10 ms·

> Sounds like a cop-out. Adhering to legal and copyright standards isn't a "cop-out"

by urda 3y ago

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
  Being 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 ago
  INAL. 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 ago
    There 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.
  - Rexxar 3y ago
    > This has nothing to do with politics. Please tell what is, in your opinion, a conservative garbage collector without looking on google.
- imchillyb 3y ago
  > https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-... US Copyright Office has stated unequivocally that AI works cannot be copyrighted, or otherwise protected legally. The US patent office is studying the effects of AI on the patent system and asking citizens and businesses for comment. If that’s not enough for you, I don’t know what would be.
  - jamilton 3y ago
    That's meaningfully different. "Can't be copyrighted" doesn't mean "can't be sold", or "someone else owns the copyright". It just means someone can copy and resell the generated portions without payment/licensing.
    - __loam 3y ago
      That sounds like a fucking nightmare if you're running a marketplace for what is essentially intellectual property.
      - jamilton 3y ago
        I'm not sure. I'm not an expert, but it doesn't seem that different from including public domain text and art in your game. I assume that, if it is true that Valve isn't allowing games with generated images, it's because (they feel) the legal status could change, not because of the current status.
        __loam 3y ago
        Yes that's exactly what I'm saying lol. There's also a quality argument. If Valve lets a bunch of slapdash AI hackjobs onto the store that were developed in a week by people who don't know anything about game development, and that makes it harder to discover well made games, that's a meaningful business risk for them. They're responsible for curating the steam store.
  - oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
- chefandy 3y ago
  Sure— the method of making the image, such as being AI generated, is entirely irrelevant in terms of IP enforcement. You could cut a cross-section from a log that had coincidentally formed the Nike symbol with it's rings, and if you slapped a picture of it on your line of sportsware, you better believe you're going to get owned. But if they see an increased risk of IP violations from AI generated assets— and given the Getty red carpet debacle that's entirely reasonable— banning it will probably save them a whole lot of money on manual game reviews.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
    The Nike example is trademark rights, not copyright. If you give a worker 5 examples of cars, and tell him "draw me a new car in this style", and he does so (from memory without clearly copying any individual example), it's unlikely to be a copyright or other IP violation.
    - __loam 3y ago
      > If you give a worker 5 examples of cars, and tell him "draw me a new car in this style", and he does so Yeah that's great, but it actually has nothing to do with how the AI works. A worker learning through observation about 5 cars is hugely different situation than an AI company scraping 400 million often copyrighted images onto their servers to run through a training algorithm to create a for-profit system that displaces the people who produced the original images.
    - chefandy 3y ago
      Ok, fine... an image of Goofy. Both are judged on how similar they are, not the tools with which they were made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity > Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted in Arica v. Palmer that a court may find copyright infringement under the doctrine of "comprehensive non-literal similarity" if "the pattern or sequence of the two works is similar". You're going to have a much harder time proving that you absolutely did not copy something if you had an image of what you're being accused of copying in the dataset you used to make it. If the images are deemed substantially similar, it will be deemed an infringement.
- blibble 3y ago
  regardless of legality: the odds are games with AI generated materials are going to be much lower quality (shovelware)
  - __loam 3y ago
    Made by people with none of the skills or drive to make games.
ekianjo 3y ago
And which standard is that for ai generated art ?
- georgeecollins 3y ago
  A 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 ago
    To 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 ago
      I 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 ago
    They 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.

> Sounds like a cop-out. Adhering to legal and copyright standards isn't a "cop-out"

by 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
Being 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 ago
INAL. 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 ago
  There 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.
- Rexxar 3y ago
  > This has nothing to do with politics. Please tell what is, in your opinion, a conservative garbage collector without looking on google.
imchillyb 3y ago
> https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/ https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-... US Copyright Office has stated unequivocally that AI works cannot be copyrighted, or otherwise protected legally. The US patent office is studying the effects of AI on the patent system and asking citizens and businesses for comment. If that’s not enough for you, I don’t know what would be.
- jamilton 3y ago
  That's meaningfully different. "Can't be copyrighted" doesn't mean "can't be sold", or "someone else owns the copyright". It just means someone can copy and resell the generated portions without payment/licensing.
  - __loam 3y ago
    That sounds like a fucking nightmare if you're running a marketplace for what is essentially intellectual property.
    - jamilton 3y ago
      I'm not sure. I'm not an expert, but it doesn't seem that different from including public domain text and art in your game. I assume that, if it is true that Valve isn't allowing games with generated images, it's because (they feel) the legal status could change, not because of the current status.
      - __loam 3y ago
        Yes that's exactly what I'm saying lol. There's also a quality argument. If Valve lets a bunch of slapdash AI hackjobs onto the store that were developed in a week by people who don't know anything about game development, and that makes it harder to discover well made games, that's a meaningful business risk for them. They're responsible for curating the steam store.
- oneeyedpigeon 3y ago
chefandy 3y ago
Sure— the method of making the image, such as being AI generated, is entirely irrelevant in terms of IP enforcement. You could cut a cross-section from a log that had coincidentally formed the Nike symbol with it's rings, and if you slapped a picture of it on your line of sportsware, you better believe you're going to get owned. But if they see an increased risk of IP violations from AI generated assets— and given the Getty red carpet debacle that's entirely reasonable— banning it will probably save them a whole lot of money on manual game reviews.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 3y ago
  The Nike example is trademark rights, not copyright. If you give a worker 5 examples of cars, and tell him "draw me a new car in this style", and he does so (from memory without clearly copying any individual example), it's unlikely to be a copyright or other IP violation.
  - __loam 3y ago
    > If you give a worker 5 examples of cars, and tell him "draw me a new car in this style", and he does so Yeah that's great, but it actually has nothing to do with how the AI works. A worker learning through observation about 5 cars is hugely different situation than an AI company scraping 400 million often copyrighted images onto their servers to run through a training algorithm to create a for-profit system that displaces the people who produced the original images.
  - chefandy 3y ago
    Ok, fine... an image of Goofy. Both are judged on how similar they are, not the tools with which they were made. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity > Judge John M. Walker, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted in Arica v. Palmer that a court may find copyright infringement under the doctrine of "comprehensive non-literal similarity" if "the pattern or sequence of the two works is similar". You're going to have a much harder time proving that you absolutely did not copy something if you had an image of what you're being accused of copying in the dataset you used to make it. If the images are deemed substantially similar, it will be deemed an infringement.
blibble 3y ago
regardless of legality: the odds are games with AI generated materials are going to be much lower quality (shovelware)
- __loam 3y ago
  Made by people with none of the skills or drive to make games.

ekianjo 3y ago

And which standard is that for ai generated art ?

georgeecollins 3y ago
A 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 ago
  To 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 ago
    I 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 ago
  They 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.