@steamdb.info‬ "Players have been asking for the ability to filter out games made with Gen AI. We've added an automatic tag on SteamDB based on the AI gen content disclosures on the store pages."

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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)

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.

Calculators didn't steal products created by artists and repurpose them as their own.

As if slide rules didn't prerot their brains /j

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

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 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.

Whilst for my project AI Gen was only ever an idea for a nice to have which is not important for game-play, I'm pretty sure that there will be projects out there being done by tiny Indies which aren't financially feasible without AI Gen because those operations are not well funded and can't afford to pay for lots of manpower.

In game-making, generation tools (not necessarily AI) even the field between Indies and AAA game makers (which is why so many Indie titles in this latest blossoming of Indie Game-Making have procedurally generated worlds/levels whilst the AAA titles almost invariably have massive hand-crafted worlds/levels) but until AI Gen the unassailable advantage in favor of the AAA makers was in the finishing touches - for example, it has long been possible to use procedural voice generation, it just doesn't sound as good as the stuff done with ML (unless you're making a game about robots were a robotic voice does sound great) - since one can only go so far with procedural generation so in more real-world-related domains (voice being a great example) procedural generation is usually shy of "good enough" whilst both AI Gen and professional human crafted content is beyond it even if the former is IMHO generally not as good as the latter.

In gatekeeping a certain level of quality to only things that can be done by those who can afford to hire large teams, because you refuse to accept games made with the kind of tools that most benefit the smaller game makers, you're basically supporting what's best for the bigger companies, unless the only kind of games you buy are "text-only dialog and limited art assets" games made by Indies with small budgets (in which case I'll take my hat off to you for being Principled in a consistent way) and not the more glitzy stuff that only bigger operations can afford to make without AI Gen.

Merely being against the kind of tools that most benefit small operations and then turning around and mostly buying the work from the most massive of operations because it has a better quality (since they have the economies of scale and revenues to afford real human craftsmanship) wouldn't actually be a consistent principled stand IMHO.

In the game making world, gatekeeping AI Gen use outright "just because" is a great way to keep the playing field tilted in favor of the likes of EA.

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.

And the artists can just go fuck themselves then I guess?

Writing good music is really freakin' hard, but I do it on my own anyway because the whole point of making something creative is that a person is doing it. It's truly a shame to see people rally for software made by tech bros that takes work away from real artists who could use it.

editing to be less snarky: How would you feel if generative AI could make a game and an artist or musician had it make an entire game for their art/music because it saved them money?

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.

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.

Off the top of my head: Supermarket Simulator and Void Crew. There’s more.

It's already got a name, AGI... Artificial general intelligence

"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.

Your opinion seems prejudicial, focusing on the creator of the art, and not the art itself.

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Humans still controlled the machines.

AI takes the human creativity out of the equation.

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.

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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. 😈

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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.

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?

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