28 ms·

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

622 points by Wouter33 3y ago

smoldesu 3y ago
> At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data. This seems like a completely fair response from Valve. On top of that, they gave them notice and an opportunity to remove the offending content (with that content explicitly called out) and offered to refund if that was not a viable option. If this was an iOS/Android app, they would have just been told to pound sand and swallow the dev fee. Good on Valve for not lapsing communication here.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  Organic only content -- here we come. Not that it bothers me, but I feel oddly validated that appears to be the path taken. It makes sense, even from just purely 'we can't review it all' perspective.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    Well, it's not like they're The App Store and controlling everything you can install. You can still put AI-assisted software on any machine that can install Steam, they just don't want to deal with the legal implications of hosting the dubiously-generated content themselves.
  - colechristensen 3y ago
    I think it's fine. You have to have rights to do AI things with the content of your datasets. No more "download the whole internet" or "create image generation models from the scraped contents of a stock image provider". I think it's going to turn into a new class of copyright permissions. Along the lines of > thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind More like > License is hereby given for the consumption of these contents by human minds
- slimsag 3y ago
  It sounds like they even looked into the specific AI the gamedev said they used: > we reviewed [Game Name Here] and took our time to better understand the AI tech used to create it. And offered a refund on the $100 app submission credit: > App credits are usually non-refundable, but we’d like to make an exception here and offer you a refund. Please confirm and we’ll proceed. Seems incredibly reasonable.
kevinh 3y ago
I'd wait for more information before making any assumptions about what Valve is doing here. So often these stories here are lacking context due to only one side trying to paint the situation in a very one-sided light.
- Wouter33 3y ago
  Valve is quite clear about their reasoning. Since AI models use all kind of sources for their training, they don't want those assets on their platform because they are afraid of copyright claims.
  - peoplearepeople 3y ago
    That seems very sensible to me, I hope other platforms follow this example
  - kevinh 3y ago
    For all we know, the game in question had images clearly aping some licensed characters. We don't know how stringent the policies are without clarification or examples of art found infringing. How did Valve know that the art was AI-generated? Did the developer tell them or include it in their marketing materials? It's basically just reading tea leaves without that information.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    It actually sounds like if you claim to have ownership of the training data you can still use AI generated assets. For most people this is a distinction without a difference however.
- NelsonMinar 3y ago
  Agreed. The link here here is to a Reddit post from an relatively unknown person claiming to be quoting a private email from Valve. Kotaku has a bit more reporting, including a second report from a developer on Reddit. Also some comments on skepticism. https://kotaku.com/valve-ai-art-generator-steam-crypto-ban-metaverse-pc-1850590856 https://kotaku.com/valve-ai-art-generator-steam-crypto-ban-m... I'm pretty sure if this is Valve policy they'll have no trouble saying so publicly. I miss the old days of journalism where someone made an effort to get the story correct including responses from the named parties.
minimaxir 3y ago
This just creates a moral hazard to not disclose the use of any AI-generated assets, which is something other creative industries have already learnt the hard way. Recent text-to-image models have improved enough such that it's possible to get realistic, not-Midjourney-dreaminess in the generations with a modicium of effort, so banning obviously-AI-generated images is shortsighted and unsustainable.
- bob1029 3y ago
  > This just creates a moral hazard to not disclose the use of any AI-generated assets The whole space is somewhat amusing to me. what is the bigger moral hazard: Openly disclosing everything about your content pipeline and getting your team's efforts shitcanned, or keeping everything private unless a court order shows up?
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    So, the OpenAI model?
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      And GitHub Copilot
      - Kiro 3y ago
        That's OpenAI.
    - minimaxir 3y ago
      It has been widely speculated that the primary reason OpenAI never disclosed the full training dataset for GPT-3 or GPT-4 was to avoid potential legal backlash.
    - mr_coleman 3y ago
      I prefer to think of it as the Uber/AirBnB model. Just do illegal things so much that you clog the enforcement mechanisms. Then it becomes such an unreasonable burden that they change the laws in your favor.
moogly 3y ago
How about Firmament?
justrealist 3y ago
This seems utterly impossible to enforce. You really going to guarantee that your design firm didn't use AI to generate the assets?
- Nursie 3y ago
  So you’re in breach of contract and if it turns out later that you don’t own the copyright for what you’re distributing, valve get to plant that firmly on you.
- jasonlotito 3y ago
  It doesn't need to be 100%. It just needs to be a reasonable attempt. We all too often let perfect be the enemy of good. Impossible to enforce? That's not true. They did so right here. Yes, people will work around it, and some will slip through the cracks. That doesn't mean it's a useless policy with no impact.
- Eji1700 3y ago
  It's a CYA thing. Steam says "we don't allow AI content". Someone shoves AI content on the platform anyways. If it can be proved they violated the TOS, they then have the ability to nuke their game and stop someone from suing them. If they can't prove it, well they can't prove it and the game stays. To do otherwise opens up the door to steam having to "vet" all the AI content. So yes AI content will slip through (in massive droves) but it will be indy scene. The biggest impact here is going to be AAA devs who can't just neglect to mention they used AI at some point. This is actually the first thing that could "kill" steam or give Epic a competitive advantage. There's 0 doubt that companies like EA/Activision/whatever want to jump all over AI to make yearly releases like FIFA even cheaper, and if Epic is willing to say "come on over" we might see epic exclusivity for that reason alone, rather than the current "here's a pile of money to make up for all the sales you'll miss out on when no one remembers your game released"
  - freedomben 3y ago
    If Steam (or probably more likely Steam's lawyers) is/are worried about liability, shouldn't Epic be also? The lawsuits are firing up, I wouldn't want to be the whipping boy chosen by the copyright holders to punish.
kemayo 3y ago
> 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 assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game. Valve's worried that AI-generated art is in a murky copyright state, and don't want to open themselves up to being sued.
- XCSme 3y ago
  Well, that was the entire point of banning AI generated content, right? Or, are you implying that the article states different reasons for the ban?
  - freedomben 3y ago
    > that was the entire point of banning AI generated content, right? But AI generated content is NOT banned. You just have to prove you have the copyright (or permission) for the training data.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      Which honestly sounds rather reasonable and should be the expectation of all current AI products. The only reason it wouldn't be easy enough to provide is if you just scraped any available data set with a complete disregard for intellectual property.
      - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
        Humans take in inputs and transform what they learn into distinct outputs. Training data is essentially just a machine doing the same thing. Knowingly scraping pirated material would be one thing, but essentially having the machine view publicly-available material is not clearly at odds with existing IP law.
wincy 3y ago
Interesting. So products that use AI generation as pet of an API, say using a diffusion model to generate different stylings for the walls and textures for a level creator, would fall under this? Guess it’s time to ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission and not let Valve know where my art assets are coming from in my web-based API. If I were making a game I’d just lie and lie at this point.
- axus 3y ago
  AI code generation is OK though! Because they can't detect it? It's cool to see the development of new ethical standards in response to new technology. If I could get an option for ethically-sourced AI, which only uses public-domain art / text / code for training, that'd be nice.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  For a very long time music producers would pirate their samples, plugins and presets. The idea was that nobody could tell how illegal these tools were in the finished product, so there was no reason not to steal. It was genuinely the gold standard for a while, and even established artists like Diplo, Porter Robinson and Kanye West were caught pirating content en-masse. Nowadays there isn't the same attitude so much. Many people still pirate sounds, but skeptic listeners will sometimes ask musicians to show off their project files to embarass them over how many pirated Cymatics drums they use and their version of Sylenth licensed to "RuTorrent". It wouldn't surprise me if the same thing happened today. AI-assisted development will take off for a while, and then people will ask self conscious questions like "nice art, who's your art director?"
  - sebzim4500 3y ago
    > Many people still pirate sounds, but skeptic listeners will sometimes ask musicians to show off their project files And the musicians comply? Weird.
    - smoldesu 3y ago
      I mean, not always. It's hard to be super secretive in a live situation, but I'd wager many musicians have successfully hidden their pirated plugins. A lot of people have been caught anyways. Steve Aoki accidentally left a visibly pirated Sylenth VST in a promo vid, Porter Robinson and Skrillex both got caught with pirated plugins during track breakdowns, Kanye West posted a video with 30 tabs of The Pirate Bay open to download Logic Pro... the list goes on. It was extremely common in the early days of digital music production (and still is today, to an extent), but the backlash has pushed most legit production houses to legit licensed software.
bilalq 3y ago
Where do they draw the line? What about DLSS? Doesn't any game using that have "AI generated graphics"? I guess their email wording focused specifically on assets. Does that mean if you don't pre-bake assets in as artifacts, you're fine?
- giobox 3y ago
  There is very clearly a line most people will understand between what DLSS does, and generating completely new art that mimic existing intellectual property. No one is ever going to accuse DLSS of creating new art works containing some other legal entity's existing IP for example, its literally just a (very clever) upscaling of the original art. If it did, it would presumably render the game being upscaled almost unplayable as it would be changing the output to a state unrecognizable from the input frame.
  - bilalq 3y ago
    There may be a line between there somewhere, but it's not at all clear where it is. What about generating foliage or varied ground textures? What about generating buildings? Or NPCs? Also, the "just upscaling" relies on training data from outside your own game. Why is that okay when the rest of this isn't? I totally get why Valve is taking the stance that they are. I imagine its hard even for them to know where to draw the line (evidenced by how long the turnaround time was on the support response).
    - giobox 3y ago
      > What about generating foliage or varied ground textures? What about generating buildings? Or NPCs? This isn't how NVidia DLSS or AMD FSR works at all. DLSS/FSR can't create new buildings or foliage, or NPCs, so hard to foresee problems of the kind Valve are concerned with. Same for varied ground textures- the entire point of the technology is to sharpen and upscale the original image, or in case of DLSS3 inject new matching frames. The only "risk" to DLSS is in Nvidia's own training data, but there is no "risk" of another company's existing IP leaking into final frame - again if there was, gamers wouldn't want to use it, as its destroying the original frame! If the resulting frame isn't a near perfect match for the original, DLSS has failed. Thankfully it does nearly perfectly match the original in use and alongside AMD's FSR 2.0 stuff has been one of the best advancements in gaming technology of recent years - effectively significant FPS boost "for free" on same hardware. > https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/dlss/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/dlss/ > https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/fidelityfx-super-resolution https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/fidelityfx-super-resolut... While the line may be gray for other AI technologies in gaming, such as using it create new original textures or models, DLSS/FSR is just a really good upscaler - no "new" content being created and therefore no risk of IP infringement. To be really blunt; FSR and DLSS are in almost every new game for the last couple of years on both PC and console across literally hundreds of games now - if there was IP infringement issues, we would know by now - we are already onto second/third generations of these upscalers.
rngname22 3y ago
This is just legal cover until such time as its possible to enforce no child exploitation imagery, no copyright stuff, etc. It doesn't matter if they are able to enforce it, Valve can use this policy as cover if they ever get sued. Don't overthink the motivation. 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. The same sorts of things already happen for example on YouTube and Twitch, where types of content are against TOS or copyright but enforcement is sporadic and selective, smaller operations often fly under the radar of enforcement, bigger creators who are netting the org sufficient revenue will likely be able to get away with more, etc, the automated tools for detection are flawed.
- birdyrooster 3y ago
  Going public about your awareness to a problem necessitates an enforcement response to be considerable. Imagine you are a trademark holder and someone is using your IP but you don't enforce your trademark by litigating. Your claim is weakened. It shows the public and the court how significant this problem is for your party. Edit: copyright -> trademark
  - epakai 3y ago
    You seem to be confusing copyright and trademark. Copyright isn't diminished by non-enforcement. A trademark risks being invalidated or genericized when not enforced. Intellectual property is an encompassing term that seems to lead to this sort of confusion.
    - birdyrooster 3y ago
      Thank you!!
- MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
  > 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 detrimental to anyone creating legitimate work. It is such a ridiculously bad idea I'm dumbfounded that anyone smart would be trying to do it.
Madmallard 3y ago
Strong disapprove. Artificially attempting to slow progress just creates a massive power disparity for those who do not care.
- freedomben 3y ago
  > Artificially attempting to slow progress Why do you think Valve is just trying to slow progress? Don't they win when people on their store win? It seems more likely to me that this is CYA against the major lawsuits that are happening right now from copyright holders.
  - Madmallard 3y ago
    Ah yeah that is probably right. Chinese indie industry boom?
- seanw444 3y ago
  If this was politically or ethically motivated, I'd be inclined to agree. But it seems this is just a safeguard against lawsuits, which I can understand at least.
Der_Einzige 3y ago
Good luck enforcing this. You can generate textures all day with no evidence that they were AI generated.
- justahuman74 3y ago
  Depends if the game publisher is willing to run the risk of their game getting yanked from sale
- pessimizer 3y ago
  You can also ban games from your platform for even the vaguest suspicion that they contain AI generated assets, or probably even for complaining about the policy.
scohesc 3y ago
How would you be able to know if something is AI generated if it's not outright stated in the product description? "Yes, I intentionally designed the static image of this man to have 5 and a half fingers on one hand with a distorted logo on their t-shirt, please allow this game, Valve." How can you prove that something is AI generated? Would creating graphics in Adobe's photoshop AI filler tool count as AI-generated content to Valve, or is Adobe's AI data-set using copyright-free graphics? I wonder if this is Valve trying to also somewhat cater/attract artists on the platform, as I'm sure artists are against using AI under the guise it'd "steal their jobs/hamper creativity".
- mcintyre1994 3y ago
  I think the idea is that if someone gets sued for the AI art in their game, Steam plans to point to their terms of service and say the legalese equivalent of "they promised us that it didn't have AI art, if they didn't lie to us we wouldn't have hosted their game", and not also get sued.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
Seems entirely reasonable. Just because Stability (who seems to be crashing and burning) decided to try and do a Napster for image generation doesn’t mean everyone else should run into the lawsuit abyss alongside them.
slongfield 3y ago
This doesn't seem to have anything really related to the AI-generation of the graphics--it's 100% about copyright. The statement from Valve even says that explicitly: if this user had owned the copyright to the training data, they would have been fine using the AI generated graphics and text.
jasonjmcghee 3y ago
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.
- schnebbau 3y ago
  [flagged]
- gcampos 3y ago
  > we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game. Yep, you are absolutely right.
  - __loam 3y ago
    This is exactly how this stuff should work. Greedily scraping whatever content you want hurts people who made that content and ultimately hurts AI developers who still need more high quality data.
    - jwestbury 3y ago
      I'm still not convinced by this argument. All human-generated art is also a result of the artist's experiences, and is strongly influenced by other art they have consumed. So why should GenAI not be allowed to blend the work of other artists? If you want to argue that we should fundamentally treat machine- and human-generated works differently, that's fine -- but it's a different argument from "looking at a bunch of art and then synthesising ideas is bad," because that's exactly what many (most?) human artists do.
      - dwaite 3y ago
        I believe the expectation is that there is a difference between new creative work by humans and the output of tools. Tools are not 'artistically influenced' by their inputs. Also, a human can take a work, modify it, and create a derivative work. They do not have copyright to the original material, and the degree of derivation is a winding blurry line through the court system to determine if they fully own the new work. I suspect these to dominate the arguments for the first court cases around generative AI art - that the artist (operator) is the one who has to justify that they provided enough creativity in the process to create an independent work.
floomk 3y ago
So using Adobe Firefly is fine, since they only trained on data they had the rights to?
- acomjean 3y ago
  Yes, You can assert you own or have the rights to those images, based on your license with Adobe.
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    How do you prove that the images where generated using Adobe Firefly instead of SD or MJ?
    - delecti 3y ago
      They don't seem to be asking for proof. > we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data So it seems that asserting "assets X and Y were generated by tool Z that has rights to its training data" would be sufficient. Presumably AI tools will also start to formalize that declaration alongside their terms of service.
      - GaggiX 3y ago
        Are there similar things where you have to declare something that is in no way provable in game development? It feels kinda silly.
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        Yes, its fairly normal for distribution platforms to require you to declare that you have the rights for everything in your game (which is in no way provable), extending it to everything in the training set(s) for the model(s) used for generative AI used is ludicrous, but just amounts to the same thing plus the (almost certainly false) assumption that every work produced by AI generation is legally a derivative work of every work in the training set(s) of the AI model(s) used.
add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. It will happen regardless, but any oasis of real content will become important. Automation will be a force multiplier for laziness and predation more so than for creativity.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  Massive amounts of shovelware on Steam is most definitely not a new phenomenon.
  - imdsm 3y ago
    Amazon is more like eBay than eBay now Steam is like eBay but for low quality games It happens to them all. There are big games on steam, but 95% of the stuff on there is low value, low cost content
    - __loam 3y ago
      Steam has systems in place to bubble high quality work to the top.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  >We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. Everywhere. Games, porn, text, articles, music, etc. For the generation that grew up with the internet already existing, this is their epoch moment, lives pre and post generative AIs. I was thinking the other day that original artworks are going to be far more valued with a glut of AI generated. Thinking slightly ahead, you can find your absolute favorite artist, and in seconds use their style you love so much to make the family portrait you would never be able to commission them to do. But going forward even more… It’s just not the same as a print right? Well, thanks to AI being able to learn and determine where brush strokes would land, we take advancements from 3D printers and your desktop painting rig picks up a brush and paints it just as the artist would have. Then going forward even more.. the artist himself needs some cash and knocks out 100 of these customs while they sleep, signs them, and now they are originals, sort of. So… verifiable originals are going to be the hot thing. A painting with a video of the artist painting it… but not an AI generated video of course! Maybe the artist will have to print it on location while you watch.
FloatArtifact 3y ago
Basically valve is saying no AI generated content. The premise is that all AI generated content violates copyright which isn't necessarily true. To me, it sounds like their side stepping a potential issue rather than an actual issue with a copyright holder complaining of infringement with a particular IP.
- rileymat2 3y ago
  They are saying no AI content trained on copyrighted work you don’t own. Thats a very different framing.
  - FloatArtifact 3y ago
    Yes I can see that now but that seems too broad. Hypothetically if a model's trained on a thousand images only which 10 images are copyright. Does that mean of all images generated violate copyright law...?
LinuxBender 3y ago
I do not believe this will be limited to Valve. I expect more companies to start covering their backside by implementing similar rules to avoid copyright lawsuits. I can't say I would blame them either. I am not a lawyer but I think one of the risks is that LLM's do not show their work so proving where something came from is likely to end up in court after a lot of expensive discovery is performed.
shadowgovt 3y ago
Does that mean High on Life is now banned? If I recall correctly, they used AI on purpose to give ads and billboards a nonsense alien feel.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  atomic heart, high on life, hawken reborn, observation duty and probably many others, but no they are not banned.
  - imdsm 3y ago
    Hypocrisy is alive and well
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      Or maybe the developers of those games have given their assurance to Valve that they own all the relevant copyright, and therefore the same standard is being applied? > As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.
      - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
        If they claimed that then they lied because we all know those games studios didn't train their own Image gen models without relying on the base SD models
        mcpackieh 3y ago
        Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But if the developer is willing to sign a document saying they own the rights, that's probably good enough for Valve to feel their ass has been covered.
- oblio 3y ago
MagicMoonlight 3y ago
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 nobody wants.
- vlunkr 3y ago
  > 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.
  - LanceH 3y ago
    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.
    - eropple 3y ago
      It's not being "rejected entirely". That is mendacious editorializing. Generative AI products are being rejected unless you affirm that you have rights to the entirety of the training data set. What's wrong with that?
      - Animats 3y ago
        That you probably don't need rights to the training set in the US, unless Congress changes copyright law. This is being litigated.[1] Humans can look at a collection of copyrighted images and draw a new picture. The legal basis for holding AIs to a higher standard is weak. Current litigation: [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-ar...
jasonlotito 3y ago
Of note: they aren't banning AI generated graphics. Rather: > we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data. It's not AI generate graphics. Instead, it's AI-generated graphics where the rights to the training data cannot be established. I think that's an important distinction.
dleslie 3y ago
The models which can prove the progeny, and valid licensing, of their source assets will become increasingly valuable with time. This gives social networks an edge, which often have EULAs that allow the business to use uploaded content _at least_ internally, if not commercially. _And_, in the short term, there's an opportunity for someone to pay armies of artists to create _decent renditions_ of existing styles and known works. It's not a copyright violation if a human being mimics another human being in creating a new, original work.
seydor 3y ago
good news for their competitors
- bogwog 3y ago
  Not really, or at least, not yet. If Epic allows AI generated content, it will just attract devs that use AI generated content. I think those are more likely to be shovelware garbage today than anything else. Until there's a killer/must-have game built with AI content, I don't think this is going to have much of a noticeable impact.
ccheney 3y ago
Seems shortsighted and overly limiting to me. Perhaps in this specific case it makes sense? What's the difference? A) Human creates artwork in the style of [insert artist here] B) Computer creates artwork in the style of [insert artist here] Both "trained" against existing copyrighted works except one is human. Is this to "save jobs"?
TheCaptain4815 3y ago
I wonder if they'll do the same for Ai generated text? Why shouldn't they honestly. I could easily finetune an LLM on the writings of a certain author or maybe the content of Mass Effect 1-3 and have the outputs be similar.
cinntaile 3y ago
This opens up one hell of an opportunity for Epic or a startup.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  As I understand it, Epic already has a smaller and more curated catalog by intention. They're already trying to keep out the tens of thousands of low quality and hobbyist titles.
tuckerpo 3y ago
I imagine this is a stopgap measure until there's more concrete legislature in place for AI generated IP.
lobo_tuerto 3y ago
Actual title is: "Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore"
GreedClarifies 3y ago
I guess we need clarity on whether using copyrighted material is covered under fair use. GenAI clearly meets the "transformative" standard. OTOH it seems likely that it will have difficulty with the "Amount and substantiality" as it considers the whole art work, OTOH this is not necessarily a hard barrier given the "transformative" nature. My guess is that the "Effect upon work's value" standard vs. the "transformative" standard will be the area where there is most action. Clearly, in aggregate, GenAI will have great impact upon works value. However, this is not the usual standard (it is about individual works), and I would argue that this would be creating new law by the courts. Hopefully we will get a case to the supreme court to resolve this, quickly. I think that this is a boon for humanity and I would like to see the cuffs taken off as quickly as possible.
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  > GenAI clearly meets the "transformative" standard. IANAL, but the problem is that fair use is an affirmative defense and is decided for each case separately. One GenAI may be transformative, while others may not, depending on how much of the original training data they throw back at you.
raincole 3y ago
Random reddit anecdote. And from 23 days ago. AND misleading clickbait title.
guy98238710 3y ago
Engineers have created it and lawyers have ruined it. It's interesting how whole professions can be inherently constructive or inherently destructive.
- a_cardboard_box 3y ago
  Or are engineers trying to destroy the livelihood of millions of artists, and lawyers are protecting it?
  - GreedClarifies 3y ago
    Smash the looms! Smash the looms!
    - pessimizer 3y ago
      Looms weren't trained unwillingly by the people they replaced. You're thinking about outsourcing.
      - tzekid 3y ago
        But they were. Weavers improved on their processes for a long time before the engineers swooped in and put that accumulated knowledge into an automated form.
        CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        And they were worried it would be used to disenfranchise them and enrich the factory owners at the expense of themselves/laborers, and surprise! they weren't wrong.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  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.
deleted 3y ago
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deskamess 3y ago
Interesting... what would an AI trained only on the Commons/public domain be like? Would it be a clean source for new images? And would new images need to inherit a public/Commons license (GPL style)?
- Kuinox 3y ago
  > And would new images need to inherit a public/Commons Well first we need to know if using images for AI training can be considered fair use.
- Kiro 3y ago
  I thought Adobe Firefly did that.
  - xsmasher 3y ago
    And some non-public-domain images of their own. > The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired.
whywhywhywhy 3y ago
This will change within 6 months I promise you, EA/Ubisoft/etc will ALL be shipping AI generated textures in games before the end of the year.
- TaupeRanger 3y ago
  That's not a change from this though, as long as those AI generated textures are from systems that were trained on images that they have permission to use (or are copyright free).
  - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
    No such system exists so they won’t. Even Adobes system has questionable training data mixed in
    - TillE 3y ago
      Every major game publisher has an enormous archive of in-house artwork, and probably a decent amount of hardware they could use for training. They'd be stuck with open source software like Stable Diffusion - or have to cut a deal with Midjourney or whoever - but there's no barrier to creating such a system.
      - nickthegreek 3y ago
        Stable Diffusion nor Midjourney can be used to create artwork under these Valve guidelines.
- teaearlgraycold 3y ago
  And only a matter of time until a major game lets you talk to NPCs by generating dialog with an LLM.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
    It'll be interesting to see if a game can make good use of that, but it sounds like it would lead to some very frustrating interactions.
brucethemoose2 3y ago
Well what if someone ships a model exclusively trained on legal content?
- eropple 3y ago
  Then you tell Valve that and they say "OK"?
  - brucethemoose2 3y ago
    Would they though? I think the legality of the dataset would be hard to prove. And I can see some game devs straight up lying, shipping SD 1.5/Llama, and dragging Valve into court when one of them explodes in popularity.
    - eropple 3y ago
      > I think the legality of the dataset would be hard to prove. Could be. I hope it is. It's a reason not to use it!
stuckinhell 3y ago
This just shows me the future is people using AI tools to make their own games custom for them.
emveeoh 3y ago
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alexdeloy 3y ago
After seeing that Unity Muse[0] AI presentation yesterday and the following backlash regarding the source material[1], this seems to be a huge legal minefield to be solved first. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR4IuN2tF78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR4IuN2tF78 [1]: https://nitter.net/unitygames/status/1673650585860489217 https://nitter.net/unitygames/status/1673650585860489217
al_be_back 3y ago
copyright issues aside, a platform has to consider 'spam', AI generated content could quickly and easily overwhelm a platform.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  See Clark's sci fi magazine.
newobj 3y ago
Fake story, guaranteed
euix 3y ago
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 20 minutes. As placeholders or to create little bits and doodles (like a mouse cursor in the style of an armored fist), there are lots of little graphical icons in a game that would other have to be created by a graphical artist. Generative art is really useful in my experience. It's reduced the work to the point where I can toy with it in my off time and spend most of my effort in the actual programming and development. The other idea I have toyed with, coming from professional ML experience - was to build my own generative model and use it to create my own art assets. Here I wonder how the copyright rules would work - would the assets I train on be subjected to copyright? This is a much bigger conversation at that point and I wont be the only one affected.
- c-hendricks 3y ago
  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.
  - valine 3y ago
    What if I look at other people's art and learn from it? Seem unfair to pass that work off as my own. All artists should be banned from looking at copyrighted images, we can't risk them incorporating copyrighted elements into their own work. /s
    - Jolter 3y ago
      That’s not a good analogy and you should know it.
snowman647 3y ago
That's the wrong path, soon Internet for 90%++ will be mixed with AI. Btw - What if I write my game using Chat-GPT?
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  As long as you just use it for generating the code and not the assets, Valve doesn’t seem to care.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- janosdebugs 3y ago
  I recently tried to use it to learn the Blender API, without much success. It halucinates left right and center, so I had to go back to reading the docs, trial and error, as well as reverse engineering. I'd be honestly surprised if you could use it to create an entire game.
jncfhnb 3y ago
Outlast Trials appears to be a fairly large title that utilized AI art. I sincerely doubt it’ll get ax’ed
pessimizer 3y ago
Not only does this keep them safe from copyright fallout, I think its real goal is to hold back a flood of shit games until the tech matures.
Zetobal 3y ago
Without seeing the art there is nothing to judge. I bet it's a visual story and they are using characters from established ips.
- Sivart13 3y ago
  100%, my guess this is someone putting Disney or Nintendo characters in compromising situations and Valve would have rejected it AI or not
paulmd 3y ago
https://i.imgur.com/JWjLFlO.png https://i.imgur.com/JWjLFlO.png now that's how you know when a comments section is gonna be amazing
charles_f 3y ago
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.
justinclift 3y ago
Wonder if using (Japanese) anime based AI assets would be workable instead, as the licensing situation there sounds a bit clearer? aka "copyright doesn't apply": https://cacm.acm.org/news/273479-japan-goes-all-in-copyright-doesnt-apply-to-ai-training/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/news/273479-japan-goes-all-in-copyright...
zzzzzzzza 3y ago
misleading title, hn should ban reddit links
hospitalJail 3y ago
Beginning of the end for Valve. This is a warning shot. Might want to stop buying games on steam sales.
pierat 3y ago
By that definition, any roguelike should be banned. And, well, we're not seeing that. I'll watch, but I disbelieve the reddit poster. Probably a CEO bot drumming up obvious bait comments over current computer events.
stainablesteel 3y ago
i really hope the US copies Japan's ruling on this kind of thing.
lost_tourist 3y ago
Sounds like a market opportunity.
fyrn_ 3y ago
Title is very misleading for something that the only the only evidence of is a anecdote from reddit. Was expecting a statement from Valve based on the title
Havoc 3y ago
>I improved those pieces by hand, so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI Steam's objection is other copyright even indirectly in the AI training dataset and to remove it, not to conceal the issue better. Tricky copyright questions aside, inability to follow basic instructions is definitely a disadvantage when going through approval processes
lyu07282 3y ago
This is obviously nonsense because games and artists have been using AI and procedural generated content for decades, everything from textures, models, maps, animation, music and sound. Generative models are now even integrated in the NVIDIA drivers for upscaling and every photo you take with a recent samsung phone uses generative AI. Just because now generative AI has made a significant leap doesn't mean its anything new. And copyright is irrelevant because models are clearly derivative works the same way artists remix existing works of art, if that were to change, copyright law would destroy the majority of all creative endeavors.
- SrslyJosh 3y ago
  > games and artists have been using AI and procedural generated content for decades These are not the same things. Procedural generation is not the same as feeding different prompts to a model until it vomits up something that looks sort-of like what you want.
theknocker 3y ago
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samstave 3y ago
We need an "AI generated web game tower defense" FULL FN STOP.
Zuiii 3y ago
A moronic policy if true: 1. Copyright Office made it clear that AI generated output is generally not copyrightable irrespective of training data: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05... 2. In fact, there is credible legal theory that goes as far as to conclude that training dataset license cannot effect the resulting weights under US law (EU's take on copyright make it less clear) 3. DMCA already provides Valve with legal cover in the unlikely event that training dataset license is somehow found to effect the IP rights of generated content. 4. By adopting this policy, they are acting more as a traditional publisher rather than a platform, thus exposing themselves to even more liabilities not less. This policy makes no sense to me no matter how I look at it. The harsh reality that Valve and everyone else needs to accept is that AI-generated content from "unclear" datasets is here to stay. People need to accept this fact^1 and move on. I already have. 1: Copyright is an incredibly limited, obsolete, broken invention that was never meant to handle concepts like this. It's very much like a poor analogy that we stubbornly insist on applying to situations were it simply does not fit. We will continue to find ourselves arriving to bizarre and nonsensical conclusions like this as long as we continue holding onto this broken invention. Reward authors in another way. Placing arbitrary limitations on information was never the right way to do it.

622 points by Wouter33 3y ago

> At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data. This seems like a completely fair response from Valve. On top of that, they gave them notice and an opportunity to remove the offending content (with that content explicitly called out) and offered to refund if that was not a viable option. If this was an iOS/Android app, they would have just been told to pound sand and swallow the dev fee. Good on Valve for not lapsing communication here.

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
Organic only content -- here we come. Not that it bothers me, but I feel oddly validated that appears to be the path taken. It makes sense, even from just purely 'we can't review it all' perspective.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  Well, it's not like they're The App Store and controlling everything you can install. You can still put AI-assisted software on any machine that can install Steam, they just don't want to deal with the legal implications of hosting the dubiously-generated content themselves.
- colechristensen 3y ago
  I think it's fine. You have to have rights to do AI things with the content of your datasets. No more "download the whole internet" or "create image generation models from the scraped contents of a stock image provider". I think it's going to turn into a new class of copyright permissions. Along the lines of > thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind More like > License is hereby given for the consumption of these contents by human minds
slimsag 3y ago
It sounds like they even looked into the specific AI the gamedev said they used: > we reviewed [Game Name Here] and took our time to better understand the AI tech used to create it. And offered a refund on the $100 app submission credit: > App credits are usually non-refundable, but we’d like to make an exception here and offer you a refund. Please confirm and we’ll proceed. Seems incredibly reasonable.

kevinh 3y ago

I'd wait for more information before making any assumptions about what Valve is doing here. So often these stories here are lacking context due to only one side trying to paint the situation in a very one-sided light.

Wouter33 3y ago
Valve is quite clear about their reasoning. Since AI models use all kind of sources for their training, they don't want those assets on their platform because they are afraid of copyright claims.
- peoplearepeople 3y ago
  That seems very sensible to me, I hope other platforms follow this example
- kevinh 3y ago
  For all we know, the game in question had images clearly aping some licensed characters. We don't know how stringent the policies are without clarification or examples of art found infringing. How did Valve know that the art was AI-generated? Did the developer tell them or include it in their marketing materials? It's basically just reading tea leaves without that information.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  It actually sounds like if you claim to have ownership of the training data you can still use AI generated assets. For most people this is a distinction without a difference however.
NelsonMinar 3y ago
Agreed. The link here here is to a Reddit post from an relatively unknown person claiming to be quoting a private email from Valve. Kotaku has a bit more reporting, including a second report from a developer on Reddit. Also some comments on skepticism. https://kotaku.com/valve-ai-art-generator-steam-crypto-ban-metaverse-pc-1850590856 https://kotaku.com/valve-ai-art-generator-steam-crypto-ban-m... I'm pretty sure if this is Valve policy they'll have no trouble saying so publicly. I miss the old days of journalism where someone made an effort to get the story correct including responses from the named parties.

minimaxir 3y ago

This just creates a moral hazard to not disclose the use of any AI-generated assets, which is something other creative industries have already learnt the hard way. Recent text-to-image models have improved enough such that it's possible to get realistic, not-Midjourney-dreaminess in the generations with a modicium of effort, so banning obviously-AI-generated images is shortsighted and unsustainable.

bob1029 3y ago
> This just creates a moral hazard to not disclose the use of any AI-generated assets The whole space is somewhat amusing to me. what is the bigger moral hazard: Openly disclosing everything about your content pipeline and getting your team's efforts shitcanned, or keeping everything private unless a court order shows up?
- ethbr0 3y ago
  So, the OpenAI model?
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    And GitHub Copilot
    - Kiro 3y ago
      That's OpenAI.
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    It has been widely speculated that the primary reason OpenAI never disclosed the full training dataset for GPT-3 or GPT-4 was to avoid potential legal backlash.
  - mr_coleman 3y ago
    I prefer to think of it as the Uber/AirBnB model. Just do illegal things so much that you clog the enforcement mechanisms. Then it becomes such an unreasonable burden that they change the laws in your favor.

moogly 3y ago

How about Firmament?

justrealist 3y ago

This seems utterly impossible to enforce. You really going to guarantee that your design firm didn't use AI to generate the assets?

Nursie 3y ago
So you’re in breach of contract and if it turns out later that you don’t own the copyright for what you’re distributing, valve get to plant that firmly on you.
jasonlotito 3y ago
It doesn't need to be 100%. It just needs to be a reasonable attempt. We all too often let perfect be the enemy of good. Impossible to enforce? That's not true. They did so right here. Yes, people will work around it, and some will slip through the cracks. That doesn't mean it's a useless policy with no impact.
Eji1700 3y ago
It's a CYA thing. Steam says "we don't allow AI content". Someone shoves AI content on the platform anyways. If it can be proved they violated the TOS, they then have the ability to nuke their game and stop someone from suing them. If they can't prove it, well they can't prove it and the game stays. To do otherwise opens up the door to steam having to "vet" all the AI content. So yes AI content will slip through (in massive droves) but it will be indy scene. The biggest impact here is going to be AAA devs who can't just neglect to mention they used AI at some point. This is actually the first thing that could "kill" steam or give Epic a competitive advantage. There's 0 doubt that companies like EA/Activision/whatever want to jump all over AI to make yearly releases like FIFA even cheaper, and if Epic is willing to say "come on over" we might see epic exclusivity for that reason alone, rather than the current "here's a pile of money to make up for all the sales you'll miss out on when no one remembers your game released"
- freedomben 3y ago
  If Steam (or probably more likely Steam's lawyers) is/are worried about liability, shouldn't Epic be also? The lawsuits are firing up, I wouldn't want to be the whipping boy chosen by the copyright holders to punish.

kemayo 3y ago

> 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 assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game. Valve's worried that AI-generated art is in a murky copyright state, and don't want to open themselves up to being sued.

XCSme 3y ago
Well, that was the entire point of banning AI generated content, right? Or, are you implying that the article states different reasons for the ban?
- freedomben 3y ago
  > that was the entire point of banning AI generated content, right? But AI generated content is NOT banned. You just have to prove you have the copyright (or permission) for the training data.
  - mrweasel 3y ago
    Which honestly sounds rather reasonable and should be the expectation of all current AI products. The only reason it wouldn't be easy enough to provide is if you just scraped any available data set with a complete disregard for intellectual property.
    - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
      Humans take in inputs and transform what they learn into distinct outputs. Training data is essentially just a machine doing the same thing. Knowingly scraping pirated material would be one thing, but essentially having the machine view publicly-available material is not clearly at odds with existing IP law.

wincy 3y ago

Interesting. So products that use AI generation as pet of an API, say using a diffusion model to generate different stylings for the walls and textures for a level creator, would fall under this? Guess it’s time to ask for forgiveness rather than ask for permission and not let Valve know where my art assets are coming from in my web-based API. If I were making a game I’d just lie and lie at this point.

axus 3y ago
AI code generation is OK though! Because they can't detect it? It's cool to see the development of new ethical standards in response to new technology. If I could get an option for ethically-sourced AI, which only uses public-domain art / text / code for training, that'd be nice.
smoldesu 3y ago
For a very long time music producers would pirate their samples, plugins and presets. The idea was that nobody could tell how illegal these tools were in the finished product, so there was no reason not to steal. It was genuinely the gold standard for a while, and even established artists like Diplo, Porter Robinson and Kanye West were caught pirating content en-masse. Nowadays there isn't the same attitude so much. Many people still pirate sounds, but skeptic listeners will sometimes ask musicians to show off their project files to embarass them over how many pirated Cymatics drums they use and their version of Sylenth licensed to "RuTorrent". It wouldn't surprise me if the same thing happened today. AI-assisted development will take off for a while, and then people will ask self conscious questions like "nice art, who's your art director?"
- sebzim4500 3y ago
  > Many people still pirate sounds, but skeptic listeners will sometimes ask musicians to show off their project files And the musicians comply? Weird.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    I mean, not always. It's hard to be super secretive in a live situation, but I'd wager many musicians have successfully hidden their pirated plugins. A lot of people have been caught anyways. Steve Aoki accidentally left a visibly pirated Sylenth VST in a promo vid, Porter Robinson and Skrillex both got caught with pirated plugins during track breakdowns, Kanye West posted a video with 30 tabs of The Pirate Bay open to download Logic Pro... the list goes on. It was extremely common in the early days of digital music production (and still is today, to an extent), but the backlash has pushed most legit production houses to legit licensed software.

bilalq 3y ago

Where do they draw the line? What about DLSS? Doesn't any game using that have "AI generated graphics"? I guess their email wording focused specifically on assets. Does that mean if you don't pre-bake assets in as artifacts, you're fine?

giobox 3y ago
There is very clearly a line most people will understand between what DLSS does, and generating completely new art that mimic existing intellectual property. No one is ever going to accuse DLSS of creating new art works containing some other legal entity's existing IP for example, its literally just a (very clever) upscaling of the original art. If it did, it would presumably render the game being upscaled almost unplayable as it would be changing the output to a state unrecognizable from the input frame.
- bilalq 3y ago
  There may be a line between there somewhere, but it's not at all clear where it is. What about generating foliage or varied ground textures? What about generating buildings? Or NPCs? Also, the "just upscaling" relies on training data from outside your own game. Why is that okay when the rest of this isn't? I totally get why Valve is taking the stance that they are. I imagine its hard even for them to know where to draw the line (evidenced by how long the turnaround time was on the support response).
  - giobox 3y ago
    > What about generating foliage or varied ground textures? What about generating buildings? Or NPCs? This isn't how NVidia DLSS or AMD FSR works at all. DLSS/FSR can't create new buildings or foliage, or NPCs, so hard to foresee problems of the kind Valve are concerned with. Same for varied ground textures- the entire point of the technology is to sharpen and upscale the original image, or in case of DLSS3 inject new matching frames. The only "risk" to DLSS is in Nvidia's own training data, but there is no "risk" of another company's existing IP leaking into final frame - again if there was, gamers wouldn't want to use it, as its destroying the original frame! If the resulting frame isn't a near perfect match for the original, DLSS has failed. Thankfully it does nearly perfectly match the original in use and alongside AMD's FSR 2.0 stuff has been one of the best advancements in gaming technology of recent years - effectively significant FPS boost "for free" on same hardware. > https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/dlss/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/technologies/dlss/ > https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/fidelityfx-super-resolution https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/fidelityfx-super-resolut... While the line may be gray for other AI technologies in gaming, such as using it create new original textures or models, DLSS/FSR is just a really good upscaler - no "new" content being created and therefore no risk of IP infringement. To be really blunt; FSR and DLSS are in almost every new game for the last couple of years on both PC and console across literally hundreds of games now - if there was IP infringement issues, we would know by now - we are already onto second/third generations of these upscalers.

rngname22 3y ago

This is just legal cover until such time as its possible to enforce no child exploitation imagery, no copyright stuff, etc. It doesn't matter if they are able to enforce it, Valve can use this policy as cover if they ever get sued. Don't overthink the motivation. 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. The same sorts of things already happen for example on YouTube and Twitch, where types of content are against TOS or copyright but enforcement is sporadic and selective, smaller operations often fly under the radar of enforcement, bigger creators who are netting the org sufficient revenue will likely be able to get away with more, etc, the automated tools for detection are flawed.

birdyrooster 3y ago
Going public about your awareness to a problem necessitates an enforcement response to be considerable. Imagine you are a trademark holder and someone is using your IP but you don't enforce your trademark by litigating. Your claim is weakened. It shows the public and the court how significant this problem is for your party. Edit: copyright -> trademark
- epakai 3y ago
  You seem to be confusing copyright and trademark. Copyright isn't diminished by non-enforcement. A trademark risks being invalidated or genericized when not enforced. Intellectual property is an encompassing term that seems to lead to this sort of confusion.
  - birdyrooster 3y ago
    Thank you!!
MetaWhirledPeas 3y ago
> 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 detrimental to anyone creating legitimate work. It is such a ridiculously bad idea I'm dumbfounded that anyone smart would be trying to do it.

Madmallard 3y ago

Strong disapprove. Artificially attempting to slow progress just creates a massive power disparity for those who do not care.

freedomben 3y ago
> Artificially attempting to slow progress Why do you think Valve is just trying to slow progress? Don't they win when people on their store win? It seems more likely to me that this is CYA against the major lawsuits that are happening right now from copyright holders.
- Madmallard 3y ago
  Ah yeah that is probably right. Chinese indie industry boom?
seanw444 3y ago
If this was politically or ethically motivated, I'd be inclined to agree. But it seems this is just a safeguard against lawsuits, which I can understand at least.

Der_Einzige 3y ago

Good luck enforcing this. You can generate textures all day with no evidence that they were AI generated.

justahuman74 3y ago
Depends if the game publisher is willing to run the risk of their game getting yanked from sale
pessimizer 3y ago
You can also ban games from your platform for even the vaguest suspicion that they contain AI generated assets, or probably even for complaining about the policy.

scohesc 3y ago

How would you be able to know if something is AI generated if it's not outright stated in the product description? "Yes, I intentionally designed the static image of this man to have 5 and a half fingers on one hand with a distorted logo on their t-shirt, please allow this game, Valve." How can you prove that something is AI generated? Would creating graphics in Adobe's photoshop AI filler tool count as AI-generated content to Valve, or is Adobe's AI data-set using copyright-free graphics? I wonder if this is Valve trying to also somewhat cater/attract artists on the platform, as I'm sure artists are against using AI under the guise it'd "steal their jobs/hamper creativity".

mcintyre1994 3y ago
I think the idea is that if someone gets sued for the AI art in their game, Steam plans to point to their terms of service and say the legalese equivalent of "they promised us that it didn't have AI art, if they didn't lie to us we wouldn't have hosted their game", and not also get sued.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

Seems entirely reasonable. Just because Stability (who seems to be crashing and burning) decided to try and do a Napster for image generation doesn’t mean everyone else should run into the lawsuit abyss alongside them.

slongfield 3y ago

This doesn't seem to have anything really related to the AI-generation of the graphics--it's 100% about copyright. The statement from Valve even says that explicitly: if this user had owned the copyright to the training data, they would have been fine using the AI generated graphics and text.

jasonjmcghee 3y ago

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.

schnebbau 3y ago
[flagged]
gcampos 3y ago
> we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game. Yep, you are absolutely right.
- __loam 3y ago
  This is exactly how this stuff should work. Greedily scraping whatever content you want hurts people who made that content and ultimately hurts AI developers who still need more high quality data.
  - jwestbury 3y ago
    I'm still not convinced by this argument. All human-generated art is also a result of the artist's experiences, and is strongly influenced by other art they have consumed. So why should GenAI not be allowed to blend the work of other artists? If you want to argue that we should fundamentally treat machine- and human-generated works differently, that's fine -- but it's a different argument from "looking at a bunch of art and then synthesising ideas is bad," because that's exactly what many (most?) human artists do.
    - dwaite 3y ago
      I believe the expectation is that there is a difference between new creative work by humans and the output of tools. Tools are not 'artistically influenced' by their inputs. Also, a human can take a work, modify it, and create a derivative work. They do not have copyright to the original material, and the degree of derivation is a winding blurry line through the court system to determine if they fully own the new work. I suspect these to dominate the arguments for the first court cases around generative AI art - that the artist (operator) is the one who has to justify that they provided enough creativity in the process to create an independent work.

floomk 3y ago

So using Adobe Firefly is fine, since they only trained on data they had the rights to?

acomjean 3y ago
Yes, You can assert you own or have the rights to those images, based on your license with Adobe.
- GaggiX 3y ago
  How do you prove that the images where generated using Adobe Firefly instead of SD or MJ?
  - delecti 3y ago
    They don't seem to be asking for proof. > we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data So it seems that asserting "assets X and Y were generated by tool Z that has rights to its training data" would be sufficient. Presumably AI tools will also start to formalize that declaration alongside their terms of service.
    - GaggiX 3y ago
      Are there similar things where you have to declare something that is in no way provable in game development? It feels kinda silly.
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        Yes, its fairly normal for distribution platforms to require you to declare that you have the rights for everything in your game (which is in no way provable), extending it to everything in the training set(s) for the model(s) used for generative AI used is ludicrous, but just amounts to the same thing plus the (almost certainly false) assumption that every work produced by AI generation is legally a derivative work of every work in the training set(s) of the AI model(s) used.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago

We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. It will happen regardless, but any oasis of real content will become important. Automation will be a force multiplier for laziness and predation more so than for creativity.

minimaxir 3y ago
Massive amounts of shovelware on Steam is most definitely not a new phenomenon.
- imdsm 3y ago
  Amazon is more like eBay than eBay now Steam is like eBay but for low quality games It happens to them all. There are big games on steam, but 95% of the stuff on there is low value, low cost content
  - __loam 3y ago
    Steam has systems in place to bubble high quality work to the top.
SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
>We're on the cusp of a profound content shovelware crisis. Everywhere. Games, porn, text, articles, music, etc. For the generation that grew up with the internet already existing, this is their epoch moment, lives pre and post generative AIs. I was thinking the other day that original artworks are going to be far more valued with a glut of AI generated. Thinking slightly ahead, you can find your absolute favorite artist, and in seconds use their style you love so much to make the family portrait you would never be able to commission them to do. But going forward even more… It’s just not the same as a print right? Well, thanks to AI being able to learn and determine where brush strokes would land, we take advancements from 3D printers and your desktop painting rig picks up a brush and paints it just as the artist would have. Then going forward even more.. the artist himself needs some cash and knocks out 100 of these customs while they sleep, signs them, and now they are originals, sort of. So… verifiable originals are going to be the hot thing. A painting with a video of the artist painting it… but not an AI generated video of course! Maybe the artist will have to print it on location while you watch.

FloatArtifact 3y ago

Basically valve is saying no AI generated content. The premise is that all AI generated content violates copyright which isn't necessarily true. To me, it sounds like their side stepping a potential issue rather than an actual issue with a copyright holder complaining of infringement with a particular IP.

rileymat2 3y ago
They are saying no AI content trained on copyrighted work you don’t own. Thats a very different framing.
- FloatArtifact 3y ago
  Yes I can see that now but that seems too broad. Hypothetically if a model's trained on a thousand images only which 10 images are copyright. Does that mean of all images generated violate copyright law...?

LinuxBender 3y ago

I do not believe this will be limited to Valve. I expect more companies to start covering their backside by implementing similar rules to avoid copyright lawsuits. I can't say I would blame them either. I am not a lawyer but I think one of the risks is that LLM's do not show their work so proving where something came from is likely to end up in court after a lot of expensive discovery is performed.

shadowgovt 3y ago

Does that mean High on Life is now banned? If I recall correctly, they used AI on purpose to give ads and billboards a nonsense alien feel.

GaggiX 3y ago
atomic heart, high on life, hawken reborn, observation duty and probably many others, but no they are not banned.
- imdsm 3y ago
  Hypocrisy is alive and well
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    Or maybe the developers of those games have given their assurance to Valve that they own all the relevant copyright, and therefore the same standard is being applied? > As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.
    - whywhywhywhy 3y ago
      If they claimed that then they lied because we all know those games studios didn't train their own Image gen models without relying on the base SD models
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. But if the developer is willing to sign a document saying they own the rights, that's probably good enough for Valve to feel their ass has been covered.
oblio 3y ago

MagicMoonlight 3y ago

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 nobody wants.

vlunkr 3y ago
> 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.
- LanceH 3y ago
  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.
  - eropple 3y ago
    It's not being "rejected entirely". That is mendacious editorializing. Generative AI products are being rejected unless you affirm that you have rights to the entirety of the training data set. What's wrong with that?
    - Animats 3y ago
      That you probably don't need rights to the training set in the US, unless Congress changes copyright law. This is being litigated.[1] Humans can look at a collection of copyrighted images and draw a new picture. The legal basis for holding AIs to a higher standard is weak. Current litigation: [1] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-art-copyright-legal-lawsuit-stable-diffusion-midjourney-deviantart https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/16/23557098/generative-ai-ar...

jasonlotito 3y ago

Of note: they aren't banning AI generated graphics. Rather: > we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data. It's not AI generate graphics. Instead, it's AI-generated graphics where the rights to the training data cannot be established. I think that's an important distinction.

dleslie 3y ago

The models which can prove the progeny, and valid licensing, of their source assets will become increasingly valuable with time. This gives social networks an edge, which often have EULAs that allow the business to use uploaded content _at least_ internally, if not commercially. _And_, in the short term, there's an opportunity for someone to pay armies of artists to create _decent renditions_ of existing styles and known works. It's not a copyright violation if a human being mimics another human being in creating a new, original work.

seydor 3y ago

good news for their competitors

bogwog 3y ago
Not really, or at least, not yet. If Epic allows AI generated content, it will just attract devs that use AI generated content. I think those are more likely to be shovelware garbage today than anything else. Until there's a killer/must-have game built with AI content, I don't think this is going to have much of a noticeable impact.

ccheney 3y ago

Seems shortsighted and overly limiting to me. Perhaps in this specific case it makes sense? What's the difference? A) Human creates artwork in the style of [insert artist here] B) Computer creates artwork in the style of [insert artist here] Both "trained" against existing copyrighted works except one is human. Is this to "save jobs"?

TheCaptain4815 3y ago

I wonder if they'll do the same for Ai generated text? Why shouldn't they honestly. I could easily finetune an LLM on the writings of a certain author or maybe the content of Mass Effect 1-3 and have the outputs be similar.

cinntaile 3y ago

This opens up one hell of an opportunity for Epic or a startup.

add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
As I understand it, Epic already has a smaller and more curated catalog by intention. They're already trying to keep out the tens of thousands of low quality and hobbyist titles.

tuckerpo 3y ago

I imagine this is a stopgap measure until there's more concrete legislature in place for AI generated IP.

lobo_tuerto 3y ago

Actual title is: "Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore"

GreedClarifies 3y ago

I guess we need clarity on whether using copyrighted material is covered under fair use. GenAI clearly meets the "transformative" standard. OTOH it seems likely that it will have difficulty with the "Amount and substantiality" as it considers the whole art work, OTOH this is not necessarily a hard barrier given the "transformative" nature. My guess is that the "Effect upon work's value" standard vs. the "transformative" standard will be the area where there is most action. Clearly, in aggregate, GenAI will have great impact upon works value. However, this is not the usual standard (it is about individual works), and I would argue that this would be creating new law by the courts. Hopefully we will get a case to the supreme court to resolve this, quickly. I think that this is a boon for humanity and I would like to see the cuffs taken off as quickly as possible.

janosdebugs 3y ago
> GenAI clearly meets the "transformative" standard. IANAL, but the problem is that fair use is an affirmative defense and is decided for each case separately. One GenAI may be transformative, while others may not, depending on how much of the original training data they throw back at you.

raincole 3y ago

Random reddit anecdote. And from 23 days ago. AND misleading clickbait title.

guy98238710 3y ago

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

a_cardboard_box 3y ago
Or are engineers trying to destroy the livelihood of millions of artists, and lawyers are protecting it?
- GreedClarifies 3y ago
  Smash the looms! Smash the looms!
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Looms weren't trained unwillingly by the people they replaced. You're thinking about outsourcing.
    - tzekid 3y ago
      But they were. Weavers improved on their processes for a long time before the engineers swooped in and put that accumulated knowledge into an automated form.
      - CatWChainsaw 3y ago
        And they were worried it would be used to disenfranchise them and enrich the factory owners at the expense of themselves/laborers, and surprise! they weren't wrong.
mrweasel 3y ago
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.

deleted 3y ago

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deskamess 3y ago

Interesting... what would an AI trained only on the Commons/public domain be like? Would it be a clean source for new images? And would new images need to inherit a public/Commons license (GPL style)?

Kuinox 3y ago
> And would new images need to inherit a public/Commons Well first we need to know if using images for AI training can be considered fair use.
Kiro 3y ago
I thought Adobe Firefly did that.
- xsmasher 3y ago
  And some non-public-domain images of their own. > The current Firefly generative AI model is trained on a dataset of Adobe Stock, along with openly licensed work and public domain content where copyright has expired.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

This will change within 6 months I promise you, EA/Ubisoft/etc will ALL be shipping AI generated textures in games before the end of the year.

TaupeRanger 3y ago
That's not a change from this though, as long as those AI generated textures are from systems that were trained on images that they have permission to use (or are copyright free).
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  No such system exists so they won’t. Even Adobes system has questionable training data mixed in
  - TillE 3y ago
    Every major game publisher has an enormous archive of in-house artwork, and probably a decent amount of hardware they could use for training. They'd be stuck with open source software like Stable Diffusion - or have to cut a deal with Midjourney or whoever - but there's no barrier to creating such a system.
    - nickthegreek 3y ago
      Stable Diffusion nor Midjourney can be used to create artwork under these Valve guidelines.
teaearlgraycold 3y ago
And only a matter of time until a major game lets you talk to NPCs by generating dialog with an LLM.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
  It'll be interesting to see if a game can make good use of that, but it sounds like it would lead to some very frustrating interactions.

brucethemoose2 3y ago

Well what if someone ships a model exclusively trained on legal content?

eropple 3y ago
Then you tell Valve that and they say "OK"?
- brucethemoose2 3y ago
  Would they though? I think the legality of the dataset would be hard to prove. And I can see some game devs straight up lying, shipping SD 1.5/Llama, and dragging Valve into court when one of them explodes in popularity.
  - eropple 3y ago
    > I think the legality of the dataset would be hard to prove. Could be. I hope it is. It's a reason not to use it!

stuckinhell 3y ago

This just shows me the future is people using AI tools to make their own games custom for them.

emveeoh 3y ago

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deleted 3y ago

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alexdeloy 3y ago

After seeing that Unity Muse[0] AI presentation yesterday and the following backlash regarding the source material[1], this seems to be a huge legal minefield to be solved first. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR4IuN2tF78 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR4IuN2tF78 [1]: https://nitter.net/unitygames/status/1673650585860489217 https://nitter.net/unitygames/status/1673650585860489217

al_be_back 3y ago

copyright issues aside, a platform has to consider 'spam', AI generated content could quickly and easily overwhelm a platform.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
See Clark's sci fi magazine.

newobj 3y ago

Fake story, guaranteed

euix 3y ago

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 20 minutes. As placeholders or to create little bits and doodles (like a mouse cursor in the style of an armored fist), there are lots of little graphical icons in a game that would other have to be created by a graphical artist. Generative art is really useful in my experience. It's reduced the work to the point where I can toy with it in my off time and spend most of my effort in the actual programming and development. The other idea I have toyed with, coming from professional ML experience - was to build my own generative model and use it to create my own art assets. Here I wonder how the copyright rules would work - would the assets I train on be subjected to copyright? This is a much bigger conversation at that point and I wont be the only one affected.

c-hendricks 3y ago
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.
- valine 3y ago
  What if I look at other people's art and learn from it? Seem unfair to pass that work off as my own. All artists should be banned from looking at copyrighted images, we can't risk them incorporating copyrighted elements into their own work. /s
  - Jolter 3y ago
    That’s not a good analogy and you should know it.

snowman647 3y ago

That's the wrong path, soon Internet for 90%++ will be mixed with AI. Btw - What if I write my game using Chat-GPT?

dragonwriter 3y ago
As long as you just use it for generating the code and not the assets, Valve doesn’t seem to care.
deleted 3y ago
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janosdebugs 3y ago
I recently tried to use it to learn the Blender API, without much success. It halucinates left right and center, so I had to go back to reading the docs, trial and error, as well as reverse engineering. I'd be honestly surprised if you could use it to create an entire game.

jncfhnb 3y ago

Outlast Trials appears to be a fairly large title that utilized AI art. I sincerely doubt it’ll get ax’ed

pessimizer 3y ago

Not only does this keep them safe from copyright fallout, I think its real goal is to hold back a flood of shit games until the tech matures.

Zetobal 3y ago

Without seeing the art there is nothing to judge. I bet it's a visual story and they are using characters from established ips.

Sivart13 3y ago
100%, my guess this is someone putting Disney or Nintendo characters in compromising situations and Valve would have rejected it AI or not

paulmd 3y ago

https://i.imgur.com/JWjLFlO.png https://i.imgur.com/JWjLFlO.png now that's how you know when a comments section is gonna be amazing

charles_f 3y ago

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.

justinclift 3y ago

Wonder if using (Japanese) anime based AI assets would be workable instead, as the licensing situation there sounds a bit clearer? aka "copyright doesn't apply": https://cacm.acm.org/news/273479-japan-goes-all-in-copyright-doesnt-apply-to-ai-training/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/news/273479-japan-goes-all-in-copyright...

zzzzzzzza 3y ago

misleading title, hn should ban reddit links

hospitalJail 3y ago

Beginning of the end for Valve. This is a warning shot. Might want to stop buying games on steam sales.

pierat 3y ago

By that definition, any roguelike should be banned. And, well, we're not seeing that. I'll watch, but I disbelieve the reddit poster. Probably a CEO bot drumming up obvious bait comments over current computer events.

stainablesteel 3y ago

i really hope the US copies Japan's ruling on this kind of thing.

lost_tourist 3y ago

Sounds like a market opportunity.

fyrn_ 3y ago

Title is very misleading for something that the only the only evidence of is a anecdote from reddit. Was expecting a statement from Valve based on the title

Havoc 3y ago

>I improved those pieces by hand, so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI Steam's objection is other copyright even indirectly in the AI training dataset and to remove it, not to conceal the issue better. Tricky copyright questions aside, inability to follow basic instructions is definitely a disadvantage when going through approval processes

lyu07282 3y ago

This is obviously nonsense because games and artists have been using AI and procedural generated content for decades, everything from textures, models, maps, animation, music and sound. Generative models are now even integrated in the NVIDIA drivers for upscaling and every photo you take with a recent samsung phone uses generative AI. Just because now generative AI has made a significant leap doesn't mean its anything new. And copyright is irrelevant because models are clearly derivative works the same way artists remix existing works of art, if that were to change, copyright law would destroy the majority of all creative endeavors.

SrslyJosh 3y ago
> games and artists have been using AI and procedural generated content for decades These are not the same things. Procedural generation is not the same as feeding different prompts to a model until it vomits up something that looks sort-of like what you want.

theknocker 3y ago

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samstave 3y ago

We need an "AI generated web game tower defense" FULL FN STOP.

Zuiii 3y ago

A moronic policy if true: 1. Copyright Office made it clear that AI generated output is generally not copyrightable irrespective of training data: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05321/copyright-registration-guidance-works-containing-material-generated-by-artificial-intelligence https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05... 2. In fact, there is credible legal theory that goes as far as to conclude that training dataset license cannot effect the resulting weights under US law (EU's take on copyright make it less clear) 3. DMCA already provides Valve with legal cover in the unlikely event that training dataset license is somehow found to effect the IP rights of generated content. 4. By adopting this policy, they are acting more as a traditional publisher rather than a platform, thus exposing themselves to even more liabilities not less. This policy makes no sense to me no matter how I look at it. The harsh reality that Valve and everyone else needs to accept is that AI-generated content from "unclear" datasets is here to stay. People need to accept this fact^1 and move on. I already have. 1: Copyright is an incredibly limited, obsolete, broken invention that was never meant to handle concepts like this. It's very much like a poor analogy that we stubbornly insist on applying to situations were it simply does not fit. We will continue to find ourselves arriving to bizarre and nonsensical conclusions like this as long as we continue holding onto this broken invention. Reward authors in another way. Placing arbitrary limitations on information was never the right way to do it.