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Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

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Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#201

Engineers have created it and lawyers have ruined it. It's interesting how whole professions can be inherently constructive or inherently destructive.

Engineers, well companies, created an entire industry without any regards for how that might affect artists... again.

Musicians are still being screwed over because engineers wanted change how music is distributed. The goals are noble enough, just as with the music, but large corporations inserted themselves in the middle to capitalize on the work of the artists. I can't fault artists teaming up with lawyers again in an attempt to be paid for their work. It's didn't really work out for the music industry, but hey, what can they do?

As engineer we clearly aren't on the side of the artists, we help companies in the middle, not the artists. When developers created ChatGPT, or Stable Diffusion, did anyone of the developers insist on building in licens tracking, to ensure that only work in the public domain or under appropriate licenses was used, or at least tracked?

We're once again trying to build a new industry, but we don't care how that might affect others. It's dumb, it's not like there wasn't enough publicly available material, it's just that it's cheaper to ignore licensing.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#202
post #165

Midjourney has been really helpful to me as a one man dev. I can mockup art much faster then what I can do in photoshop. I still intend to at some point do a complete pass using a professional artist (or learn to draw myself) - because generative art is not consistent thematically from asset to asset. But if I just want to see what my tile assets look like if they were all done in 30's art deco style, I can do it in…

And no one is trying to take that away from you. You are using it as a tool, and intend to pay someone to create the final version, or do it yourself.

The issue people have is when you just use a dataset trained on someone else's work and pass it off as your own, and in the case of Steam games, most likely profit from it.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#203
What sounds very weird to me, is that I doubt Valve is verifying the copyright for all the graphics and text you submit. Why would they reject something because "it looks AI generated"? The potential for legal hazard is probably less on these re-mashed works than on purely copy-pasted content.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#204
post #9

> 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…

Man, getty images is sitting on a goldmine opportunity to get into AI here. They have enough images to train something quite useful!

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#205
post #165

Midjourney has been really helpful to me as a one man dev. I can mockup art much faster then what I can do in photoshop. I still intend to at some point do a complete pass using a professional artist (or learn to draw myself) - because generative art is not consistent thematically from asset to asset. But if I just want to see what my tile assets look like if they were all done in 30's art deco style, I can do it in…

Yeah I don't see too much issue in using generative art for more trivial things, like some banner art to sit atop a blogpost or something. Placeholders also seem like a really good application, particularly for cases where the randomization might expose issues that real users would face. I wouldn't have spent money on these things anyway.

Direct incorporation of generative art into a commercial product is much more murky.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#206
post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> ultra super conservatively cautious. This has nothing to do with politics. This has everything to do with CYA, the issue is AI trained with copyrighted material is a huge gray area and they don’t want to be in the gray area. That’s rational and has zero to do with “conservative”. This is likely not set in stone and after the copyright laws and courts catch up and decide what to do, Valve will likely go back and upd…

>> ultra super conservatively cautious.

> This has nothing to do with politics.

> This has everything to do with CYA, the issue is AI trained with copyrighted material is a huge gray area and they don’t want to be in the gray area. That’s rational and has zero to do with “conservative”.

The word "conservative" isn't a political word in all (or even I would have thought in most) contexts: it's normal meaning is similar to "chosen so as to be careful". For example, a "conservative estimate" isn't "an estimate that leans to the right of the political spectrum": it is an estimate which has been padded out in the direction you are more likely wrong.

When someone says they are being "ultra super conservatively cautious" they are merely being super extra extra doubly-cautious, as we are stacking similar adjectives (as one might could do with something else such as "carefully"). So, wanting to avoid being in a gray area is dead center to being "conservative" in one's curation or legal strategy.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#207
post #9

> 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…

Man, getty images is sitting on a goldmine opportunity to get into AI here. They have enough images to train something quite useful!

AI is already trained on Getty's image set... it's why people have to exclude watermarks from their prompts.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are they copping out of? What are you suggesting their real motivation is?

I'll suggest a real motivation: they want to make their own game generated by AI and have first mover advantage while they work out all the scary AI copyright issues they have to deal with that they already deal with because the same problem exists with human generated art. Why do I say that? They want the developer to prove they only used material they created to do the training and Valve has the resources to follow…

> They want the developer to prove they only used material

No, they only want the developer to "affirmatively confirm" it. It doesn't say anything about Valve demanding some sort of proof.

Re: Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore?

#210

Why editorialize? "Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore" Your title changes the meaning- they didn't ban games afaict. It's also a misleading post, as it's specifically GenAI where authors can't prove or don't have rights to content. If you use ProcGen etc or have full rights to the data used, I can't imagine there would be any issues.

> it's specifically GenAI where authors can't prove or don't have rights to content.

Even more specifically, the author admitted to the images being "obviously AI generated" and Valve alleges that the images themselves in the game's initial submission contained copyrighted third-party content.

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