I originally pitched is mine anymore, it’s now owned by the company.
AI, on the other hand, promises to eventually allow me to be able to generate models, animations, textures, and so on. This massively decreases the budget and staffing required to make the game a reality, potentially bringing the costs in line with something I can actually afford. The artists weren’t replaced by AI because I couldn’t afford to pay them in the first place. That’s not a slight against them, I’d pay them up front if I could, but I can’t; nor do I believe it’s ethical or moral to string them along with the promise of profit sharing when I know full well that I’m not really interested in making a profit. I’m ultimately doing it because I want to and if I make money at it, then that’s cool. If I promise to share any profit the game makes, there’s a real potential that they might get pennies when they could have been making more money working for someone else. At that point I’ve selfishly taken food out of their mouths and wasted their time.
Being able to use AI to asset in game creation also means that while any AI-generated assets are public domain, I still get to keep whatever I made by hand, whether it’s the script, the hero models, or even just the setting and character designs. I also get to have full oversight of what I’m making, I don’t have to worry about business suits harassing me about whether or not my game is going to be profitable, how marketing analysis says I need to add X mechanic or focus on having Y graphics, or Z representation. It’s my artistic vision, and while I may have used AI to assist in bringing it to fruition, they’re simply pieces of a larger, human-created work.
Or I guess to put it another way, I understand why artists are upset by AI generating traditional artworks; however AI also has the future potential to reduce the barrier of entry for complex creative works to the point where even a highly complex game or AAA-quality movie could be done by a small group of friends, or even a single person. If you have the money, then you should absolutely pay your artists, but I also think it should be decided on a case-by-case basis.
Instead of painting it all with a broad brush, take into consideration whether or not it’d be realistically feasible for an individual or creative group to do it “right”. How much was AI-generated? A little? A lot? All of it? How much is okay? Does it matter if the individual parts are generated by an AI if it was ultimately assembled and guided by a human? What situations would it be okay to use AI in? Is your view reasonable? Why or why not? Consider it not just from your perspective, but from the perspective of the person wanting to create their vision. Not all creative works are equal when it comes to the effort required to create them. Hell, not all games are equal in that regard. It’s significantly easier to make a simple platformer or RPG than it is to create a Fallout or GTA.
I’m not gonna pretend I have the answers, I recognize how much damage AI can do to creative industries; however I also recognize that there’s a lot of creativity going to waste because the barriers are so high for some types of creative works that AI is likely the only way they’ll ever have the chance to see the light of day.
Your creative vision doesn’t entitle you to profit from others’ hard work, just because you don’t want to put in the work to learning those skills yourself.
I imagine I’m about to talk to a brick wall, because I see that message nearly word-for-word whenever AI ethics comes up. But to hell with it. I’m already miserable, not like talking to a stubborn brick wall is going to make me anymore miserable than I already am.
That’s the problem and I get the sense you didn’t read my message. I know how to 3d model. I know how to make textures, how to animate, how to write, how to make sound effects. I literally know how to do nearly every part of the development process. I’m telling you that this isn’t a case of not wanting to learn the skills. This is a case of game development being so ridiculously complex that the feasibility of a single person being able to create a game ranges from “easily possible” to “that’s literally impossible, you’d never make it a reality even with every developer in the world working on it”.
You’re coming into this looking at it like every creative pursuit is the same as traditional art. You plop a skilled person down in front of a canvas and they can make a beautiful artwork all by themselves. However, the same is not true for games. I have most of the skills necessary to make a game, from scratch, and I’m telling you that this has nothing to do with being unwilling to learn new skills; this is entirely about the fact that games are so ridiculously complex that it doesn’t matter what your skill set is, as it stands right now some games are so complex they can only be built as a capitalist pursuit, not as a creative one.
Making a game is a team effort, I am aware of this. I’m literally a game design student. But your excuse that it’s okay for you to use AI because you want to make a game alone doesn’t hold much water. Other people are part of the process: all those artists whose work was strip-mined for AIs. You’re basically going to profit from their work without having any responsibility to pay them for all their effort, or even the decency to get their permission,as you would for any other asset you want to use. The fact that their work is “copyright laundered” through an AI first doesn’t change what you’re doing, no matter how much you try to convince yourself it’s okay.