Valve quietly not publishing games that contain AI generated content if the submitters can’t prove they own the rights to the assets the AI was trained on
The ignorance here about how AIs work is staggeringly high, almost as high as the confidence with which some users lecture based on their own beliefs.
Not that AI should be treated with the same rights and dignity a person, but is this not a sort of double standard? I mean, do they publish games with art made by humans who learned from works the human artists did not own?
I think I’m starting to understand… If I go to an art gallery that allows photos, take some photos, and share them with a friend who is learning to be an artist, that seems to be generally ok and does not feel unethical. But if I take those photos to an underground sweatshop and use it to train a thousand people who are mass producing art for corporate use, that seems wrong.
If I think of the AI as a human analog, then I have trouble seeing the problem with it learning from the same resources as humans, but if I see it as a factory then I see the problem.
Based on the language from Valve, it sounds more like legal protection for themselves than a judgment from an ethical perspective.
Your question isn’t a bad one, but the battleground over copyright ownership probably isn’t one they’re weighing in on here.
Good. Until a studio can point to a known-dataset that isn’t just ripping art illegally from sources they don’t have the rights to use then it’s just not worth the risk.
It’s not 100% unrealistic that large studios like Blizzard and Riot (who have very clear styles that “work well” with AI generation weirdness) will eventually have huge in-house datasets that they own since it’s all created under the umbrella of their employees and contractors who already sign away all the rights when they make content for the games they’re working on. But until that happens, it’s so obviously a red flag / great area that Valve’s move is just a no-brainer.
When I learned to play Piano, I did so by playing music I did not have the rights to and that was fine. I could take my learned skills and even use it commercially. If an AI does the same, its suddenly a bad thing.
If you can’t tell the difference between learning as a human being, and selling content that you don’t own the rights to, then I don’t know what to tell you.
But you do know, and you’re just being disingenuous intentionally.
He wasn’t conflating those two. He was conflating the process of learning for humans and modern AI. You’re just being a dick about a really subjective subject.
Please be civil
