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And valve will throw out the resulting game. Justifications aside, it was depressing seeing how quickly the AI gamedev movement ground to a halt. I’ve been wai

And valve will throw out the resulting game. Justifications aside, it was depressing seeing how quickly the AI gamedev movement ground to a halt. I’ve been waiting patiently for 4 years now. And now that the moment is here, it’s impossible for any serious gamedev to pursue it without committing financial suicide. Bah. At least such things tend to work themselves out over decades. The next few generations will look back on us and wonder why we dragged our feet for so long.

bulbosaur123 3y ago
Why so pessimistic about gamedev?
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  Valve has adopted the stance that any game with even a hint — literally just a whiff — of AI generated content will be instantly rejected from steam with no explanation beyond "it appears your game contains AI generated content." They say nothing beyond that. If that seems unbelievable, I agree. I didn’t believe it till I drilled down into the details of multiple instances of this happening. It pops up on Reddit with alarming frequency. Meanwhile Tim Sweeney looks like a visionary, since he says "bring your games over to the Epic Store, we’ll host them." And while I applaud this and cheer him on, as a former gamedev I understand the reality of the situation: neither indie studios nor established studios can take the financial risk of prototyping a new development model spearheaded by AI, only for the resulting game to be thrown out of the primary revenue stream (Steam). There’s a ray of hope, which is that AI can revolutionize the mobile gaming space. But I’m pessimistic because mobile gaming sucks. It’s not an industry I’d choose to be in, because the financial pressures practically force you to develop something addictive at best and downright predatory at worst. It’s hard to imagine Portal being developed for iOS, yet it was easy to imagine a lone dev making Portal for desktop PCs using AI. But now no one will try. Hopefully some teenager with nothing to lose will pull it off. I don’t think Gabe made this decision. It’s too hamfisted. It feels like someone at Valve got a bug up their bonnet about AI and implemented the worst reactionary policy imaginable. Gabe would understand the implications and nuances, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate a system where Valve is abusing their developer trust by rejecting them with no explanation and no recourse. But Sir Newell is old, and it was a matter of time till empire decay set in, so it’s not surprising it ended up this way. Still sad though.
  - fartsucker69 3y ago
    that's not true. they only ban ai if you don't clearly have usage rights for the data that the ai was trained on. obviously, this includes basically all of the big and popular available AI APIs at the moment. that sucks for using AI right now, but it's only a question of time until you get huge models trained on CC0 data imo
    - GaggiX 3y ago
      And how are you going to prove you were using a model trained only on CC0 data?
    - sillysaurusx 3y ago
      This is functionally identical to “This is true, because Valve bans all existing means of generating AI content for games." As for your dream of CC0 models, it’s a dream because you’d have to be asleep to believe it. I don’t mean to phrase it so harshly, but there are so many reasons that can’t work. The main one is that there isn’t enough non-copyrighted data to train any competitive model. The competitive models have only recently gotten good enough to just barely be usable, and far more than 90% of their training data was sourced from people they certainly didn’t get usage rights from. I deleted a paragraph ranting about usage rights. Suffice to say, Stallman’s “Right to Read” becomes more prescient with each passing day.
      - frabcus 3y ago
        Adobe's generative AI features all use appropriately licensed training data.
      - Philpax 3y ago
        I more or less agree with you (I'm not convinced that training models on the imagery of the internet isn't fair use), but I wouldn't rule out a CC0 model just yet. There's Mitsua Diffusion One [0], which doesn't produce incredible results, but it's a start and they're planning on adding more data, including opt-in work from artists. PIXART-alpha [1] was trained on only 25 million images, and has excellent and competitive results. This could pair well with Fondant AI's 25 million Creative Commons-only dataset [2] (not all CC0, but a sizeable amount). I don't think it's as far away as you think it is! [0]: https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one [1]: https://pixart-alpha.github.io/ https://pixart-alpha.github.io/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/datasets/fondant-ai/fondant-cc-25m https://huggingface.co/datasets/fondant-ai/fondant-cc-25m
gumballindie 3y ago
I find it excellent that game devs have firmly rejected stolen content. At the end of the day it’s their livelihoods. Openai and those who promote the idea of reselling work without permission should be out of business. But their bet is that if done at scale they’ll get away with it. At least one industry rejected their philosophy. Other software and content developers should follow suit.
- Kiro 3y ago
  If you only care when something affects you personally it's hard to take your criticism seriously. It's much easier when you have no stake in the game or even benefit from it. Likewise, if you can say "this sucks for me personally but is a net positive for humanity", then I have a much easier time to consider your endorsement.
  - jimmaswell 3y ago
    As a programmer, I'm glad if AI tools can learn from my code and improve copilot etc. for everyone. I find it exasperating how much other creators clutch their pearls over the same thing.
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Easy statement to make when one's code has no value.
      - Kiro 3y ago
        What do you mean?
        gumballindie 3y ago
        Think of it like those in favour of communism. They find it easy to demand that other people share the output of their work for free so they can benefit from it. Similarily, programmers that produce insignificant code are happy to use the valued work of others for free. For instance, corporations have no issue in using the enormously valuable work of open source developers and neither do some of their mediocre workers. Essentially this is what we are witnessing with demands from workers that folk's work is made available to them so they too can be productive.
zo1 3y ago
This is unfortunately Valve's equivalent of the start of Google's 'do no evil' descent into actually doing "evil". I never expected it to be over AI and copyright.
- blibble 3y ago
  banning generated vomit is now evil?
  - Philpax 3y ago
    Generation is a means to an end. It's up to the user to decide what that end is: it can be absolute naff, or it could be a solo auteur's masterpiece. The problem isn't AI, it's Valve's complete abdication of quality control.
  - zo1 3y ago
    I'm not saying this specifically is Evil. But neither was Google "first" instance of whatever it did to start it's downward descent. At the time it was probably something silly and a thing we thought we could brush off due to the goodwill they had with us.
    - blibble 3y ago
      there's nothing downward about banning the vomit
      - zo1 3y ago
        Low effort responses like that are brain vomit. ChatGPT can do much better than you.
      - Kerb_ 3y ago
        Nothing downward about Google making sure advertisers can advertise to an audience likely to buy the product instead of truly random ad distribution either.
leeeeeep101 3y ago
AI Chatbots/NPCs like https://netwrck.com https://netwrck.com is already pretty huge, similar to character ai with illustrations and AI narrators. over 1m people a day talking to AIs now whether or not Valve likes it :D Just host your own game on your site you dont need valve.
- akaij 3y ago
  Projects using AI and blockchain; my favourite combination!

bulbosaur123 3y ago

Why so pessimistic about gamedev?

sillysaurusx 3y ago
Valve has adopted the stance that any game with even a hint — literally just a whiff — of AI generated content will be instantly rejected from steam with no explanation beyond "it appears your game contains AI generated content." They say nothing beyond that. If that seems unbelievable, I agree. I didn’t believe it till I drilled down into the details of multiple instances of this happening. It pops up on Reddit with alarming frequency. Meanwhile Tim Sweeney looks like a visionary, since he says "bring your games over to the Epic Store, we’ll host them." And while I applaud this and cheer him on, as a former gamedev I understand the reality of the situation: neither indie studios nor established studios can take the financial risk of prototyping a new development model spearheaded by AI, only for the resulting game to be thrown out of the primary revenue stream (Steam). There’s a ray of hope, which is that AI can revolutionize the mobile gaming space. But I’m pessimistic because mobile gaming sucks. It’s not an industry I’d choose to be in, because the financial pressures practically force you to develop something addictive at best and downright predatory at worst. It’s hard to imagine Portal being developed for iOS, yet it was easy to imagine a lone dev making Portal for desktop PCs using AI. But now no one will try. Hopefully some teenager with nothing to lose will pull it off. I don’t think Gabe made this decision. It’s too hamfisted. It feels like someone at Valve got a bug up their bonnet about AI and implemented the worst reactionary policy imaginable. Gabe would understand the implications and nuances, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate a system where Valve is abusing their developer trust by rejecting them with no explanation and no recourse. But Sir Newell is old, and it was a matter of time till empire decay set in, so it’s not surprising it ended up this way. Still sad though.
- fartsucker69 3y ago
  that's not true. they only ban ai if you don't clearly have usage rights for the data that the ai was trained on. obviously, this includes basically all of the big and popular available AI APIs at the moment. that sucks for using AI right now, but it's only a question of time until you get huge models trained on CC0 data imo
  - GaggiX 3y ago
    And how are you going to prove you were using a model trained only on CC0 data?
  - sillysaurusx 3y ago
    This is functionally identical to “This is true, because Valve bans all existing means of generating AI content for games." As for your dream of CC0 models, it’s a dream because you’d have to be asleep to believe it. I don’t mean to phrase it so harshly, but there are so many reasons that can’t work. The main one is that there isn’t enough non-copyrighted data to train any competitive model. The competitive models have only recently gotten good enough to just barely be usable, and far more than 90% of their training data was sourced from people they certainly didn’t get usage rights from. I deleted a paragraph ranting about usage rights. Suffice to say, Stallman’s “Right to Read” becomes more prescient with each passing day.
    - frabcus 3y ago
      Adobe's generative AI features all use appropriately licensed training data.
    - Philpax 3y ago
      I more or less agree with you (I'm not convinced that training models on the imagery of the internet isn't fair use), but I wouldn't rule out a CC0 model just yet. There's Mitsua Diffusion One [0], which doesn't produce incredible results, but it's a start and they're planning on adding more data, including opt-in work from artists. PIXART-alpha [1] was trained on only 25 million images, and has excellent and competitive results. This could pair well with Fondant AI's 25 million Creative Commons-only dataset [2] (not all CC0, but a sizeable amount). I don't think it's as far away as you think it is! [0]: https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one https://huggingface.co/Mitsua/mitsua-diffusion-one [1]: https://pixart-alpha.github.io/ https://pixart-alpha.github.io/ [2]: https://huggingface.co/datasets/fondant-ai/fondant-cc-25m https://huggingface.co/datasets/fondant-ai/fondant-cc-25m

gumballindie 3y ago

I find it excellent that game devs have firmly rejected stolen content. At the end of the day it’s their livelihoods. Openai and those who promote the idea of reselling work without permission should be out of business. But their bet is that if done at scale they’ll get away with it. At least one industry rejected their philosophy. Other software and content developers should follow suit.

Kiro 3y ago
If you only care when something affects you personally it's hard to take your criticism seriously. It's much easier when you have no stake in the game or even benefit from it. Likewise, if you can say "this sucks for me personally but is a net positive for humanity", then I have a much easier time to consider your endorsement.
- jimmaswell 3y ago
  As a programmer, I'm glad if AI tools can learn from my code and improve copilot etc. for everyone. I find it exasperating how much other creators clutch their pearls over the same thing.
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Easy statement to make when one's code has no value.
    - Kiro 3y ago
      What do you mean?
      - gumballindie 3y ago
        Think of it like those in favour of communism. They find it easy to demand that other people share the output of their work for free so they can benefit from it. Similarily, programmers that produce insignificant code are happy to use the valued work of others for free. For instance, corporations have no issue in using the enormously valuable work of open source developers and neither do some of their mediocre workers. Essentially this is what we are witnessing with demands from workers that folk's work is made available to them so they too can be productive.

zo1 3y ago

This is unfortunately Valve's equivalent of the start of Google's 'do no evil' descent into actually doing "evil". I never expected it to be over AI and copyright.

blibble 3y ago
banning generated vomit is now evil?
- Philpax 3y ago
  Generation is a means to an end. It's up to the user to decide what that end is: it can be absolute naff, or it could be a solo auteur's masterpiece. The problem isn't AI, it's Valve's complete abdication of quality control.
- zo1 3y ago
  I'm not saying this specifically is Evil. But neither was Google "first" instance of whatever it did to start it's downward descent. At the time it was probably something silly and a thing we thought we could brush off due to the goodwill they had with us.
  - blibble 3y ago
    there's nothing downward about banning the vomit
    - zo1 3y ago
      Low effort responses like that are brain vomit. ChatGPT can do much better than you.
    - Kerb_ 3y ago
      Nothing downward about Google making sure advertisers can advertise to an audience likely to buy the product instead of truly random ad distribution either.

leeeeeep101 3y ago

AI Chatbots/NPCs like https://netwrck.com https://netwrck.com is already pretty huge, similar to character ai with illustrations and AI narrators. over 1m people a day talking to AIs now whether or not Valve likes it :D Just host your own game on your site you dont need valve.

akaij 3y ago
Projects using AI and blockchain; my favourite combination!