Support us on Patreon
PayPalUpdate 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.
Kimyrielle Jul 2, 2023
Quoting: Purple Library GuyQuoting: 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.
You're correct. I must have misread their statement. My bad!
Still, what they wrote in their statement is actually worse, because there is nothing "unclear" about using copyrighted data in ML data sets. As I said, multiple relevant jurisdictions explicitly allow it. No part of the "source materials" remains in the model. What Valve is doing is basically turning "innocent until proven guilty" into "you're violating copyright unless you can prove that aren't", in a situation where nobody can reasonably obtain such proof, or would be even required to.
So what do they expect you to do, honestly? Obtain written permission for every image linked to in the LAION-5B set? When there is no law or legal precedent prohibiting using copyrighted material for AI training in the first place? Ridiculous.
Their decision is horrible, not only because there is very little legal justification for it. But given Steam's near monopoly on the PC games market, it amounts to an industry-wide ban on AI art in games. Companies like Valve should apply a bit more thought and responsibility when making such decisions.
QuoteIn 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.
I do agree with most of this, even if that underlying issue is a bit out of scope for the discussion. We need to think about how to encourage (and pay) artists in the future. We really need to, and I think lawmakers are already considering options. But this doesn't change the fact that as of today, AI art is legal. Using copyrighted images in ML training is legal. And a market-dominating company shouldn't make a unilateral decision to ban AI art from being used in games just because they can.
Kimyrielle Jul 3, 2023
Quoting: Guesterr... people said that cars were great 100 years ago best thing since sliced bread, yet here we are fighting climate change,
Cars are still a fantastic thing. We need to update them with a new engine because climate change, but hey, details. They still do their car thing, even when they're battery powered. Maybe in 100 years, AI can draw people with less than six fingers per hand. Technological progress is always fun!
Last edited by Kimyrielle on 3 July 2023 at 5:22 am UTC
"We welcome and encourage innovation, and AI technology is bound to create new and exciting experiences in gaming."
How is an AI supposed to "create" or "innovate" when it just vomits associations of other work it has been trained upon?
Granted, the process "aims to be" similar to what the human mind does right now, but AI is still trained by humans with specific sets of "BIG" data.
Instead, human creativity comes from randomness, from caos, from living an entire, unpredictable life, which is different, individual.
What will be AIs trained upon from now to 100years? The need for "Bio"diversity comes to mind...
Let's try to stop this trend to make everything flat.
Last edited by kokoko3k on 3 July 2023 at 3:30 pm UTC
TobyHaynes Jul 3, 2023
Quoting: KimyrielleThe 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.
I expect to see multiple legal cases where this statement gets tested.
Essentially, the original works being fed into the ML models are under copyright. Much of the art / film / music under copyright is also licensed under complex terms including residuals - the original artist gets paid when their art is used or shown, distributors get their cut, and so on.
If you take any work that is only legally available under license (i.e. most of it) and you use it in an AI training data set, what legal standing do you have? If you did not have the license up front, you used data that you did not have permission to use. You can not claim your model does not contain the source material in some form, because that was used for input and must remain in some transformed form, even algorithmic weights, in the ML model.
Valve is playing safe while the legal aspects are litigated. As a large international business, Valve's position is the only legally safe avenue.
Quoting: kokoko3kHow is an AI supposed to "create" or "innovate" when it just vomits associations of other work it has been trained upon?
AI is more "creative" than most humans.
These comparisons are getting ridiculous. Yes, computers are less creative than Pablo Picasso, less intelligent than Albert Einstein and every some million miles of driving, they are killing a person. But they can compete with an average human in all of these fields easily. Mots of us don't write poems or paint pictures at all.
Quoting: EikeUh, they can't though. You have a point overall, but computer driving is pathetic. It looked great at the beginning and I was totally in for the idea, but it didn't get that much better and intractable problems didn't get solved. The "per X million miles" thing sounds good, but it's basically one of those "how to lie with statistics" things--they give a gee whiz number but don't make the comparison. The human accident rate is actually way better (It's quite surprising how good human drivers are, considering how crappy they seem when you're on the road). And that's despite the fact that they never, ever train these things anywhere with heavy traffic. And the computer driving systems still are absolutely incapable of successfully pulling off left turns in traffic. There's a reason the hype for computer driving has sort of quietly trickled away . . . they ran into diminishing returns and it's being slowly given up on. Even one of the top founders of computer driving has shifted to a company that just does it for specialized mining trucks on mining sites where the task is very simple and definable, because he concluded the general case just wasn't working.Quoting: kokoko3kHow is an AI supposed to "create" or "innovate" when it just vomits associations of other work it has been trained upon?
AI is more "creative" than most humans.
These comparisons are getting ridiculous. Yes, computers are less creative than Pablo Picasso, less intelligent than Albert Einstein and every some million miles of driving, they are killing a person. But they can compete with an average human in all of these fields easily. Mots of us don't write poems or paint pictures at all.
Some day I'm sure they'll get it beat, but that will be a different generation of software based at least in part on different ideas. I think the same is going to be true of a lot of people's expectations for "AI" chat and so forth.
Quoting: GroganQuoting: 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)
The AI paradox: Once it's solved, it's not AI any more. That always happens when people start to get used to computers doing things developed by AI research.
And about those thinking the *AI* lacks understanding and control: That's what the human providing the input and whatever is inside the model are providing - as a team, iteratively.
There are certainly people who master these tools in an artistic way. Postprocessing can also be a creative and artistic task - just like making a perfect photo of a mountain that was photographed a million times before.
How much creativity must go into a work to make it art? In my local art museum, there are pictures that are one-colored, two-colored or unpainted and slit with a knife. Beuys took a table, turned it around and put a piece of butter on top and now that's protected from overambitious cleaning personal for half a century while people discuss if that is art.
Also, real artists are drawing harry potters and yodas all the time and it depends on the work and opinion if this is derivative or not.
So, the problem is art-complete. If you want to decide weather ml-generated art is legit art, you could decide weather any work is art and there is no general solution to that problem.
That's why the debate is completely political and moral. I kind of like the everything generated is public domain idea, but if you ask me, that's not quite enough. If you ask me, the models should be force-published as public domain, too, unless every input has been licensed from the original creator, to ensure everyone can profit from this breakthrough humanity has worked on for decades.
Last edited by const on 3 July 2023 at 9:58 pm UTC
Quoting: EikeI firmly disagree.Quoting: kokoko3kHow is an AI supposed to "create" or "innovate" when it just vomits associations of other work it has been trained upon?
AI is more "creative" than most humans.
These comparisons are getting ridiculous. Yes, computers are less creative than Pablo Picasso ... But they can compete with an average human in all of these fields easily. Mots of us don't write poems or paint pictures at all.
Creativity is not just writing nice poems, painting nice pictures or musical scores that meet the common taste.
Every human on earth is more creative than the better AI as of today.
Are you Picasso or an average human? You really think your creativity cannot match an AI?
Me certainly not and I'm not Picasso either.
Using an AI to make art is not being unable to do it by your own, it is just lazyness, easy and quick money, more or less just another step straight on the road to the flatness.
Quoting: kokoko3kAre you Picasso or an average human? You really think your creativity cannot match an AI?
Yes, I fear I'm less creative at least in writing poems and painting than an AI.
I hope I'm still better (more creative?!? I don't know!) in my best field, software development.
But all of this seems to be a "Rückzugsgefecht" (dictionaries say it's "rearguard action" in English?) of mankind.
We're trying to defend what we think we're best in and what seems to be the "most human" trait to us, and it gives us strong feelings, and it makes us fear.
Last edited by Eike on 4 July 2023 at 10:15 am UTC
Quoting: EikeI understand your point and I'm all for the artificial life.Quoting: kokoko3kAre you Picasso or an average human? You really think your creativity cannot match an AI?
Yes, I fear I'm less creative at least in writing poems and painting than an AI.
I hope I'm still better (more creative?!? I don't know!) in my best field, software development.
But all of this seems to be a "Rückzugsgefecht" (dictionaries say it's "rearguard action" in English?) of mankind.
We're trying to defend what we think we're best in and what seems to be the "most human" trait to us, and it gives us strong feelings, and it makes us fear.
But i still think that we, as Natural Intelligences, are much more well trained and will be so for long time, because we make far more experiences; our training set of big data are much more vast, our potential is still so much bigger.
But,
if we start to rely on IAs, our set will stop to grow or will grow in a way that is driven by someone else woth much money in his pocket.
That's what I fear.
See more from me