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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?

#401

Post by Filligree »

mrweasel wrote: post #201
guy98238710 wrote: post #103

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…

Hang on. Imagine that these image generators were based entirely on public imagery, but work equally well.

Clearly that would clarify the legal situation, and it’d be a lot harder to ban it. But would that help artists? If so, how?

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

#402

Post by chefandy »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #341
chefandy wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure— the method of making the image, such as being AI generated, is entirely irrelevant in terms of IP enforcement. You could cut a cross-section from a log that had coincidentally formed the Nike symbol with it's rings, and if you slapped a picture of it on your line of sportsware, you better believe you're going to get owned. But if they see an increased risk of IP violations from AI generated assets— and given th…

The Nike example is trademark rights, not copyright. If you give a worker 5 examples of cars, and tell him "draw me a new car in this style", and he does so (from memory without clearly copying any individual example), it's unlikely to be a copyright or other IP violation.

Ok, fine... an image of Goofy. Both are judged on how similar they are, not the tools with which they were made.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity

> Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted in Arica v. Palmer that a court may find copyright infringement under the doctrine of "comprehensive non-literal similarity" if "the pattern or sequence of the two works is similar".

You're going to have a much harder time proving that you absolutely did not copy something if you had an image of what you're being accused of copying in the dataset you used to make it. If the images are deemed substantially similar, it will be deemed an infringement.

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

#403

Post by kube-system »

hedora wrote: post #376
kube-system wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But what if the wind blows, and my laptop falls off a shelf and writes the source code for windows 95, but reindented, with some implementation details and variable names changed? Simple. If it wasn't created by a human, it's not eligible for copyright. The law is quite clear about this. Microsoft gets the copyright to Windows 95 because they wrote it with humans. You wouldn't get it because you didn't write it. Yo…

But, if my laptop’s implementation of windows 95 is not eligible for copyright protection, then I can freely redistribute it because no one can use copyright law to stop me , in a runaround of Microsoft’s copyright on windows 95 (which the laptop generated version is clearly a derivative of). This is exactly the ambiguity Valve is concerned about.

But the hypothetical world in which your laptop falls off a shelf and randomly writes Windows 95 is a fake one.

LLMs aren't random number generators running in isolation.

They're trained on copyrighted material. If they regurgitate copyrighted material, we know where it came from. It came from the training material.

Valve is rightly concerned that non-lawyers have no clue what they're getting themselves into when using the current generation of AI models. The inability to determine whether an output is a substantial copy of an input is not a free pass to do whatever you want with it, it's a copyright infringement roulette.

There are way too many people in this industry who believe that building a technology which makes compliance impossible is the same thing as making compliance unnecessary.

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

#404

Post by kemayo »

dragonwriter wrote: post #286
kemayo wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed. Given the whole "Stable Diffusion reproduces the Getty Images watermark" lawsuit[1] that's still ongoing, it's not an idle concern. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright...

> What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed. Hard to see how any plausible outcome that would have that result for users of SD (if model training isn’t fair use, that’s definitely a blanket-liability issue for Stability.AI — and Midjourney, and Open…

> I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”.

The speculative worst-case outcome for these tools that I've seen suggested is the legal system deciding that an image generated with them is a derivative work of every image that was used to train the model. Since none of these models were trained on images that they had rights releases for, this would mean they're incapable of outputting images that aren't infringing on the copyrights of vast numbers of people.

I can't say how likely that is to actually be the legal outcome, of course, but it seems like the sort of concern that might lead to Valve's policy here.

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

#407

Post by cubefox »

devwastaken wrote: post #390
jasonjmcghee wrote: post #26

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 not valves job to police game assets. If it were then they should be removing plenty of other games. They don't, because they don't look and don't care. This is yet again more AIphobia. Under u.s. law you don't need to prove rights for content used in this way. It's transformative and does not replicate the heart of the originals work, therefore it's protected under fair use. AI generated content cannot be copyr…

This is correct, see:

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-...

The AI generated images are not protected by copyright because they are not authored by a human. Whether or not it is legal to train a model on copyrighted images is irrelevant for this. So it seems clear that Valve made the wrong call here.

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

#408

Post by asveikau »

xk_id wrote: post #360
asveikau wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think game art for programmers or people with a game design idea but no visual arts chops is a very fitting use. As would be generating text for such a use, like dialog for an NPC.

There’s a long way to go from “no artistic chops” to “compelling art” and although this is subjective, I haven’t seen AI getting there.

I'm not an expert or especially well versed, but I feel like I've seen things from midjourney that could pass for semi-professional art, the kind that might be sold at a small time park exhibition on a sunny afternoon.

And with somebody super focused on figuring out the right prompts, maybe tweaking the images slightly, I think it could be workable in a game for sprites, textures, backgrounds.

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

#409

Post by antifa »

cwkoss wrote: post #236
MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They will not even have a bulletproof way to detect AI imagery as it evolves every single day as an arm's race and detection is a full-time job. Even a FAANG or a state actor would need to dedicate team(s) to detection technology and still have false negatives. Are people actually trying to detect AI-generated content? That would not only be pointless and futile; the threat of false positives would be enormously de…

Yep. There is a cohort of #noaiart amateur-but-wants-to-be-professional artists on twitter who believe their mediocre talents would be paying their expenses if it only wasnt for that pesky ai imggen. (Ignoring that a vanishingly small proportion of imggen art is replacing commissioned art - most is art that would simply never have been made). Like a horde of locusts, they will randomly pile onto AI artwork with hate…

> Like a horde of locusts

My sympathies will be with the people whose career aspirations were just demoted to hobby, not the person who clicked "regenerate" 5 times then decided to upload.

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