5 ms·

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

by 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.
        kemayo 3y ago
        > I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”. The speculative worst-case outcome for these tools that I've seen suggested is the legal system deciding that an image generated with them is a derivative work of every image that was used to train the model. Since none of these models were trained on images that they had rights releases for, this would mean they're incapable of outputting images that aren't infringing on the copyrights of vast numbers of people. I can't say how likely that is to actually be the legal outcome, of course, but it seems like the sort of concern that might lead to Valve's policy here.
- nemomarx 3y ago
  They can ask you to say that you own all the relevant rights, and then if it turns out not to be true later they can say they don't know. Which seems like as much as you can hope for in a policy?
  - XCSme 3y ago
    But how does this work for YouTube for example? People still upload copyrighted stuff, even if the ToS says you shouldn't.
    - gbear605 3y ago
      The key is that it protects YouTube (and Valve in this case) since they can say “we weren’t allowing our users to upload copyrighted content but they snuck it in”
    - __loam 3y ago
      YouTube has to comply with things like DMCA takedowns.
      - XCSme 3y ago
        So, shouldn't Steam too?
        __loam 3y ago
        Yes and they do.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  It just has to be enough that Valves legal team can claim that they approved the game in good faith and that they can be held responsible for a game developer lying and knowingly violating the terms of service.
- Zetobal 3y ago
  Most sd guis save the generational data in the final pngs as default. The metadata includes the model hash. The model can be easily checked against a data from civit or hugging face.

by kemayo 3y ago

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.
      - kemayo 3y ago
        > I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”. The speculative worst-case outcome for these tools that I've seen suggested is the legal system deciding that an image generated with them is a derivative work of every image that was used to train the model. Since none of these models were trained on images that they had rights releases for, this would mean they're incapable of outputting images that aren't infringing on the copyrights of vast numbers of people. I can't say how likely that is to actually be the legal outcome, of course, but it seems like the sort of concern that might lead to Valve's policy here.
nemomarx 3y ago
They can ask you to say that you own all the relevant rights, and then if it turns out not to be true later they can say they don't know. Which seems like as much as you can hope for in a policy?
- XCSme 3y ago
  But how does this work for YouTube for example? People still upload copyrighted stuff, even if the ToS says you shouldn't.
  - gbear605 3y ago
    The key is that it protects YouTube (and Valve in this case) since they can say “we weren’t allowing our users to upload copyrighted content but they snuck it in”
  - __loam 3y ago
    YouTube has to comply with things like DMCA takedowns.
    - XCSme 3y ago
      So, shouldn't Steam too?
      - __loam 3y ago
        Yes and they do.
mrweasel 3y ago
It just has to be enough that Valves legal team can claim that they approved the game in good faith and that they can be held responsible for a game developer lying and knowingly violating the terms of service.
Zetobal 3y ago
Most sd guis save the generational data in the final pngs as default. The metadata includes the model hash. The model can be easily checked against a data from civit or hugging face.