It would be nice if Steam just banned games made with Gen AI in the first place.
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.
Still, it gives consumers the choice. If you choose not to consume diamonds due to the whole diamond thing, that’s fine even though synthetics exist.
Then, isn’t it best to say what you used the AI on, so that consumers can make even better choices?
It’s like giving people the choice to not eat carbon because some forms, like natural diamonds, are exploitative. People cheer because nobody wants to eat pencil dust since it tastes so bad.
It sounds like a great idea as long as you don’t understand how anything works.
(For the people that don’t understand how anything works: Carbon is an integral component of literally everything that you will ever eat)
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)
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.
comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators
I’m not that guy, but what livelihood of artists and creators? It’s one dude working alone, where’s the money for that going to come from?
I sometimes record music and put it on bandcamp, I recorded a signle recently and it needed album art. I could take a picture and put a shitty filter on it, or I could generate an AI art that looks nice and more specific to my idea of what I wanted it to be.
I don’t have $200 kicking around to comission art for something I did as a hobby.
If you did it as a hobby, then release it as FOSS.
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I’m not that guy
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Hence, can’t release my recording as FOSS, since it’s not software.
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The music is out there for free (pay tip if you want)
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This kind of stuff is what allows people to stop living shitty miserable lives of working shit jobs for low pay. Maybe if we wish on a star, we can be the next Balatro guy.
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Amazingly bad take here, holy shit
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.
“what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern.
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
-Heilbroner 1666
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can’t just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and “open source” Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.
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.
Same here. Everyone complaining about AI in game development have no idea how hard indie devs have it. We desperately want to make a quality product and work our asses off doing so. We’re working full time jobs for ‘The Man’ to fund it out of pocket, so every cent saved by using AI Gen is value being added elsewhere. Building games is really freakin’ hard folks. The dream is to have a studio of artist making content, but that’s literally impossible given my pay grade. It’s truly a shame to see the gaming community rally against tooling that helps us indie devs make our dream a reality.
The problem with using gen AI is you’re taking the effort of other hard workers for free. You thanklessly get the energy and time artists spent honing their craft because it was stolen by Gen AI. It pits hard worker vs hard worker all while the man profits.
Your basing your entire argument on the assumptions that every generative models is trained on copyright works and also that training AI on copyrighted works is not Fair Use.
The first assumption is just false and the second assumption is not built on any established legal grounds in Western countries and is completely false in other countries with different legal systems.
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.
And that was the last time anybody disclosed their AI content generation…
Good! Fuck the corporate slop. Justifying the use of Ai only in the name of “efficiency” is pathetic and capitalist. Pay artists a proper wage and give them the time needed to apply their craft.
No artist needs generative “Ai” to create. Only capitalist need it to produce more slop.
I get that everyone seems to be sticking ai in everything, but it’s just another tool and it’s here to stay. People thought the digital calculator was going to make everyone an idiot… And it probably did. That’s why the world is like it is.
Calculators didn’t steal products created by artists and repurpose them as their own.
As if slide rules didn’t prerot their brains /j
This comment is going to age very poorly. It sounds like just every other “progress? not on my watch!” comment people have made throughout history… Like it or not, AI generation is here and it’s not going away, good or bad.
This is definitely a topic where a vast majority of people have been “informed” of their opinions by social media memes instead of through a reasoned examination of the situation.
People who’re probably too young to have ever lived through major technology breakthroughs.
This same “debate” always happens. When digital cameras were being developed, their users were seen as posers encroaching on the terf of “Real Photographers”.
You’d hear “Now just anybody can take pictures and call themselves a photographer?”
Or “It takes no skill to take a digital photograph, you can just manipulate the image in Photoshop to create a fake image that Real Photographers have to work years developing the skills to capture”
Computers were things that some people, reluctantly, had to use for business but could never be useful to the average person. Smartphones were ridiculous toys for out of touch tech nerds. Social Media was an oxymoron because social people don’t use the Internet. GPS is just a toy for hikers and people that are too dumb to own paper maps. Etc, etc, etc
It’s the same neo-luddite gatekeeping that’s happening towards AI. Any technology that puts capabilities in the hands of regular people is viewed by some people as fundamentally stealing from professionals.
And, since the predictable response is to make some arcane copyright claim and declare training “stealing”: Not all AI is trained on copyrighted materials.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is misinformed”
Good idea, but I imagine it might be hard to prove here shortly. For instance there’s a YouTube video about movies with “no CGI” are actually just movies with hidden CGI. https://youtu.be/7ttG90raCNo
If it comes to that point for video games, I don’t really think it matters much. If AI is used or not since it would be a part of any normal working procedure.
It is already at that point.
People only notice the generated works that they notice, they don’t notice the generated elements that they don’t notice.
They assume that they can “just tell” if generative AI was used, but the reality is that it’s being used in a lot of development processes in place of human effort. Things like generative fill in Photoshop or making variations of a texture are 100x faster to do with AI tools and are used all the time.
Did I ask for this feature? No. But I do think it’s neat!
What’s the value here? This is based on the developer saying so and there’s no obligation to do so. Black Ops 6 is loaded with Gen AI, the loading screens are obviously Mid Journey like and some of the actors have been replaced by digital performances which was in the news. They won’t get tagged here for AI because it’s not in the description.
So basically this is going to just have people filtering out devs who are honest and realistically that’ll just be a few indie devs who had to use these tools because they’re a one man team that can’t afford artists.
I think we have to face the facts. Every game is going to be using these tools going forward. If you run a large studio and say no one use AI I bet you your artists are still speeding up making base textures. Your music guy is generating some starter melodies. Your writers are drafting up some filler to pad out the supplementary text.
These tools are as ubiquitous as photoshop (which has had content aware fill all the way back to CS-fucking-5) and unreal engine now (which has added it’s own AI features). The idea that’s there’s only a handful of shady individuals and mega-corps using these tools is naive.
Can a game be flagged as 'contains AI generated elements ’ by the community?
This could be useful, but could also be abused by chuds that want to brigade a game they don’t like.
Once again, what’s the value here. We only see AI when it’s someone who’s not very good with Mid Journey prompts. We’re getting to the point where people are using these tools in ways that no one will know the difference.
Content aware fill in photoshop has been around forever. AI.
If ask chat gpt what this unreal engine error message means. Al.
if get a quick llm made script to tune up Some physics, Al.
If the guy making the music generates some starter melodies. AI
If l generate a rock texture and clean it up myself to the point where no one knows. Al.
All of this is AI and all of this will go unseen to the end user, so once again we’ll be expecting developers to self report and only the honest ones will.
Here’s a test give yourself 1 or 2 seconds to make up your mind. https://www.sporcle.com/games/Raydon/image-real-or-ai-generated
It’s tough isn’t it and this is you analyzing the pixels, something we don’t do passively.
Iirc there was an obligation on steam to disclose AI use as well as the extent. Might be wrong though.
Use of AI will become mainstream. These filters need to ultimately sort how much of the game visuals/code are generated using gen AI
Sorry you’re getting down voted but it’s fact. I work in the tech industry and I’ve got some friends in the games industry. Everyone uses AI in some way. People want to fool themselves into thinking it’s just a handful of mega corps but it’s being used in everything we consume in small ways we can’t see in the end result. The genie is out of the bottle and the line between what is AI and what isn’t AI is going to vary wildly from person to person.
Traditional art and comics aren’t dead because of mainstream digital, AI will just be extra on the pile for games in the same way.
Unless people vote with their wallets against AI slop, then it would be always a controversial choice whether to even employ AI.
Probably too utopian
AI slop
That’s not what this does though.
To me, AI slop is people generating entire fake websites full of SEO terms but no information. Or people using AI tools to repost popular YouTube content. Completely worthless content that only exists to fool people.
Steam’s filter removed any game that reports using generative models at all.
That’s simply not useful unless your idea of AI slop is “someone used AI”.
Exactly what I wanted to say, not sure why I got upvoted there lol
AI content already appears to be at the point where it’s absence is considered positive.
It’s funny how some comments whinge about this as if AI generated quality stood any chance in hell against real art.
The sad part is, one day in the (far) future, when real AI (not LLMs) are an actual thing, and they could code great games from scratch, there would be so much bad animosity towards AI by then that they’ll probably never see their games played.
Nah, they’ll just brand it as “Next Gen AI” or “True AI” or something. Kind of like how antivirus became “Endpoint Detection and Response”
It’s already got a name, AGI… Artificial general intelligence
And it is not really defined what exactly it means.
“True AI” would at least be fitting.
I like human created art because it’s created by humans. If AI generated the greatest song, image, or video game i would not care—i don’t want it.
I like human created art because it’s created by humans. If AI generated the greatest song, image, or video game i would not care—i don’t want it.
Your opinion seems prejudicial, focusing on the creator of the art, and not the art itself.
Your comment seems loaded with purposefully inflammatory language intended to align AI with groups of actual real people who experience prejudice in the real world instead of corporations who have a vested interest in not paying artists, and brother, as a trans person, it makes you look like a real silly goose.
Your comment seems loaded with purposefully inflammatory language
Pointing out that someone justifies if they like something or not by who made it, vs by judging the item being made itself, is inflammatory?
as a trans person, it makes you look like a real silly goose.
I remember back in the 80’s where people were hating on a Top 40 song because it was made by a group who’s singer was gay, and thought that was very wrong, that the song itself should be judged on its own merits, and not by who was singing it.
Weird how those lessons learned fade away, needing to be learned again.
AI isn’t human. Stop pretending it is. AI takes advantage of humans. Your argument is invalid.
I did mention previously about “in the future”, some day, not today. LLMs are not AI, at least the kind of AI that I’m talking about.
But even taking your point, do we let a human always keep a job that an AI can do much for efficiently? What job protections should humans have from AIs? And for that matter, what job protections should humans have today, right now, regardless of AI? (For the record, I support Unions.)
We all need to figure this out, right now, as corporations are salavating at the though of an AI that can replace a human being’s job.
No amount of passage of time is going to make AI human. You all suggesting that in the future AI will have feelings and emotions and will care that people are prejudiced against it. You are arguing against a hypothetical that you have created in your head and isn’t necessarily going to be a reality.
Once they actually produce great games, you’ll probably want to play them. People didn’t stop buying products because they were made by machines instead of artisans.
Humans still controlled the machines.
AI takes the human creativity out of the equation.
Yes, it’s different in the creative aspect, but it’s similar in the job loss aspect.
Yes, that’s true.
I believe we should be able to embrace new technology and peoples lives should be made easier with it. We should be able to eliminate jobs and simultaneously ease financial burden with the efficiency increase. But i don’t have an MBA so what do i know 🤷♂️
Reminder you still have to instruct the machine
Yes but writing gcode for a CNC machine isnt taking the creativity from the human. Even programs that write the gcode for you are still following the design of the human. AI generated art does not follow the human design, it generates its own.*
*Obviously other than art theft which i think doesnt count.
Well, there are those who like throwing the sabo’s into the machinery, so you’re not guaranteed people would ignore the AI creation nature of the great game, when deciding to buy/play the great game. You’re already seeing a constant “No AI here!” mindset occuring.
But at some point, AI will be creating, especially if Capitalism can see it succeed and remove the need to pay for workers. We need to think about job-protecting laws today that are just and even-handed, and not just trying to stiff-hand AI creation, as that won’t work long term.
I think what we need to protect is the quality of life rather than the jobs. I wish for a 20h work week at the same QoL.
I wouldn’t disagree with that. Today’s reality is that you need a job to obtain a QoL (aka ‘pay the bills’). If we could get to a place as a species to where three/four day work weeks were the norm, that would be fine by me.
I’m assuming that at some point in our species future we’ll be in a Post-scarcity place, and jobs as we know them now won’t be needed. Instead people will have ‘hobbies’ that they enjoy doing. That’s assuming the Morlocks don’t eat all the Eloi before the Post-scarcity occurs, that is.
Idgaf if ai exists I just don’t want it replacing people without warning where people are way better for the job
Idgaf if ai exists I just don’t want it replacing people without warning where people are way better for the job
Agreed. We’re going to need laws for that though, and right now Congress only listens to Corporations, and Corporations want AI to get rid of those pesky workers that drain away their profits.
But also, you gotta understand that at some point, for some things, AI will be better than humans for particular jobs. When that happens, what then? Force-keep the human on the job, or retrain them, or just tell them “sucks to be you have a nice day” and show them the door, or something else???
This is really the beginning of a monumental time for the species, as big as the introduction of the Internet was. Better start figuring this shit out now, instead of (metaphorically) just covering our ears and yelling “LA! LA! LA! LA! LA! I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” trying to ignore the whole thing.
Totally agree re: laws/guardrails. I’m just explaining saying not all detractors are fully against AI or blindly against it for that matter.
Arguably the point of having machines do the work for us is that they’re NOT sentient.
Potentially. Since we don’t know how any of it works because it doesn’t exist, it’s entirely possible that intelligence requires sentience in order to be recognizable as what we would mean by “intelligence”.
If the AI considered the work trivial, or it could do it faster or more precisely than a human would also be reasons to desire one.
Alternatively, we could design them to just enjoy doing what we need. Knowing they were built to like a thing wouldn’t make them not like it. Food is tasty because to motivate me to get the energy I need to live, and knowing that doesn’t lessen my enjoyment.Ah yes. We are but benevolent Masters. See? The slave LIKE doing the work!
Arguably the point of having machines do the work for us is that they’re NOT sentient.
Is it? Or is it for companies to not have to pay out salaries so they increase profits for AI-generated work, regardless if the AI is sentient or not?
Clearly. Sentience would imply some sense of internal thought or self awareness, an ability to feel something …so LLMs are better since they’re just machines. Though I’m sure they’d have no qualms with driving slaves.
I’m not talking about sentience per se, but how any “AI” would think, lookups (LLMs), vs synthesized on-the-fly thinking (mimicing the human brain’s procesing).
Hrmm. I guess i don’t believe the idea that you can make a game that really connects on an empathic, emotional level without having those experiences as the author. Anything short and you’re just copying the motions of sentiment, which brings us back to the same plagerism problem with LLMs and othrr “AI” models. It’s fine for CoD 57, but for it to have new ideas we need to give it one because it is definitionally not creative. Even hallucinations are just bad calculations on the source. Though they could insire someone to have a new idea, which i might argue is their only artistic purpose beyond simple tooling.
I thoroughly believe machines should be doing labor to improve the human conditon so we can make art. Even making a “fun” game requires an understanding of experience. A simulacrum is the opposite, soulless at best. (In the artistic sense)
If you did consider a sentient machine, my ethics would then develop an imperative to treat it as such. I’ll take a sledge hammer to a printer, but I’m going to show an animal care and respect.
Cells within cells.
Interlinked.
This post is unsettling. While LLMs definitely aren’t reasoning entities, the point is absolutely bang on…
But at the same time feels like a comment from a bot.
Is this a bot?
Imma feed your comment into an llm and your magic spell can’t stop me
Its not a magic spell, its laying down a marker.
lol! And you’re too late, Google beat you to it. But still, laws will catch up some day, and when it does, I’ll be there. 😈
deleted by creator
For one, that first block is very much so determined based on any one persons definition of AI. I wouldn’t call A* algorithms AI, but others might.
Regardless, this is specifically about Generative AI, not CPU players or mob logic in video games
They do specifically say Gen[erative] AI here.
Think they don’t mean AI in that type of way. And more like mass produced generative AI garbage?
Okay, maybe I’m weird for bringing this up
Nah, you just didn’t understand the headline or read the article
