> After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated…
Sounds like a cop-out. They can't possibly verify that any content they're hosting isn't already copyrighted, let alone in a "murky copyright state"
Sounds like a cop-out. They can't possibly verify that any content they're hosting isn't already copyrighted, let alone in a "murky copyright state"
> Sounds like a cop-out. Adhering to legal and copyright standards isn't a "cop-out"
And neither is choosing to act in a situation where the legality isn't clear.
I understand that OpenAI et al would like to assure all their investors and customers that there's nothing legally problematic with using an AI to launder away copyright infrigement, but we're going to need a few lawsuits to have the matter settled.
I'm quoting the relevant bit from Valve's email in the reddit post, to indicate exactly what they're actually forbidding. Notably: not all AI-generated content, but rather AI-generated content from models that were trained on material that's not owned by the person submitting the game.
Can that even be proven/tested?
It just has to be enough that Valves legal team can claim that they approved the game in good faith and that they can be held responsible for a game developer lying and knowingly violating the terms of service.
Depending on the court, burdens of proof can vary a lot...
In court, it would be the entity claiming infringement that would have the burden of proof that their exclusive rights under copyright were violated by the assets in question, not the distributor of the asset that had the burden of showing ownership of every item in the training set of the model used in some part of the workflow.
That seems pretty sensible. There have been lawsuits from artists before. Do you want to risk a game selling 10m copies and then it turns out that all the art was just copied and pasted by the "AI" and Valve is now on the hook. Also from a store perspective, any game where shortcuts like this are used tend to be shit games. They don't want spam games to be pumped. There's already enough indie trash platformers that n…
> Also from a store perspective, any game where shortcuts like this are used tend to be shit games. Yeah, they indicate that they have already submitted multiple games with AI generated assets, and submitted this one "with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated." Maybe I'm being unfair and they are making really good games, but these are not good indicators to me.
These tools have only now become available. I can imagine a game where these tools are used to develop a large world and backstory previously not possible. The main images and text may be hand crafted, but you might walk down a street where the other building are all unique, have names, and descriptions. It could really flesh out some of the procedurally generated games out there. Or it could be terrible. Or it could be good for being so terrible. It shouldn't be rejected entirely just yet.
That seems pretty sensible. There have been lawsuits from artists before. Do you want to risk a game selling 10m copies and then it turns out that all the art was just copied and pasted by the "AI" and Valve is now on the hook. Also from a store perspective, any game where shortcuts like this are used tend to be shit games. They don't want spam games to be pumped. There's already enough indie trash platformers that n…
There are already successful Steam games known to have used AI art. And this is only in the cases of the developers publicly admitting that.
So is Valve now going to remove these games off the store? This seems like a very terrible way to handle this - they need to make clear rules and make a public statement, not just start banning apps that they sense use AI art.
So using Adobe Firefly is fine, since they only trained on data they had the rights to?
Sort of - the person uploading to adobe stock can upload copyrighted material. Adobe will handle copyright claims and be liable up to 10k worth of damages.