4 ms·

> It's a video game, but entirely generated by AI I ctrl-F'ed the webpage and saw 0 occurrence of "Minecraft". Why? This isn't a video game, this is a poor cop

> It's a video game, but entirely generated by AI I ctrl-F'ed the webpage and saw 0 occurrence of "Minecraft". Why? This isn't a video game, this is a poor copy of a real video game you didn't even bother to say the name of, let alone credit it.

dartos 2y ago
Yeah it is strange how they make the model sound like it can generate any environment, but only shows demos of the most data-available game ever.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
armchairhacker 2y ago
It seems like an interesting attempt to get around legal issues. They can't say "Minecraft" because that's a Microsoft trademark, but they can use Minecraft images as training data, because everyone (including Microsoft) is using proprietary data to train diffusion models. There's the issue that the outputs obviously resemble Minecraft, but Microsoft has its own problems with Bing and DALL-E generating images that obviously resemble trademarked things (despite guardrails).
- chefandy 2y ago
  Avoiding legal and ethical issues. This stuff was made by a bunch of real people, and people still get their name in movie and game credits even if they got a paycheck from it. Microsoft shamelessly vacuuming up proprietary content didn't change the norms of the way people get credited in these mediums. It's sad to see how thoughtlessly so many people using generative AI disregard the models' source material as "data" while the models (and therefore their creators) almost always get prominently credited for putting in a tiny fraction of the effort. The dubious ethical defense against crediting source works— that models learn about media the same way humans do and adapt it to suit their purposes— is obliterated when it is trained on one work to reproduce that work. That this is equated to generating an image on Midjourney it's a blatant example of a common practice— people want to get credit for other people's work, but when it's time to take responsibility the way a human artist would have to, "The machine did it! It's not my responsibility!"
  - woah 2y ago
    The point of this paper is to demonstrate a method of training an AI to output interactive game footage. They could have trained it for similar results with DOOM videos. Presumably the footage they trained on was OK to train on (I don't think a video of someone playing a video game is copyrighted by the video game's author), but they could have used a variety of other games.
    - stared 2y ago
      Algorithms trained on DOOM, or using DOOM as a showcase, mention DOOM.
    - rodiger 2y ago
      Surprisingly, Nintendo has a long history of copyright-striking videos of folks playing their games. https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-co...
  - FeepingCreature 2y ago
    Do you really think this would be materially different if they used Minetest? To be frank, nothing in Minecraft as a game (rather than the code) deserves intellectual property protection; it copies games that came before and was copied by games that came after. It is an excellent, well-designed implementation of a very basic concept.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      > nothing in Minecraft as a game (rather than the code) deserves intellectual property protection > excellent, well-designed implementation And there we see the problem laid bare. Excellent designs that are well-executed are not worthless facets of the real product. As we can see from Minecraft's success, that is the real product. People play video games for the experience, not to execute some logical construct a formal proof showing that it's fun. The reason that this demo uses Minecraft as opposed to a Minecraft knockoff is because Minecraft is better, and they are capitalizing on that. Even if that game is based on a well-worn concept, the many varied design problems you solve when making a game are harder than development, which is why damn near every game that starts open source is a knockoff of something other people already designed. It's not Mojang was some marketing powerhouse that knocked infiniminer off it's perch without merit.
- amelius 2y ago
  Maybe they are even __trying__ to get sued to set a legal precedent against Copilot.
kiloDalton 2y ago
There is one mention of Minecraft in the second paragraph of the Architecture section, "...We train on a subset of open-source Minecraft video data collected by OpenAI[9]." I can't say whether this was added after your comment.
stared 2y ago
It is weird - compare and contrast with https://diamond-wm.github.io/ https://diamond-wm.github.io/, which explicitly mentions Counter Strike. When a scientific work uses some work and does not credit it, it is academic dishonesty. Sure, they could have trained the model on a different dataset. No matter which source was used, it should be cited.

dartos 2y ago

Yeah it is strange how they make the model sound like it can generate any environment, but only shows demos of the most data-available game ever.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

armchairhacker 2y ago

It seems like an interesting attempt to get around legal issues. They can't say "Minecraft" because that's a Microsoft trademark, but they can use Minecraft images as training data, because everyone (including Microsoft) is using proprietary data to train diffusion models. There's the issue that the outputs obviously resemble Minecraft, but Microsoft has its own problems with Bing and DALL-E generating images that obviously resemble trademarked things (despite guardrails).

chefandy 2y ago
Avoiding legal and ethical issues. This stuff was made by a bunch of real people, and people still get their name in movie and game credits even if they got a paycheck from it. Microsoft shamelessly vacuuming up proprietary content didn't change the norms of the way people get credited in these mediums. It's sad to see how thoughtlessly so many people using generative AI disregard the models' source material as "data" while the models (and therefore their creators) almost always get prominently credited for putting in a tiny fraction of the effort. The dubious ethical defense against crediting source works— that models learn about media the same way humans do and adapt it to suit their purposes— is obliterated when it is trained on one work to reproduce that work. That this is equated to generating an image on Midjourney it's a blatant example of a common practice— people want to get credit for other people's work, but when it's time to take responsibility the way a human artist would have to, "The machine did it! It's not my responsibility!"
- woah 2y ago
  The point of this paper is to demonstrate a method of training an AI to output interactive game footage. They could have trained it for similar results with DOOM videos. Presumably the footage they trained on was OK to train on (I don't think a video of someone playing a video game is copyrighted by the video game's author), but they could have used a variety of other games.
  - stared 2y ago
    Algorithms trained on DOOM, or using DOOM as a showcase, mention DOOM.
  - rodiger 2y ago
    Surprisingly, Nintendo has a long history of copyright-striking videos of folks playing their games. https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-copyright-on-youtube-lets-plays https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/05/16/nintendo-enforces-co...
- FeepingCreature 2y ago
  Do you really think this would be materially different if they used Minetest? To be frank, nothing in Minecraft as a game (rather than the code) deserves intellectual property protection; it copies games that came before and was copied by games that came after. It is an excellent, well-designed implementation of a very basic concept.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    > nothing in Minecraft as a game (rather than the code) deserves intellectual property protection > excellent, well-designed implementation And there we see the problem laid bare. Excellent designs that are well-executed are not worthless facets of the real product. As we can see from Minecraft's success, that is the real product. People play video games for the experience, not to execute some logical construct a formal proof showing that it's fun. The reason that this demo uses Minecraft as opposed to a Minecraft knockoff is because Minecraft is better, and they are capitalizing on that. Even if that game is based on a well-worn concept, the many varied design problems you solve when making a game are harder than development, which is why damn near every game that starts open source is a knockoff of something other people already designed. It's not Mojang was some marketing powerhouse that knocked infiniminer off it's perch without merit.
amelius 2y ago
Maybe they are even __trying__ to get sued to set a legal precedent against Copilot.

kiloDalton 2y ago

There is one mention of Minecraft in the second paragraph of the Architecture section, "...We train on a subset of open-source Minecraft video data collected by OpenAI[9]." I can't say whether this was added after your comment.

stared 2y ago

It is weird - compare and contrast with https://diamond-wm.github.io/ https://diamond-wm.github.io/, which explicitly mentions Counter Strike. When a scientific work uses some work and does not credit it, it is academic dishonesty. Sure, they could have trained the model on a different dataset. No matter which source was used, it should be cited.