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! :tongue:

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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Quoting: gradyvuckovic

"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...

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Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: Kimyrielle

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah, but the point is everything an AI produces is somebody's Yoda or Harry--maybe two or three somebodies mixed together if you're lucky.

This is widespread, but still false assumption. A good approximation to 100% of all characters generative AI will draw have never been drawn by anyone before.

That's a strong statement. How do you know?

Because the people who trained these models aren't some beginners who don't know how to avoid overfitting in the training process. Also, feel free to try yourself by making a model generate say 1000 images and see how many close matches you get when feeding them to Google Images...

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyYeah, but the point is everything an AI produces is somebody's Yoda or Harry--maybe two or three somebodies mixed together if you're lucky.

This is widespread, but still false assumption. A good approximation to 100% of all characters generative AI will draw have never been drawn by anyone before. The AI has learned how to draw people by analyzing drawings of people. But it's not a "collage tool" (which this ridiculous lawsuit filed by some artists claims). There are no fragments of Yoda or Harry in the model, unlike these people claim. If you make the AI to, then yes, it can draw an accurate Harry, because it has learned the concept of Harry by analyzing pictures of him. But chances that it will draw Harry without you prompting for him are pretty close to zero. If you don't prompt for copyrighted characters, you are very likely to get an original one.

If you want to make sure to get something original and avoid overfitting (which would be prudent if you plan to use the assets in a game), you'd never prompt for just one artist's style anyway, you'd combine many.

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The US copyright office deemed AI art non-copyrightable, which in the end means that there is no good reason to ban it. If generative AI made it, the developer of a game doesn't own it, but nobody else does, either. It's for all practical purposes Public Domain. The one exception might be overfitting (generative AI accidentally producing output close enough to the copyrighted data it got trained with). Overfitting is currently the core of a lawsuit Getty Images filed against StabilityAI - their model is known to have reproduced their (trademarked) image watermark in its output. That doesn't mean that ALL AI art is legally questionable, just some of the output might be. Similar scenarios can already happen when a developer is using assets they believe to be free, when they're in fact not. Valve still doesn't ask for proof of ownership of every single asset used in a game published on Steam.

This rule seems more to be about taking Valve out of the line of fire coming from the anti-AI peanut gallery. As is evident by a surprising number of posters is this thread, humans still hate change and will fight everything new because it's new. Teachers have fought calculators when they were new, and artists considered Photoshop the end of all art when it released, too. Now the newest object of hate is generative AI. It's not surprising. It's just how people are. In 10 years, there will be two kinds of game studios: The ones that embraced AI tools, and the bankrupt ones. Until then, the peanut gallery will throw a few more peanuts, I guess.

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Great to see a game running on Linux that's certainly going to become a big hit. Personally, I am not going to get it. I don't own a single Blizzard game, so there is that. I just don't like that company and their business practices.

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The "Toon" shader makes the game look like a...well...cartoon. Which I suppose is the idea, but my roleplayer self is still cringing. But hey, if some people like it, who am I to judge!

Great to see the game still getting updated!

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Wow! A laptop that's actually portable, unlike these "gaming laptops" I never understood why anyone would want one. Looks nice!

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Am I the only one actually liking the #1234 system? It lets us use names we actually like, instead of making us use what's not yet taken. Any platform with a few million users will run out of desirable names within seconds, so there is that. I suppose most of us will just append random numbers to our current username, and the result will look pretty much like it currently does, just without the dot between the name and the numbers. And a lot of chaos during the conversions.

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