8 ms·
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"
by 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 agoAnd 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 agosomeone failed their ethics class in college....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- doctorwho42 3y agoAnd 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 agoBeing cautious when not being cautious could mean lots of big lawsuits against you doesn't seem that ultra-super conservative. I hope this ends up going the other way, but I understand Valve's calculus here.
- adamc 3y agoINAL. But... show me the case law establishing there is near-zero risk to them if they let it go through. People make business decisions all the time to avoid murky areas that may hold peril. Unless there is a big benefit to them, why take the risk?
- hyperhopper 3y agoThere is no case law. Literally anybody saying that things related to this are illegal, are making up Boogeymen. Yes, businesses act like this, no shit. Doesn't mean we shouldn't call them out on it because it's cowardly behavior.
- gabeio 3y ago> ultra super conservatively cautious. This has nothing to do with politics. This has everything to do with CYA, the issue is AI trained with copyrighted material is a huge gray area and they don’t want to be in the gray area. That’s rational and has zero to do with “conservative”. This is likely not set in stone and after the copyright laws and courts catch up and decide what to do, Valve will likely go back and update their policies accordingly.
- saurik 3y ago>> ultra super conservatively cautious. > This has nothing to do with politics. > This has everything to do with CYA, the issue is AI trained with copyrighted material is a huge gray area and they don’t want to be in the gray area. That’s rational and has zero to do with “conservative”. The word "conservative" isn't a political word in all (or even I would have thought in most) contexts: it's normal meaning is similar to "chosen so as to be careful". For example, a "conservative estimate" isn't "an estimate that leans to the right of the political spectrum": it is an estimate which has been padded out in the direction you are more likely wrong. When someone says they are being "ultra super conservatively cautious" they are merely being super extra extra doubly-cautious, as we are stacking similar adjectives (as one might could do with something else such as "carefully"). So, wanting to avoid being in a gray area is dead center to being "conservative" in one's curation or legal strategy.
- ekianjo 3y agoAnd which standard is that for ai generated art ?
- georgeecollins 3y agoA lot of AI generated images retain the watermark of the copyright image it was trained on. If you sell something with that image with no agreement from the rights holder it is not fair use. It is completely reasonable for Valve to forbid this until it is sorted out. Keep mind they are a company of IP creators, creating a marketplace for IP creators. The whole reason Steam was created was to establish a DRM that fought the piracy of Half Life. I am on the side of Valve in this.
- sdenton4 3y agoTo correct the common misconception: Sometimes AI image generators insert a watermark because they have seen a lot of watermarks on certain kinds of images during training. This does not mean that the image itself is a copy of any particular image in the training data. Producing (distorted) copies of images in the training data takes some real effort, and typically only occurs for images which are heavily repeated in the training data... Most of the complaints along these lines can be compared to complaints that cars cause massive bodily harm if you steer them into lightposts: The problem is easily preventable by not driving into a lightpost.
- __loam 3y agoI think the "well it's transformative" argument is pretty bad faith and I think a lot of the people making it might know that. Generative AI cannot exist without pre-existing bodies of work created by human labor. It also displaces that labor and hurts the people whose content was a requirement for AI to exist. From this view, AI is not fair use.
- jameshart 3y agoThey don’t ‘retain’ a watermark. They ‘reproduce’ the watermark. It’s entirely possible for a diffusion model to produce an original work and yet still hallucinate a ‘shutterstock’ watermark onto it, in much the same way as GPT can hallucinate valid-looking citations for legal cases that never happened.
- ethbr0 3y ago> Sounds like a cop-out. Sounds like due diligence.
- methehack 3y agoAnd a sound business decision until the copyright law works itself out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kemayo 3y agoThey have a manual review step when you submit a game. Although you're right that they can't catch everything, they can certainly catch obvious things. I'm sure they mostly just don't want to wind up in court with a lawyer being able to say that they let [blatant example here] get published on their store. So long as they can credibly claim that there was no way for them to tell something was in an objectionable category, I'd imagine they're fine with it. Their rules, if you're curious: https://partner.steamgames.com/steamdirect https://partner.steamgames.com/steamdirect
- CommitSyn 3y agoI wonder how automated their system is. They obviously wouldn't boot the game up and start walking around because they can just extract the media files and check. But I'm curious if there is a system that identifies copyrighted images/video stills and searches for copyrighted words.
- ryathal 3y agoI doubt their manual review actually does much of anything. There are already tons of "games" that don't actually function that are just pre-built engine assets shoved together.
- krainboltgreene 3y agoThose games aren't breaking any rules, why would them being allowed through imply the manual review "doesn't do much of anything"?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wahnfrieden 3y agoWell, they verify. Think again or say something that isn't just "I know something I made up about them that I didn't look up".
- mcpackieh 3y agoWhat are they copping out of? What are you suggesting their real motivation is?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- evandale 3y agoI'll suggest a real motivation: they want to make their own game generated by AI and have first mover advantage while they work out all the scary AI copyright issues they have to deal with that they already deal with because the same problem exists with human generated art. Why do I say that? They want the developer to prove they only used material they created to do the training and Valve has the resources to follow that rule unlike the rest of us.
- mardifoufs 3y agoI don't think valve wanting to make a game is a realistic argument for anything in 2023. I'd believe any other reason than that lol.
- mcpackieh 3y ago> They want the developer to prove they only used material No, they only want the developer to "affirmatively confirm" it. It doesn't say anything about Valve demanding some sort of proof.
- pinkcan 3y agoyea, and the game is half-life 3
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- justapassenger 3y agoRisk management. AI generated content has high likelihood of copyright infringement.
- wiz21c 3y agofunny, a while ago MSFT said Copilot was not stealing code, it was merely reading it...
- doctorwho42 3y agoAnd Microsoft isn't the government. So I see no bearing on the actual issue at hand, which is valve protecting it's own ass from lawsuits that are in the realm of murk at best.
- bee_rider 3y agoIt isn’t a settled legal issue yet. It could be that Valve and Microsoft are responding to different incentives, because they have different business models. But it could also just be that their lawyers have different legal opinions.
- kibwen 3y agoMicrosoft wants to leverage LLMs to expand their influence in the software development market. For them, Copilot is both revenue source and a moat, so it behooves them to claim that these models don't constitute copyright infringement. But there's no business benefit to Valve in allowing AI-generated art assets on Steam, and a small (though nonzero) amount of risk.
- alpaca128 3y agoI'd say that too if I was Microsoft, but that doesn't make it true.
- usrusr 3y agoThe best case scenario for Microsoft would be supplying the world with programming tools far ahead of all others (no idea, haven't tried any of that stuff), while maybe not getting sued to bits. The best case scenario for Valve would be not getting sued to bits while getting even more spammed by low-effort money grab attempts that hope to luck into virality than they already are. At first approximation, yeah, the risk of getting sued to bits might be roughly the same. But the upside is not.
- 99_00 3y agoIt's incorrect to say that Valve can't verify any content they are hosting is copyrighted. They are obviously able to identify some copyright material.