Update 01/07/2023 - Valve sent over a statement here's what they said:
We are continuing to learn about AI, the ways it can be used in game development, and how to factor it in to our process for reviewing games submitted for distribution on Steam. Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can. The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.
We know it is a constantly evolving tech, and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam; instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already-existing review policies. Stated plainly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policies, not an added layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process.
We welcome and encourage innovation, and AI technology is bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming. While developers can use these AI technologies in their work with appropriate commercial licenses, they can not infringe on existing copyrights.
Lastly, while App-submission credits are usually non-refundable, we're more than happy to offer them in these cases as we continue to work on our review process.
Original article below:
Here's an interesting one on Steam publishing for you. Valve appear to be clamping down on AI art used in games due to the murky legal waters. AI art is such a huge topic of discussion everywhere right now, as is other forms of "AI" like ChatGPT and it's just — everywhere. I can't seem to get away from talk on it from people for and against it.
In a post on Reddit, a developer who tried to release their game on Steam got word back from Valve that they have denied listing it. Here's what they sent the developer:
Hello,
While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.
After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.
We are failing your build and will give you one (1) opportunity to remove all content that you do not have the rights to from your build.
If you fail to remove all such content, we will not be able to ship your game on Steam, and this app will be banned.
That developer mentioned they tweaked the artwork, so it wasn't so obviously AI generated and spoke to Valve again but Valve once again rejected it noting:
Hello,
Thank you for your patience as we reviewed [Game Name Here] and took our time to better understand the AI tech used to create it. Again, while we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights. At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data.
App credits are usually non-refundable, but we’d like to make an exception here and offer you a refund. Please confirm and we’ll proceed.
Thanks,
Given the current issues with AI art and how it's generated, this really seems like a no-brainer for Valve to deny publishing games that have AI art unless the developers of the games can prove fully they own the full rights. Their own guidelines are pretty clear on it, developers cannot publish games on Steam they don't have "adequate rights" to.
That said, this is a difficult topic to fully address. With the tools Valve will be using to flag these games, how will they be dealing with false positives? It's not likely Valve will be individually personally going over every game with a human checking it, and algorithms can be problematic. It's going to be interesting to see how this develops over time. Seems like more developers will need to have everything they need ready to ensure they can prove ownership of all artwork.
I've reached out to Valve to see if they have any comments on it to share.
What do you think about this? Let me know in the comments.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: EikePeople said similar things about music sharing--where did it go?Quoting: hardpenguinYes, this is good. Gotta get rid of the AI generated images (it is difficult to call it art).
It's obvious that this will not happen, right?
I do understand - and share - such feelings, but in the end, it's like trying to get rid of photos in the early stages of photography because they're "not art".
Erm, I got no idea which similarity you're pointing at here. (Music sharing, like with Napster?)
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: EikePeople said similar things about music sharing--where did it go?Quoting: hardpenguinYes, this is good. Gotta get rid of the AI generated images (it is difficult to call it art).
It's obvious that this will not happen, right?
I do understand - and share - such feelings, but in the end, it's like trying to get rid of photos in the early stages of photography because they're "not art".
Erm, I got no idea which similarity you're pointing at here. (Music sharing, like with Napster?)
Quoting: fabertaweThis is not generally a good thing, in my view. Jobs will be lost and the quality of human creativity will be diluted and swamped by a tsunami of this stuff.
The strange thing is that now AI is painting and writing poems, while humans are doing hard work for minimal wages.
Wasn't this once supposed to be the other way around...?
Quoting: EikeYeah. Not so much a conceptual similarity, just a similarity in, people sometimes think something is too basic or unstoppable to be regulated or outlawed, and then they regulate or outlaw it.Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: EikePeople said similar things about music sharing--where did it go?Quoting: hardpenguinYes, this is good. Gotta get rid of the AI generated images (it is difficult to call it art).
It's obvious that this will not happen, right?
I do understand - and share - such feelings, but in the end, it's like trying to get rid of photos in the early stages of photography because they're "not art".
Erm, I got no idea which similarity you're pointing at here. (Music sharing, like with Napster?)
Some have mentioned worries about the mechanisms to detect AI generated art. Not something I'm worried about myself. I know it will not be perfect, just like other tools in the software industry. Will they use "bots" and algorithms to detect AI art? I'd be surprised if they didn't. Why wouldn't they? Software automation is the only way we can handle the scale of content we all use out of necessity or entertainment. It will never be perfect, just like when you buy a box of nails from the hardware store. There is often a bent or misshapen one. That's alright. You deal with a bump in the road and keep driving.
I'm not against AI generated art when legalities are met. AI is a tool just like other software that requires knowledge, skill, and time to use. If the art is ugly, it won't sell, which means a great amount of engineering (AI) and creativity of using the tool are required to get a desirable result. Like other tools of many kinds, you could produce good things or bad things.
Quoting: Purple Library GuyThe hype would be quite a bit smaller if they weren't calling it "artificial intelligence", which it really isn't.
That's right, now it's essentially a bunch of machine learning algorithms that they are calling "AI". They also call the behaviour of NPC's in video games "AI" (and that's a stretch of wordsmithing that has always made me laugh)
But it's not always going to be that way. Right now it's a bunch of new legal issues that need to be sorted for when AI does become something a bit more sophisticated.
gradyvuckovic Jul 2, 2023
Quoting: gaboverstaThe recent news about AI generated images getting worse as previous AI generated images end up in the training data shows that it is still far closer to copying than actual creativity.
An intelligent artist improves by referencing their own work, not degrades.
I think this is the key. One of the biggest objections I have is the way many people have insisted there's 'no difference' between AI software having it's parameters tuned on a dataset of copyrighted images and 'humans learning art by studying the works of other artists'.
Quote"They're both just looking at pictures and learning, what's the difference bro??"
And every time I hear that my first thought is, "Clearly you don't understand either AI or art".
Those two things are not even remotely the same thing. They really aren't. Humans look at examples of things, find patterns, learn, invent new things based on what they've seen, they experiment and try things, and stick with concepts they like or which they show to other people and are well received. None of the AI image generators in the market today do that.
The first artists who learned to paint and draw, and stylise humans with interesting representations, did so without any examples to look at at all. They just looked at other people, and experimented with different strokes and lines, and experimented until they found something they liked, and kept going with it and evolved their style over time.
AI image generators are certainly not doing that, they don't experiment, they have no sense of even 'liking' or 'disliking' what they're generating or being fed, a crucial aspect of how humans learn to do art and how new art styles are developed, so how could the AI be 'learning' the same way humans do?
All AI image generators do, is take a bunch of examples of data, and their algorithms are tuned to reproduce that data, and to combine it together based on keys. Combining the image data of blonde hair with image data of blue eyes to create an image of a person with both. There's no 'learning', there's no 'experimenting', and there's certainly no 'art'.
To me legally there's little difference between running 100,000 images through an AI image generator and claiming copyright over the result, and running 1 image through an image editor with a hue slider to shift the colour and claiming copyright over the result.
The only difference is, the latter example is infringing the copyright of one prior artist, the former example is infringing the copyright of likely thousands of artists. Both equally wrong.
AI image generators do have potential uses, such as a means of automatically generating variations of artworks automatically to fill a need for a large sum of procedural data, but AI image generators should not be used as a smokescreen to basically steal copyrighted works from artists, which seems to be the way they're being mainly used right now.
So I think it's very good to see Valve insisting 'If you're using AI image generators in your game, then you should be able to prove you have copyright over the images that were used to train the AI image generator'.
Kimyrielle Jul 2, 2023
Quoting: gradyvuckovicQuote"They're both just looking at pictures and learning, what's the difference bro??"
And every time I hear that my first thought is, "Clearly you don't understand either AI or art".
Those two things are not even remotely the same thing. They really aren't
Your point of AI being unable to invent truly new artstyles is correct, but largely irrelevant to the discussion. For the overwhelming number of games being made, their originality is largely not derived from the art assets. Visual elements are often used in a supportive manner, and it doesn't really matter if that elf wizard in an RPG isn't the most original art ever. If all I need is images to visualize my game, AI art will do the trick just fine in this regard.
Also, this point of AI art being essentially "stealing" from artists doesn't magically become true from repeating it just enough. Nothing is being "stolen", ever. The images are used for the training process and are then discarded. No fragments of copyrighted material remain in the published model. During training, the AI -does- learn to reproduce art-styles of existing artists. That's not stealing. If I draw an elf wizard in the style of say Clyde Caldwell, I don't violate his copyright, unless I draw an exact replica of one of his paintings. The paradigm of art-styles being not copyrightable has been affirmed in and out of court time and again, and is actually one thing artists should beg to not ever getting changed. If art styles would be copyrightable, Disney would probably need less than 24 hours to copyright every imaginable art style and no artist would ever do art again without their permission. I don't think that's what we want, no?
As far as training data itself goes, downloading publicly accessible images from the internet isn't illegal. That's also something some artists don't seem to comprehend. You cannot redistribute their images without their permission, but if you download anything, you can do whatever you want with it, as long as any copies or derived works don't leave your house/office. Copyright law restricts redistribution, not private use. In other words, if you don't want people to feed your images to a ML model, don't upload them to the public internet. Should be a no-brainer, but apparently isn't.
Oh, and using such data for machine learning is actually explicitly -allowed- by many jurisdictions (including the UK, home of Stable Diffusion). Even if this changes one day, it won't change the fact that any model released today is operating in the clear and images produced with them will remain so forever. You cannot retroactively criminalize behavior that's legal today.
The most laughable thing is the statement by Valve (supported by you) asking people to prove that you have copyright/usage-rights for your AI generated content, when the US Copyright Office clarified multiple times that such content is not copyrightable in the first place. How do you prove ownership over images that legally cannot have an owner, anyway?
This gist of the story is still Valve banning AI art on the sheer premise that the legal status quo might change one day, when there is very little indication that it will (the upcoming EU AI Act certainly won't, and there is no indication that the US has any intent to make rules dramatically different from that). It's not something I can support, but hey...
Quoting: KimyrielleThe most laughable thing is the statement by Valve (supported by you) asking people to prove that you have copyright/usage-rights for your AI generated content, when the US Copyright Office clarified multiple times that such content is not copyrightable in the first place. How do you prove ownership over images that legally cannot have an owner, anyway?You've made some good points, but that's just a grammatical error on your part. Nobody's asking them to prove copyright of the AI generated images themselves. Rightly or wrongly, as far as I can tell people are asking them to prove sufficient rights over whatever the source material was, not over the results.
In the end I think the existence of these things represents a huge challenge to our whole model of copyright, both in itself and perhaps particularly the way in recent decades we have brought it as much as certain interests could into the model of property. That latter bit isn't so much a problem legally in itself, it's a conceptual problem.
So, let's not forget what copyright is, originally: It is a legal intervention in the world for the purposes of making our economic model viable in the realm of literary production (as far as I know, it was originally all about publishing books, not about art, for instance). And that is what its original justification was--making things work, not any inherent rights that anyone might have. As a side note, it was created mainly for the benefit of publishers, not writers.
As things like copyright became more important and at the same time there was ever greater potential for ordinary people to interact with it, such as by making mix tapes on cassettes, copies of videos, and then all the things the internet lets you do, corporations elaborated a rationale for making copyright more powerful and giving it greater moral force in people's minds--the idea of "intellectual property", which brings the whole capitalist, Lockean property schtick in. And so here we are, arguing about whether people's inherent rights to their "property" are being violated by the uses these "AI" programs are making of them.
And the thing is, quite likely not, but they could still break all intellectual production. As an instrumental, practical matter, "AI" could break the original rationale for copyright, by making it impossible for artists and writers to produce and get paid. At which point we're gonna need a law to stop it, whether the damage is relevant to people's so-called "intellectual property" or not. Whatever we end up with that we still call copyright, would have to be different and appeal to a different rationale--either a different ethical basis, or a spirit more in keeping with early copyright, of just saying we have to have a law so as not to break the economy of intellectual production.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 2 July 2023 at 7:01 pm UTC
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