itch.io store now requires AI generated content disclosures for assets

Something puzzles me.

...because some time ago, when I expressed my concerns about the extensive and almost exclusive use of game engines like Unity and Unreal, the most frequent response was that it was fine because it allowed anyone, even those who didn’t know how to program, to develop games.
The engine takes care of the programming to a certain extent, you add the graphics and audio, and everyone is happy.

Now, the extensive use of AI for image generation seems to be perceived differently, but the principle remains the same: you handle the programming and audio while paying relatively little attention to the graphical aspect, yet... not everyone is happy.


Last edited by kokoko3k on 21 November 2024 at 3:02 pm UTC

Quoting: kokoko3kSomething puzzles me.

I ask because some time ago, when I expressed my concerns about the extensive and almost exclusive use of game engines like Unity and Unreal, the most frequent response was that it was fine because it allowed anyone, even those who didn’t know how to program, to develop games.
The engine takes care of the programming to a certain extent, you add the graphics and audio, and everyone is happy.

Now, the extensive use of AI for image generation seems to be perceived differently, but the principle remains the same: you handle the programming and audio while paying relatively little attention to the graphical aspect, yet... not everyone is happy.

Because the code that you use was written by the company that you licensed the engine from. With AI it is usually unclear what it's from and who is the rightful owner to the source material. Stores are simply attempting to cover their responsibility.

Quoting: kokoko3kThe engine takes care of the programming to a certain extent, you add the graphics and audio, and everyone is happy.

Now, the extensive use of AI for image generation seems to be perceived differently, but the principle remains the same: you handle the programming and audio while paying relatively little attention to the graphical aspect, yet... not everyone is happy.

Engines can be reused depending on their license, or the developer's goodwill in the case of mods. People pay attention to the engine licensing terms because they expect they will have to obey them, hence the reaction to the Unity runtime fee.

The current GenAI trend is driven by datasets of every picture ever made, ingested without the artists consent.
The proponents of the bubble do not expect to obey artists' rights such as copyright. So I am glad itch is requiring disclosures, it's a good first step against both slop and copyright laundering.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/ai-spits-out-exact-copies-of-training-images-real-people-logos-researchers-find/
https://www.salon.com/2024/01/09/impossible-openai-admits-chatgpt-cant-exist-without-pinching-copyrighted-work/

Quoting: EhvisBecause the code that you use was written by the company that you licensed the engine from. With AI it is usually unclear what it's from and who is the rightful owner to the source material. Stores are simply attempting to cover their responsibility.

That covers the stores, not people pointing their fingers on this but not that.

Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: EhvisBecause the code that you use was written by the company that you licensed the engine from. With AI it is usually unclear what it's from and who is the rightful owner to the source material. Stores are simply attempting to cover their responsibility.

That covers the stores, not people pointing their fingers on this but not that.

I would think it obvious that the potential legal issue also points to an ethical issue, that people might perhaps care about if they, you know, care about ethics. Also, there's an aesthetic issue--people often think AI assets will tend to be bland and crappy, and extensive use of them suggests a developer without aesthetic standards or a vision of their own.

More broadly, some people worry about a kind of economic/ecological impact of widespread AI use. If everyone's using AI for written and/or artistic content, there are two potential impacts: One, nobody will be paying writers or artists and they will all lose their livelihoods. Two, because AI depends on original human writing and art as its source material and seems to get iteratively crappier if it is drawing on mostly AI stuff, the takeover of AI and loss of human artistic production would result in everything getting crappy as AI models are trained by scraping mostly the production of other AIs.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 21 November 2024 at 4:10 pm UTC

Quoting: kokoko3k

Quoting: EhvisBecause the code that you use was written by the company that you licensed the engine from. With AI it is usually unclear what it's from and who is the rightful owner to the source material. Stores are simply attempting to cover their responsibility.

That covers the stores, not people pointing their fingers on this but not that.

The stores depend on artists, there's the angle of labour rights, wealth concentration, the question of promoting creativity vs slop… Cory Doctorow has written a ton about those questions. itch.io in particular has to be sensitive to the mood of indies lest they get pushed out.

Thank you all for the answers.

But although I agree with most of them, I still doubt this hype of "anti AI" is tied to those deep roots.

Quoting: kokoko3kI still doubt this hype of "anti AI" is tied to those deep roots.

Artists feel threatened by AI-generated art, so they loudly and publicly disapprove of it.

A lot of people sympathize with artists who express those opinions.

If you want a good incident that shows where Anti-AI sentiments are coming from, look no further than the Adobe incident this year. Adobe's policy change to scrape and use their users' data for training their AI if you use their apps was taken very poorly by every creative, to the point Adobe needed to issue a non-apology.

It's really the same thing as the Luddites. They felt threatened by new technology that could replace them to do the work more cheaply, and the end result was lower quality, but a lot of customers didn't care that much, so the more cheaply-produced and higher margin product won. Employees (usually children) that used the new machines were also in a lot more danger too, but that doesn't really relate.

The ultimate insult is that these AI generators use real artist's work as training data so they can eventually be used to replace the artists that "inspired" it.

I think AI generated art will continue to get better, and it will be easier to get better, more consistent art assets with less hallucinations over the years. And fewer artists will be hired—especially the lower-skilled ones—because an AI can do it more cheaply and never needs a day off. The highest-skilled artists will probably remain around for a long time, even just for the sake of the craft, but good luck to anyone new trying to get into the field.

It's just sad, thinking about it. Will we all end up too fat and happy to care in the future like in WALL-E? If there's no point learning how to express yourself through writing and art because AI can do it faster and better, what does that leave us to do? Oil the machines and watch AI-generated TV shows all day?

I think AI has its place, but I don't want to see so much of it in my games and stories. I read stories and play games to connect with a writer and artist who're trying to tell me something. It just feels cheaper and inauthentic. In the future, when I'm no longer able to tell the difference, the idea will feel cheap and inauthentic. I feel that connection when I'm playing SuperGiant games. I just don't feel it with an asset flip or AI-generated art in games. I think the worst experience I ever had was reading some fanfiction and realizing part way through that it must have been AI-generated, because no person would write like this, for as long as this. In fanfiction.

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI think AI generated art will continue to get better, and it will be easier to get better, more consistent art assets with less hallucinations over the years.

I'm not so sure. Optimists about this technology tend to be so because they think of it as a new, starting field and if the first results are this good there should be lots of room for improvement. But as far as I can figure, it isn't--the idea behind this and research into it at gradually increasing scales have been going on for quite some time, I think decades. It burst on us suddenly because we only saw it when the concept had been so thoroughly tested that someone was willing to step up and spend masses of dough to build models that scraped most of the internet and get the likes of Google and Microsoft to stick it in front of our faces. So rather than a brand new nascent technology, I think it's actually quite a mature technology, and it's already taken a key ingredient, model size, about as far as it can be taken. I think it may have already plateaued.

There will be improvements, but they'll be like pivot charts in spreadsheets--the basic way spreadsheets work hasn't changed much since Lotus, but there are lots of nice little improvements. So like maybe for ChatGPT they'll add a thing that can tell when you're asking a math question, and passes it to a dedicated little do-the-math routine, bypassing the main model so you don't get totally wrong answers.

On top of that, if in fact it displaces human-produced content on a mass scale, as I said above future versions may actually degrade in quality as we get AI models trained on AI output that was trained on AI output that was trained on AI output.

I'm sure stuff that produces better output is possible, and indeed I'm pretty sure true AI is possible (although it won't be all-powerful like some of the rich weirdos imagine). But that will be a different technology, not just iterations on current large language model concepts.

Quoting: kokoko3kSomething puzzles me.

...because some time ago, when I expressed my concerns about the extensive and almost exclusive use of game engines like Unity and Unreal, the most frequent response was that it was fine because it allowed anyone, even those who didn’t know how to program, to develop games.
The engine takes care of the programming to a certain extent, you add the graphics and audio, and everyone is happy.

Now, the extensive use of AI for image generation seems to be perceived differently, but the principle remains the same: you handle the programming and audio while paying relatively little attention to the graphical aspect, yet... not everyone is happy.

I guess I'll say it since nobody else will.

The game engine does not make the game for you. The game engine provides a foundation and some building blocks for you, but you still have to know how to put them together and program the game itself. Not to mention creating all of the assets for the game. This is all hard, very time consuming work. Not even using premade assets will spare you from the work it takes to create a high-quality, functioning game. There is a reason asset flips are so easy to spot, and there is a reason why almost nobody plays them.

This is like saying a compiler "does all the work for you" just because you're not programming directly in machine code. It is completely nonsensical.