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> 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

by 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.
      - mrweasel 3y ago
        And if your output isn't distinct enough from the inputs, you too aren't allowed to claim copyright or sell your work without proper licensing. With the AI we can at least be 100% certain of which input you trained it on and under which licens, making the whole a lot easier to deal with, as compared to humans. The liability is the same, but it's much easier to avoid legal implications, so why not play ball and ensure that you have the correct licenses?
        Matticus_Rex 3y ago
        Have what correct licenses? It's not clear that you need any license to train on data in the vast majority of cases. Having a license to train on it won't guarantee that you can grant your users a license to any particular output, especially given the addition of user input. And most of the utility is in creating outputs that are indeed distinct. So the answer to "why not play ball?" is: 1. It's not clear that it's legally required 2. It would be incredibly expensive and/or slow progress dramatically, or limit you to pre-existing licensed content (e.g. Adobe) which drastically reduces some types of capabilities 3. Given #1, for any company that doesn't have an Adobe-style library, "playing ball" is essentially betting the company that it will become legally required, because on top of developing an AI model you're going to have to become an expert content licensing and documentation studio
      - __loam 3y ago
        What humans do when they learn is a completely separate issue and has absolutely nothing to do with how this technology is regulated.
        Matticus_Rex 3y ago
        It's the most analogous process we have; the courts may not end up treating them the same, but it's unlikely they'll say it has nothing to do with how AI gets regulated.
- nickelcitymario 3y ago
  I may be wrong, but I believe they were just intending to summarize.
- kemayo 3y ago
  I'm quoting the relevant bit from Valve's email in the reddit post, to indicate exactly what they're actually forbidding. Notably: not all AI-generated content, but rather AI-generated content from models that were trained on material that's not owned by the person submitting the game.
  - XCSme 3y ago
    Can that even be proven/tested?
    - BlueTemplar 3y ago
      Depending on the court, burdens of proof can vary a lot...
      - dragonwriter 3y ago
        In court, it would be the entity claiming infringement that would have the burden of proof that their exclusive rights under copyright were violated by the assets in question, not the distributor of the asset that had the burden of showing ownership of every item in the training set of the model used in some part of the workflow.
        kemayo 3y ago
        What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed. Given the whole "Stable Diffusion reproduces the Getty Images watermark" lawsuit[1] that's still ongoing, it's not an idle concern. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright...
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed. Hard to see how any plausible outcome that would have that result for users of SD (if model training isn’t fair use, that’s definitely a blanket-liability issue for Stability.AI — and Midjourney, and OpenAI, and lots of people training their own models, either from scratch or fine-tuning, using others' copyright-protected works. But “using a tool that violates copyright in the workflow” is not itself infringement; whether and in what situations prompting SD to produce output makes the output a violation of copyright (and whose) would be a completely different decision, and while Ibcan certainly see cases (such as deliberately seeking to reproduce a particulaflr copyright-protected element, like a character, from the source data) where it might be (irrespective of the copyright status of the model itself), I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”. Lots of blanket ethical arguments about using it, but that’s a different domain than law.
bunga-bunga 3y ago
Sounds like a cop-out. They can't possibly verify that any content they're hosting isn't already copyrighted, let alone in a "murky copyright state"
- urda 3y ago
  > Sounds like a cop-out. Adhering to legal and copyright standards isn't a "cop-out"
  - vkou 3y ago
    And neither is choosing to act in a situation where the legality isn't clear. I understand that OpenAI et al would like to assure all their investors and customers that there's nothing legally problematic with using an AI to launder away copyright infrigement, but we're going to need a few lawsuits to have the matter settled.
    - weatherlight 3y ago
      someone failed their ethics class in college....
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - doctorwho42 3y ago
      And valve leadership has made a decent decision of 'we don't want to be the ones being the defendants on what could be a costly and time consuming lawsuit for something they didn't make'
  - hyperhopper 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
raincole 3y ago
It's just a random reddit post. The OP on reddit didn't even post his game. Three possiblilities: 1. It's just fictional. Probably written by a troll or generated by ChatGPT. 2. Steam refused to publish the game due to some obvious copyright issues (like they told Midjourney to generate superman or one-piece characters) 3. Steam is banning any AI generated assets. My bet is 1 > 2 > 3.
- Macha 3y ago
  I'd be less sure about that, Valve has taken stances for reasons of public demand and/or their personal ethical standards (depending on what you believe) before, for example the ban on Blockchain games.
  - judge2020 3y ago
    But not for Tyrone vs. Cops[0] "When a game comes up as problematic, it gets flagged a bunch by steam users, and there's a meeting that takes place where they decide if these things stay on steam"[1]. 0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1853200/TYRONE_vs_COPS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1853200/TYRONE_vs_COPS/ 1: https://youtu.be/hDjxBrgtJXc?t=974 https://youtu.be/hDjxBrgtJXc?t=974
    - Macuyiko 3y ago
      Well... Valve is a very interesting study in that regard. They have voted for violence, topics bordering to meme hate speech, pornography, but have voted against crypto shit and now AI. Not making a verdict either way but I find it interesting. I'd like to know more about the internal discussion(s) that took place to establish their frameworks. Especially given the company is private.
      - cmeacham98 3y ago
        For what it's worth, I think I would vote the same way, perhaps with the difference being against the hate speech depending on how bad it was. Games with significant Crypto and AI art components bring significant risks to Valve in both legal and social contexts (99.9% of modern crypto-related projects are an intentional scam, and AI art is a legal minefield right now). On the other hand, violence and pornography are much more accepted by society (in the context of fictional enterntainment).
emveeoh 3y ago
[dead]
lallysingh 3y ago
Man, getty images is sitting on a goldmine opportunity to get into AI here. They have enough images to train something quite useful!
- krapp 3y ago
  AI is already trained on Getty's image set... it's why people have to exclude watermarks from their prompts.
  - baobabKoodaa 3y ago
    Sure, but that doesn't relate in any way to the legal problem that this post is about.
ravenstine 3y ago
Why would Valve be on the hook for copyright? If a particular game developer happens to get sued (which happens regardless of AI), all Valve has to do is remove the game from Steam. Assuming this is even real, it may have more to do with preventing another 1989 video game crash resulting from the market being overwhelmed with crappy games. Then again, most AAA games today are broken pieces of suck, so IDK.
- henryfjordan 3y ago
  If Valve takes a % of sales from a game that is full of copyright infringement, they can be sued for their cut from the sales plus maybe more and they need to pay the lawyers. They also care about their reputation amongst content-producers (game makers). Youtube faced this exact dynamic back in the day and have found it better to side with the large creators who care very much about protecting IP rights and so they exercise a heavy hand against copyrighted material.
- usrusr 3y ago
  "all Valve has to do is remove the game from Steam." And take the reputation hit that would go along with that. Valve's business is 30% technology and 70% the reputation of being much less untrustworthy than the alternatives. If they lose that they can close shop.
  - shultays 3y ago
    Valve's business is its user base, as long as it has that I think they will survive.
    - usrusr 3y ago
      How are reputation and user base not the same?
      - shultays 3y ago
        99.9999% of user base won't care about a few game Valve removed from its store. And they will care even less if they decide to not publish a game at all like they did in this instance. Valve is not really losing any reputation among users for not releasing some games Valve might lose some reputation among the devs if they keep rejecting or removing games but that is far from reality, at least for now. Things perhaps might change if game studios starts picking up AI generated stuff more and more and Valve decides to blanket ban them. But even then the users of Steam is a juicy target for devs and it is a hard market to ignore.
gnopgnip 3y ago
Wouldn't the DMCA safe harbor apply, it's user submitted content?
paxys 3y ago
This is a bullshit argument. There is zero liability for Valve here. They are a publisher, and are fully protected by the DMCA. Have they received a single takedown request for AI generated art? Why are they judging it to be possible infringement then?
- pcai 3y ago
  Consider for just a moment that they have almost certainly thought about this much more deeply and thoughtfully than you have
  - pproe 3y ago
    I agree with your sentiment but this is a poor way to dismiss an argument.
  - paxys 3y ago
    "No big company can ever do a bad thing because I'm sure they've thought deeply and thoughtfully about it."
    - pcai 3y ago
      Actually no, me pointing out that “a literal anon in their armchair probably hasn’t thought through a challenging legal problem as thoroughly as the billion dollar company making the decision has” is not actually the same as saying that “every big company is infallible” but nice try
- bmoxb 3y ago
  That may be true but that won't stop people from trying to sue undoubtedly - clearly they've decided the effort and legal fees required to deal with that aren't worth it.
- scrps 3y ago
  https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contributory_infringement https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contributory_infringement The Copyright Act does not expressly impose liability for contributory infringement. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the "absence of such express language in the copyright statute does not preclude the imposition of liability for copyright infringements on certain parties who have not themselves engaged in the infringing activity. One who knowingly induces, causes or materially contributes to copyright infringement, by another but who has not committed or participated in the infringing acts themselves, may be held liable as a contributory infringer if they had knowledge, or reason to know, of the infringement. See, e.g., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005); Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). IANAL. Considering Valve not only gives games a retail platform, has to approve games before sale, and takes a cut of that sale and assuming the reddit post isn't a lie then I am gonna guess Valve's probably well staffed legal dept decided not to take a seemingly iffy legal gamble on a game that probably wasn't going to rake in a ton of sales anyway.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

by kemayo 3y ago

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.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
      And if your output isn't distinct enough from the inputs, you too aren't allowed to claim copyright or sell your work without proper licensing. With the AI we can at least be 100% certain of which input you trained it on and under which licens, making the whole a lot easier to deal with, as compared to humans. The liability is the same, but it's much easier to avoid legal implications, so why not play ball and ensure that you have the correct licenses?
      - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
        Have what correct licenses? It's not clear that you need any license to train on data in the vast majority of cases. Having a license to train on it won't guarantee that you can grant your users a license to any particular output, especially given the addition of user input. And most of the utility is in creating outputs that are indeed distinct. So the answer to "why not play ball?" is: 1. It's not clear that it's legally required 2. It would be incredibly expensive and/or slow progress dramatically, or limit you to pre-existing licensed content (e.g. Adobe) which drastically reduces some types of capabilities 3. Given #1, for any company that doesn't have an Adobe-style library, "playing ball" is essentially betting the company that it will become legally required, because on top of developing an AI model you're going to have to become an expert content licensing and documentation studio
    - __loam 3y ago
      What humans do when they learn is a completely separate issue and has absolutely nothing to do with how this technology is regulated.
      - Matticus_Rex 3y ago
        It's the most analogous process we have; the courts may not end up treating them the same, but it's unlikely they'll say it has nothing to do with how AI gets regulated.
nickelcitymario 3y ago
I may be wrong, but I believe they were just intending to summarize.
kemayo 3y ago
I'm quoting the relevant bit from Valve's email in the reddit post, to indicate exactly what they're actually forbidding. Notably: not all AI-generated content, but rather AI-generated content from models that were trained on material that's not owned by the person submitting the game.
- XCSme 3y ago
  Can that even be proven/tested?
  - BlueTemplar 3y ago
    Depending on the court, burdens of proof can vary a lot...
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      In court, it would be the entity claiming infringement that would have the burden of proof that their exclusive rights under copyright were violated by the assets in question, not the distributor of the asset that had the burden of showing ownership of every item in the training set of the model used in some part of the workflow.
      - kemayo 3y ago
        What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed. Given the whole "Stable Diffusion reproduces the Getty Images watermark" lawsuit[1] that's still ongoing, it's not an idle concern. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright-stable-diffusion-getty-images-lawsuit https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/17/23558516/ai-art-copyright...
        dragonwriter 3y ago
        > What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed. Hard to see how any plausible outcome that would have that result for users of SD (if model training isn’t fair use, that’s definitely a blanket-liability issue for Stability.AI — and Midjourney, and OpenAI, and lots of people training their own models, either from scratch or fine-tuning, using others' copyright-protected works. But “using a tool that violates copyright in the workflow” is not itself infringement; whether and in what situations prompting SD to produce output makes the output a violation of copyright (and whose) would be a completely different decision, and while Ibcan certainly see cases (such as deliberately seeking to reproduce a particulaflr copyright-protected element, like a character, from the source data) where it might be (irrespective of the copyright status of the model itself), I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”. Lots of blanket ethical arguments about using it, but that’s a different domain than law.

bunga-bunga 3y ago

Sounds like a cop-out. They can't possibly verify that any content they're hosting isn't already copyrighted, let alone in a "murky copyright state"

urda 3y ago
> Sounds like a cop-out. Adhering to legal and copyright standards isn't a "cop-out"
- vkou 3y ago
  And neither is choosing to act in a situation where the legality isn't clear. I understand that OpenAI et al would like to assure all their investors and customers that there's nothing legally problematic with using an AI to launder away copyright infrigement, but we're going to need a few lawsuits to have the matter settled.
  - weatherlight 3y ago
    someone failed their ethics class in college....
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - doctorwho42 3y ago
    And valve leadership has made a decent decision of 'we don't want to be the ones being the defendants on what could be a costly and time consuming lawsuit for something they didn't make'
- hyperhopper 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Matticus_Rex 3y ago

raincole 3y ago

It's just a random reddit post. The OP on reddit didn't even post his game. Three possiblilities: 1. It's just fictional. Probably written by a troll or generated by ChatGPT. 2. Steam refused to publish the game due to some obvious copyright issues (like they told Midjourney to generate superman or one-piece characters) 3. Steam is banning any AI generated assets. My bet is 1 > 2 > 3.

Macha 3y ago
I'd be less sure about that, Valve has taken stances for reasons of public demand and/or their personal ethical standards (depending on what you believe) before, for example the ban on Blockchain games.
- judge2020 3y ago
  But not for Tyrone vs. Cops[0] "When a game comes up as problematic, it gets flagged a bunch by steam users, and there's a meeting that takes place where they decide if these things stay on steam"[1]. 0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1853200/TYRONE_vs_COPS/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1853200/TYRONE_vs_COPS/ 1: https://youtu.be/hDjxBrgtJXc?t=974 https://youtu.be/hDjxBrgtJXc?t=974
  - Macuyiko 3y ago
    Well... Valve is a very interesting study in that regard. They have voted for violence, topics bordering to meme hate speech, pornography, but have voted against crypto shit and now AI. Not making a verdict either way but I find it interesting. I'd like to know more about the internal discussion(s) that took place to establish their frameworks. Especially given the company is private.
    - cmeacham98 3y ago
      For what it's worth, I think I would vote the same way, perhaps with the difference being against the hate speech depending on how bad it was. Games with significant Crypto and AI art components bring significant risks to Valve in both legal and social contexts (99.9% of modern crypto-related projects are an intentional scam, and AI art is a legal minefield right now). On the other hand, violence and pornography are much more accepted by society (in the context of fictional enterntainment).

emveeoh 3y ago

[dead]

lallysingh 3y ago

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

krapp 3y ago
AI is already trained on Getty's image set... it's why people have to exclude watermarks from their prompts.
- baobabKoodaa 3y ago
  Sure, but that doesn't relate in any way to the legal problem that this post is about.

ravenstine 3y ago

Why would Valve be on the hook for copyright? If a particular game developer happens to get sued (which happens regardless of AI), all Valve has to do is remove the game from Steam. Assuming this is even real, it may have more to do with preventing another 1989 video game crash resulting from the market being overwhelmed with crappy games. Then again, most AAA games today are broken pieces of suck, so IDK.

henryfjordan 3y ago
If Valve takes a % of sales from a game that is full of copyright infringement, they can be sued for their cut from the sales plus maybe more and they need to pay the lawyers. They also care about their reputation amongst content-producers (game makers). Youtube faced this exact dynamic back in the day and have found it better to side with the large creators who care very much about protecting IP rights and so they exercise a heavy hand against copyrighted material.
usrusr 3y ago
"all Valve has to do is remove the game from Steam." And take the reputation hit that would go along with that. Valve's business is 30% technology and 70% the reputation of being much less untrustworthy than the alternatives. If they lose that they can close shop.
- shultays 3y ago
  Valve's business is its user base, as long as it has that I think they will survive.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    How are reputation and user base not the same?
    - shultays 3y ago
      99.9999% of user base won't care about a few game Valve removed from its store. And they will care even less if they decide to not publish a game at all like they did in this instance. Valve is not really losing any reputation among users for not releasing some games Valve might lose some reputation among the devs if they keep rejecting or removing games but that is far from reality, at least for now. Things perhaps might change if game studios starts picking up AI generated stuff more and more and Valve decides to blanket ban them. But even then the users of Steam is a juicy target for devs and it is a hard market to ignore.

gnopgnip 3y ago

Wouldn't the DMCA safe harbor apply, it's user submitted content?

paxys 3y ago

This is a bullshit argument. There is zero liability for Valve here. They are a publisher, and are fully protected by the DMCA. Have they received a single takedown request for AI generated art? Why are they judging it to be possible infringement then?

pcai 3y ago
Consider for just a moment that they have almost certainly thought about this much more deeply and thoughtfully than you have
- pproe 3y ago
  I agree with your sentiment but this is a poor way to dismiss an argument.
- paxys 3y ago
  "No big company can ever do a bad thing because I'm sure they've thought deeply and thoughtfully about it."
  - pcai 3y ago
    Actually no, me pointing out that “a literal anon in their armchair probably hasn’t thought through a challenging legal problem as thoroughly as the billion dollar company making the decision has” is not actually the same as saying that “every big company is infallible” but nice try
bmoxb 3y ago
That may be true but that won't stop people from trying to sue undoubtedly - clearly they've decided the effort and legal fees required to deal with that aren't worth it.
scrps 3y ago
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contributory_infringement https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contributory_infringement The Copyright Act does not expressly impose liability for contributory infringement. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the "absence of such express language in the copyright statute does not preclude the imposition of liability for copyright infringements on certain parties who have not themselves engaged in the infringing activity. One who knowingly induces, causes or materially contributes to copyright infringement, by another but who has not committed or participated in the infringing acts themselves, may be held liable as a contributory infringer if they had knowledge, or reason to know, of the infringement. See, e.g., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005); Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984). IANAL. Considering Valve not only gives games a retail platform, has to approve games before sale, and takes a cut of that sale and assuming the reddit post isn't a lie then I am gonna guess Valve's probably well staffed legal dept decided not to take a seemingly iffy legal gamble on a game that probably wasn't going to rake in a ton of sales anyway.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]