Did I ask for this feature? No. But I do think it’s neat!
I’m a one man Indie making a game. It’s a management/strategy game and I want to add some depth to some of the pawns you control in the game by having a portrait for each and actual voices saying things and there are quite a lot of possible such pawns so that means quite lot of portraits and voices saying lines.
If I use generative AI I can do it at the cost of my time and some electricity for my PC, if I don’t it would cost $$$ so wouldn’t be able to have those elements because that’s not just one or two portraits and voices.
Apparently if I use AI for it that makes me and my micro-company a big bad corporation.
If you’re making it for profit, and using public resources (like GenAI trained on all the commons), then the game itself should be in the commons as well. (You can still sell it or request donations though) I support the GenAI in FOSS, but for-profit closed-source games should respect their own ideals (copyrights)
A person working to make profit might not actually believe in copyrights. Nor hold any ideological kinship with the system they exist in.
Further, virtually all resources to do anything originated in “the commons” and the sort of person who’s trying to produce a game as their means of making money probably are just trying to get away from a miserable 9 to 5 (or not live under a bridge).
People who work and give away their shit for free are good people, but they are also usually people who are financially comfortable already. Its not right to dictate what resources some individual game dev is trying to use to make a living off their work.
I disagree with all three paragraphs.
Perhaps you could elaborate on why?
Firstly, if they don’t believe in copyright, they shouldn’t be advocating for copyright, i.e. don’t base your whole business model hypocrisy. “Copyright for ther but not for me”.
The second paragraph has a vaguely defined “resources”. I assume you mean that people learning art looks at existing art as a way to get better and produce new art. I don’t think this should be in the same category as copying art from “commons”. I do believe generative AI to be copying rather than learning, unlike humans.
The third paragraph tries to put a class barrier on good morals. Let’s assume that is true. I’d argue that anyone that has the time and money to start their own venture into game development also is quite “comfortable” and should therefore be measured by the same stick.
As to that assumption: Most open source is created by people in their spare time. They mostly have full time jobs to do as well, the collaboration is done for fun or as a calling to do good for the world.
First, thanks for elaborating. I welcome the challenge to my views, but now I need to counter.
they shouldn’t be advocating for copyright, i.e. don’t base your whole business model hypocrisy. “Copyright for ther but not for me”.
I never suggested that they are advocating for copyright. Utilizing the rules of a system to get ahead doesn’t mean you actively advocate for it. That said, I somewhat agree, if a small indie dev was using gen AI and then however gets litigious over people pirating their game that indicates a ruthlessness that is significantly unpalatable and I certainly would not support them. I’d view them as extremely petty and stupid to the point that the potential hypocrisy almost comes second to me though.
I do believe generative AI to be copying rather than learning, unlike humans.
I don’t see a difference. There is nothing intrinsically special about a human’s learning methods that can’t be replicated by computer systems. Even if the current generative AI methodologies wasn’t exactly the same process, that is immaterial. If I created a humanoid robot that learned to physically paint based on paintings I showed it, would that be merely “copying” instead of learning?
What if they came out with neurological enhancement implants to human brains that sped up the process of humans learning how to do art to the point that they also could trivially replicate other artist’s styles?
The difference is purely in economic consequences. In both of my questioning examples producing art becomes economically trivial, that’s the problem. The meta-physical question of whether its “art” or whether only humans are truly creative is all cope and gibberish.
The third paragraph tries to put a class barrier on good morals. Let’s assume that is true. I’d argue that anyone that has the time and money to start their own venture into game development also is quite “comfortable” and should therefore be measured by the same stick.
This is all relative/subjective and I largely just disagree. I think this is an easy position to hold if you’ve already “made it” so to speak. It comes off as someone rich tut tuting someone poorer than them for “taking shortcuts” and saying “Look, you have a computer, smart phone, a microwave! You should be happy with what you have and just work harder if you want more.”
“Good morals” is also extremely subjective. When it comes to meta-ethics, I only care about consequences, not about the virtue of individuals. Virtue only matters in my personal relationships.
Most open source is created by people in their spare time. They mostly have full time jobs to do as well, the collaboration is done for fun or as a calling to do good for the world.
Having spare time and energy to contribute to open source is a privilege in today’s society regardless of how it is achieved. You can argue that in our time of abundance this should not be the case but unfortunately it is.
Again though, I don’t view this as a negative on the part of people who contribute to open source. I strongly support such people and hope at some point I’ve reached a point in my life that I can do the same.
Perhaps the logical compromise is to disclaim ownership of the AI-generated assets, releasing them as public domain, while retaining the copyright only on the code he’s written himself, etc
I totally agree that the things I make with Gen AI are public property.
What doesn’t make sense is that all of my work must also become public merelly because it’s alongside public works.
What I’m doing is years worth of my work, not just tic-tac-toe.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind making free for everybody games all day (I have a TON of ideas) if I could live were I wanted and all my own living costs were taken care of, but that’s not the World we live in so, not having been born to wealthy parents, I have to get paid for my work in order to survive.
If Copyright for you is an ideology (rather than a shittily implemented area of property legislation), then fell free to have your spin of it for the product of your time and effort, including having Contagion for public resources, just don’t expect that others in the World we live in must go along with such an hyper-simplifying take on property of the intellectual kind.
I suspect that your take is deep down still anchored on an idea of “corporation” and making profits for the sake of further enriching already wealthy individuals, whilst I as a non-wealthy individual have to actually make a living of my work to survive and you’re pretty much telling me that I can’t use a specific kind of free shit to do my work better without all of my work having to be free for everybody (and I go live under a bridge and starve).
Don’t take this badly but you’re pretty much making the case that the worker can’t have any free tools to earn their livelihood, which is just a way of making the case for “those who can afford it buy and own the tools, those who can’t work for those who own the tools”.
Whether you realise it or not you’re defending something that just makes sure than only those who have enough money to afford paying for artisan work can make great things whilst the rest have to work for them and maybe do tiny things on their spare time.
I don’t support the current system whatsoever and aim to dismantle it. But if you do, and you otherwise play by the rules of the system, then you have to accept that your “free tool” that improves your work comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators and is therefore immoral to use in for-profit products. I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
All capitalist practices are immoral in functionally the same way. Capitalism works to use worker exploitation but also use of the commons for private gain. Generative AI is now part of the commons that capitalists will inevitably use for profit. The fight over worker disenfranchisement in this case was functionally instantly lost the moment generative AI became usable at all.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
They already do and are going to regardless. In fact, using Generative AI will likely become functionally mandatory given a capitalist market system. If you take on labor costs that other firms don’t, then you will not be able to compete. This applies to big corporations and small indie devs already. A company wont abstain from Gen AI if their competition wont and all it takes is one company to start using Gen AI.
Oh, I would totally be happy for a property-free world in all senses (so, one were I could just occupy a piece of land, were I would make my own house and grow my own food), what I’m not happy with is the idea that I still have to obbey all the rules on the side were I have to work within the system to make money in order to survive but on the other side what’s mine is everybody’s. Your ideal world is not one we can transition into by starting with making the tool users have to pay for all their tools but everything else “we’ll solve later”.
Further, I don’t think Gen AI should be monetised - if it was trained on public works then what comes out of it are public works.
I play by the rules of the system because I have no choice: I was born in a World were everything is owned and wasn’t born in the Owner Class - for me it was always play by other people’s rules or go live under a bridge.
Your specific formulation in the last post was similar to saying that use of Open Source tools should make the product of one’s work Open Source: if the Gen AI was trained with works that authors made freely available for any use as public works, then the resulting generative tool is akin to an open source piece of software (Edit: specifically, tools and libraries for software development) only instead of being something that creates or enhances very complex control code for a processing unit it’s something that creates images or audio clips and when those images and audio clips are used as part of a much greater work, they’re just as small a fraction of the work as, say, open source libraries are in software applications.
However, “what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern. If the same happens as it did with Open Source software in the Programming world, such a tool being freely available just means that people will expect even more complex works to be done - so in the case of games, for them to have more and nicer visuals - or in other words, for the amount of work that needs to be done to grow and pretty much nullify the gains from having the new tools. If that is not what happens, then we indeed have a problem.
Given the way things are, that formulation you defended will de facto result in Gen AI that is entirelly trained on paid for works, hence is paid for, hence only those who can afford it get to use it - which in the game making world means you’re basically defending an option that helps the big for profit publishers and screws the small indies trying to make a living, which I suspect is the very opposite of the World you seem to want.
I ain’t reading all that. Anyway you keep insisting that the world allow you to do what you want to do, I don’t think it’s going to work out the way you expect, no matter how big walls of text you write. Using GenAI in for-profit ventures is going to put you into a specific box. Make of this what you will.
I shall extend to you the same “courtesy”. It’s only fair.
This is just overly broad. If I use a LLM to aid me in debugging doesn’t mean the game is tainted.
I guess the issue is the wording of the statement and not the tag itself.
The line between using Gen AI as a tool and and putting unfiltered output out there is very blurry.
SteamDB is a third-party service, not affiliated with Valve.
Procedural generation though. Infinite replay value with actual graphics or voiceover? Fuck yeah. Great roguelites will use genai and that’s awesome.
Honestly, I’d love that as well, but the problem is that you cannot connect GenAI generations to mechanics because they’re too fuzzy. The best way to use them atm is to use them only for fluff. For example to automatically generate the art for encounters, or the flavor text for card games etc. But even then, they tend to converge into generic boring slop. Still I think there’s some potential there for some creative roguelike devs to do GenAI fluff kinda OK.
I think you have to be clever with the usage of gen AI to get non-boring things, and just use it as one or multiple elements in a larger pipeline/computation graph. This is my intuition and not battle-tested.
Disagree. They can be connected to actual game mechanics. For instance, it’s quite easy to ask an LLM to output something in json format:
{ "name": "The Master of Evil", "hitpoints": 205, "class": "vampire," }and so on. You might object that it could make mistakes here. Suppose the detectable error rate is 10% (I actually think it’s lower from what I’ve played around with.) Rerunning it in the case of a such an error (e.g. malformed json, invalid class name, hit points exceeds bounds, etc.) reduces to 1%, then 0.1% etc., and in the end there can be a non-AI fallback just for certainty. Admittedly, the errors are not i.i.d., but still it should be pretty low. Many traditional procgen techniques, such as map generation, also use rejection sampling in this way, with even larger rejection rates than 10%.
It’s easy to generate something as generic as that, not as easy to generate mechanics. And if you don’t generate mechanics then you’re only doing fluff like I said
ah, I misunderstood by what you meant by “generate mechanics.” My bad.
We’d still like the option to opt out of that mess, though. I’m not sold on the quality nor the ethics yet.
The ethics based on Intellectual Property? Quality, sure, but ethics?
Full disclosure: I’m a geek from the days of newsgroups and Geocities. I watched the rise and fall of things like Napster. And I watched IP-law get more and more restrictive. But what is “intellectual property” really? You’re effectively taking an idea and saying “this is mine, I made this first, therefore I own it”.
Around 1996, when I was 12, I thought it’d be really cool to have a small laptop that laid flat and you could hold in your hands. The designs I drew up VERY closely resembled a Blackberry. Blackberry came out a few years later. If I had filed the right paperwork, at 12, should I be able to stop them? I sincerely doubt they were spying on the drawings I made on the back of my homework. Should you get to stifle innovation just because you had the first brainfart? I don’t think so.
But okay, let’s say you’re only thinking about artistic works. Again, you’re gonna have repetition. This came out in 1995. This came out in 2008.
So what’s the issue with AI; it was trained on “copyrighted” material? K, well so were you. Are folks upset because creators didn’t get paid every time an AI reviewed their copyrighted works? Well, are they similarly upset about folks who check a book or movie out of the library? Not so much…because that’s normalized (though would NEVER go over in today’s hyper-corporate nonsense world). Okay, so are folks upset that generative works can resemble the style or “essence” of the original work? Lol, see the Jill Sobule/Katy Perry comparison above, also consider “Fair Use” and the likely transformative nature involved as well.
This isn’t an “ethics” issue…it’s an issue of disrupting existing channels for corporate power within a world sliding more and more into a dystopia of corporate fascism.
Who are you arguing against? What’s this rant supposed to teach me? You don’t like copyright? Fine, tell me with one sentence - not a wall of text.
…the person who said they weren’t sold on the “ethics” of AI yet.
…?
As far as you go, I’m sorry you had to read. I know it’s really difficult to read words. You must be very proud of yourself for having gotten this far. You’re very special, right? And everyone else should cater everything they do to your level of comprehension. I get it. No worries, buddie! Hey look, I think there is some candy in the other room! You should go check!
They’ll be great once the tech is better. Right now, genAI that appears in games is still pretty jank.
And that was the last time anybody disclosed their AI content generation…
It would be nice if Steam just banned games made with Gen AI in the first place.
I’m not sure how I feel about that. If they use an LLM for troubleshooting an issue, does that mean the game must be thrown out? What if they use an LLM for repetitive tasks like creating config files, then the game is no good?
What about shovelware games that are just asset flips without any use of an LLM, are those games okay?
I don’t think it’s necessarily as simple as using generative AI in any way means the game is bad.
I use LLMs at work, does that mean that another developer who refuses to try LLMs is immediately a better developer than me? I’m not so sure it’s that simple.
Agreed. People overrect both ways - management wants AI everywhere, and users don’t want to hear of it.
It’s a tool that can be very helpful if used correctly.
Ban the games that make them enormous sums of money?
One of the ones listed is Call of Duty. Valve is not turning down 30% of that pie.
In any case, I suspect it’s now here to stay, certainly in limited amounts. You can either pay somebody to create all those assets in house, make them with AI, or outsource to a third party (who will almost certainly do it with AI).
I figure it eventually ends up like CGI or make-up. You can do it well and check it and nobody really notices it, or you do it badly and then your protagonist has a variable number of fingers in cutscenes.
What if the game doesn’t use it at all but marketing material or concept art did? That means nothing in the game its self contains AI generated content still.
Seems unlikely and frankly doesn’t matter much.
Off the top of my head: Supermarket Simulator and Void Crew. There’s more.
