> A video purportedly about his development process exclaims “Get rich quick with AI waifus” and “How I made $1000 Publishing an AI Generated Game on Steam (Gone Sexual?!?!)” — so we ought not to feel the loss too keenly.
Copying already copyrighted assets is clearly regulated. Valve knows what to do in this situation, and simply pulling down the offending game complies with the copyright regime.
It's unclear what the rules are going to be for AI generated art. There has been no law, or no court case, deciding it. As such, Valve is being a bit more defensive here to limit exposure.
I agree it's not a great trend, but it seems inevitable when this can lead to massive risk (lawsuits including Valve), and the upside is negligible. Valve is not going to lose market share over this, at least not for the foreseeable future.
I think the difference is that the stolen texture case is pretty cut and dry, right? If someone makes a complaint to valve that a game they're distributing has stolen textures, it's relatively easy for them to deal with it. Since AI generated content is in such a gray legal area now, I imagine it'd be impossible to deal with complaints about it, and they probably don't want to put themselves in a situation where they'd have to be the arbiter of that.
AI/ChatGPT/Copilot are miles off from being able to produce an entire, runnable executable, with all assets and code required for a functional game. So what does it even mean for a game to be AI generated?
Are they talking specifically AI art assets? In which case, do procedurally generated assets count? Is No Man's Sky going to be dropped from the shop?
this is such a stupid discussion from start to finish it's not even worth having.
It’s about legal copyright exposure. The copyright status of AI art is unclear, it has not been legislated or tried before the courts. In a worst case scenario, Steam could allow “AI generated games” on, after which AI art is regulated perhaps requiring permission or royalties from the original art used to train the model. In such a scenario, Valve themselves may get included in the lawsuit.
With this step, Valve massively reduces their legal exposure. Even if some AI are games slip through and the worst case scenario manifests it is still likely Valve will be fine, as they’ve sufficiently isolated themselves from the risk.
As for whether NMS counts, the answer is no. This isn’t about AI per se, it’s about using models trained on other copyrighted works. NMS doesn’t do that in any of its procedural generation.
As for how much AI generated art counts, this is a ship of Theseus problem. Not saying it’s easy, but hardly the first time regulation has come up against it.
This is going to be the next big legal battle. Google said in their new policy that anything you serve on the web can go into their AI data set so will be curious when this does happen, who actually starts it as the legal powerhouse. Will we see frivolous RIAA style claims or a larger battle of the massive companies.
I agree, and don't think I have much else to contribute, but I think that I want to make my small opinion known:
Using everything as training data is entirely reasonable. Search engines are basically built on this. Regurgitation in very digested, very opinionated, direct citation form is totally reasonable.
Regurgitation as a "new" asset is worth discussing, heavily. I lived through the days of OC Donut Steel in the history of the web. This feels a lot like that. And that's okay! You don't need original thought to create something personally useful. Sargnarg the hargeharg is valuable to the person who came up with them. What's not okay is the delusion that it's a meaningful contribution.
AI generated blades of grass, rock textures, tree bark - this will all allow for detailed, precise, realistic worlds. The authors of the original stock, the people who collected the dataset, deserve compensation. Under whatever license they used. A CC license allows you to use these assets for your own benefit. If a game ships with a set of CC licensed grass textures, a proprietary deterministic algorithm to remix them, and runs on every consumers machine to generate a set of new unique textures, I think that's clearly within license. If it ships with those textures pregenerated, that's clearly a derivative work. If it ships with the midpoint, the mixture of all of those textures, incredibly lossily? That's worth litigation, and lawmaking.
> Using everything as training data is entirely reasonable. Search engines are basically built on this. Regurgitation in very digested, very opinionated, direct citation form is totally reasonable.
Is it though? If I write about something and Google’s AI creates a regurgitation that is actually a misrepresentation of what I originally wrote and attaches my name on it as the source I think I might be pissed.
Search engines are built on data but they also should return 1 to 1 copies, not some modified version of them.
It's not illegal to cite someone out of context to distort their meaning - It's even hard to prove fraud from it. Caveat emptor and all that. Attributing a version made up whole cloth is different, but that's not what Google Search does, that's what Google Bard does.
I'm not saying it's illegal nor that it should be. I was just pushing against the idea that it's a totally reasonable thing to do.
> but that's not what Google Search does, that's what Google Bard does.
Agree which is why I said "Google’s AI". The problem I see is that AI creates this weird middle man that now also acts as a translation layer.
It used to be that you only had a search engine between you and the actual content and a search engine might only show you an excerpt of the original content (which can also be problematic) but at least it was the original content.
Now you have all these AI tools that try to make summaries of the original content and that IMO is very problematic.
Interesting as all rules and regulations initiatives are still grapelling with what 'AI-generated' actually means, and depending on that definition the percentage of AI-generated games on Steam are somewhere between 100% and 0%.
