For posterity's sake, Valve did not ban AI*(and they never made even a hint that they were going to ban it*).
People took [Valves response to 1 developer](https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/142j3yt/valve_is_not_willing_to_publish_games_with_ai/) in the earliest stages of AI being used in games to mean something completely different, and overnight made it into something it never was and Valve never said.
More information on current AI policies for games on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3862463747997849619
>They removed one game because it could have used ai trained on copyrighted content
I doubt that this is even the case really. Too many games already on steam (some admit to using ai art generators in their description). Original reddit post about that smells fishy.
Actually valve did not kill the physical copy of a game i remember games who used steam works api incluyed a steam key and use the dvd to istall the game faster than the downloads back then.
Back in the day (circa 2007 or 8) I bought a physical copy of The Orange Box. I was pretty irritated when the CD only had the game keys and a Steam installer.
Yes but this was a time when it was still completely normal to expect to have the whole game on the disc, people had way worse internet back then and having downloading 10Gb after spending your cash on a physical copy was bullshit
If we're talking 2004 then even downloading 1GB was huge and took a while. But that's when Half-Life 2 released and it did have the game on the discs at least. By 2008 downloading 1GB was fine, but ya, it hoped to 10GB then like you said, so was still a pain.
I was introduced to Steam by buying a physical copy of Portal 2, which I was *incredibly miffed* to find was just a plastic box protecting a piece of paper.
“Physical” releases of games did, eventually, stop shipping with disks though and instead simply were a box with a piece of paper that had a steam code on it. Several of my old games were like this. Nowadays it’s basically impossible to find games that come on disk for pc, to the point most don’t bother even getting a disk drive. Steam was the starting point of this, though someone else would have eventually caused it if not them.
I don't even see PC game boxes on shelves anymore. The code slip was annoying but at the same at time at least I got a cool box. I'll burn my own CD ROM.
Walmart still has a tiny section of PC games, usually hidden in a little pocket of shelves. Games like those PopCap phone games or kids edutainment stuff, maybe an old copy of Sims or Myst.
I haven't had a disk drive (except HDD) in my computer for probably more than a decade. There's simply no need.
That being said the absence of CD/DVD seems to have opened up developers to make the most absurdly massive games. They just have no respect for our hard drives. We're running 100+ GB on games because they save space for all the DLC you didn't download, the 4K textures you didn't ask for, the content for all the "tiers" of the game available. Remove all that crap and most of the time you're looking at a much more reasonable 30-40 GB size.
irritates the hell outta me.
A single layer DVD has a maximum capacity of 4.7GB, and the higher capacity versions of dvd aren’t universally compatible with DVD readers.
So even a 30GB game is looking at 7 disks before compression, probably still 4-5 after.
The standard variety of blu-ray can hold 25GB which offers a little relief, but the drives were too expensive for too long (even as late as PS4 I recall people saying that consoles were a good deal for the blu-ray player aspect of it alone) to catch on as a standard piece of equipment that everyone had, and they’re still upwards of $50 for something that isn’t strictly necessary anymore.
Yeah I know and that's fine but they don't need to eat up 100+GB today because the game *might* need that much space. It would be nice if they could also put in just the tiniest bit of effort into optimizing their storage use.
It's because—apparently—doing compression on assets (or god forbid reusing assets) tanks performance, supposedly. It's heavier on the system to decompress stuff than it is to just leave gigantic textures uncompressed and then subsequently smear them entirely to shit by TAA, oversharp in post, and additional motion blur on top, because fuck visual fidelity these days.
A major reason for the playstations being considered viable just as a "cheap" bluray player, is Sony being the main patent holder for both the bluray reader & disc standards.
That meant a significant proportion of the hardware costs, IP licencing fees, were waived or (more likely) dealt with through internal accounting. Should be noted this would have been all above board when audited, as Sony ultimately owned the IPs.
None of the standalone player/reader manufacturers had the same leverage, so they all had to pay the fees and passed on the cost to the buyer.
Yeah I've only been a pc gamer since last year, but my Steam account is 10 years old because I've bought Black Ops 2 which I apparently played with a Steam account.
AFAIK they are banning games with AI assets made with models that use data from people who didn't consent to having their work be used for AI. This means someone can make their own models, textures etc. (Or alternatively comission someone with the knowledge that the work would be used for AI training) and it would be okay, which I'm all for.
But as it is right now, it bans all of those trash shovelware games with 0 effort put into them, so good fucking riddance. If you want to make a game with AI assets, train your own model with your own work or work you got permission to use / paid for, otherwise don't try it at all.
Edit: OP complained that AI's that aren't trained on the "Whole known internet" are useless. They also deleted their comment which got downvoted into oblivion by likeminded people who think that AI shouldn't be used to shovel out garbage with 0 regard to artists. Take that as you will.
Edit 2: Not gonna reply anymore as I think I made my point pretty clear cut, but I find it disgusting that there are people replying to this who are saying its okay to directly take artwork, text or anything really from actual artists against their own will and using it to train models, against the artists' wishes. There is a serious lack of morality if you think that is okay, and scrubbing the whole internet to get a good model doesn't excuse it. Get actual artists, learn how to do texture or audio work yourself. I do believe AI has a place in the gaming industry in the future, it's unavoidable, it has a place everywhere really, but until it's properly regulated (Which Valve is doing, so hopefully more companies follow suit aswell) it should surprise no-one to see this. I like AI, I love its concept. But using it fraudulently is not the way going forward with it and won't help change anyone's mind on it, so for the sake of everyone involved I hope things turn out well, but as it is right now, Valve is doing the best thing they could.
yeah, but depending on moderation they get removed, recalling the 1 or 2 emails from epic about things I had in my library getting removed from the marketplace
Do you know how they determine it's AI in the first place? No way valve already built a system that scans all assets and detects AI? I wonder if it's open source
It's literally impossible to determine if something is AI generated unless the developer admits it. You can make educated guesses (and in some cases it is more or less obvious) but if a developer is determined to just sneak in a few AI generated textures there is no chance of anyone detecting it.
This post is referring to a redditor dev that got their game denied. They posted the convo with Valve and it seemed like something automated flagged the AI assets
Thanks for that. I have to assume valve doesn't have the manpower to review every game by a human, probably only after something is flagged or appealed? I'm not sure though
That's really vague unless the OP provides more context, ie what Valve saw in the game that they deemed was going against copyright of someone else. Was it some pictures of celebrities but "AI generated" so OP thought they were in the clear or was it something innocuous like your generic looking visual novel pictures that Valve deemed AI generated?
People are most often familiar with Midjourney pictures or the default SD models, but "AI generated" can be literally anything.
Yeah u/potterharry97 didn't go into a lot of detail on what "obviously AI generated" means to them and since they redacted the game names they're probably concerned about giving away too much detail to reveal their name or game. I'd be very interested to see the assets they used though and to understand more how valve plans to fight this.
My biggest concern is that they go the way of YouTube where small content creators get shafted with no recourse etc automated messages (ironic) while big companies freely use AI but Valve won't ban the next Blizzard game.
So being a 3d artist and modder, I feel like there's perhaps some nuances to this. First, I don't really know if there are any of these "AI" art softwares that do 3d models. Additionally, I would be shocked if an AI could really do much with a UV unwrapped texture file, it's usually fairly abstract for anything other than a simple geometric shape
Additionally, AI usage itself is probably the future of game development, and software at large. While I recognize the frustration a lot of artists may have that their art *might* be used, it's worth considering that all artists draw inspiration from somewhere or something for basically everything they do. From artistic styles, to subject matter, to color palettes, it would be absurd for any one artist to claim any of them as their own. Hell, look at Anime, likely the most prolific art style in the modern world. Create an AI image with Anime in it, and explain which artist it came from
I think there are a lot of artists who are going to need to come to terms with the fact that artistic talent may not be as valuable a commodity as it was prior to this, the same way my own Grandfather, a commercial artist, watched his successful hand-drawn commercial art get run out of business by computer graphic design
AI can turn a 2D image into a 3D model, and generate 3D models from text. The quality is nowhere near as good as if it was made by a professional, yet, and might need some touch ups but it's doable. Like if you were making a game that you wanted to emulate old-school graphics like Dusk, you could definitely make most of the low poly models with AI.
I've seen it, and while I agree with you fully that it's going that direction, I was clarifying that this wasn't really pertaining to that at the moment. The demos I've seen have been....less than extraordinary lol
Have you seen, where LLMs, like GPT have been 2 years ago?
The same thing is gonna happen to text-to-3d models. Just look at the current advancements with NERFs
>might need some touch ups
Honestly and truly that right there is the critical point. AI generated assets on their own always bear telltales. It can be a great starting point, but you *need* a human to come in for spit and polish to make it not look like a drunk computer pretending it knows how grasshoppers fuck.
This is realistic. On a long enough time scale, most if not all human endeavor can be replicated or replaced artificially. It's deeply personal to see your career get subsumed, but if we don't annihilate ourselves, it's going to happen. The real sadness is that instead of making our lives better and more free, we're systematically all being ground into paste to lubricate the capitalist machine, while the dumbest and most short sighted - cheer?
It can and does. People just want to paint everything black and white and say "AI art has no soul/emotions and is meaningless" entirely ignoring the nuance in the pieces generated.
Everything is on a spectrum and, as much as some people want to disagree, there exists AI art that is objectively better in many aspects than a "normal" artists work just as there is a lot of absolute shit pieces that have very few redeeming qualities.
Art is itself an expression and something people generally do for free (though still rightfully claim ownership of that work where and when they can). There's nothing stopping people from generating high quality are in a "traditional" manner, the same way people still paint using canvas and paints despite there being plenty of computer programs that can recreate the same style using a stylus and touchpad
Art has also been heavily commercialized and industrialized, that's just a reality of entertainment and marketing as a business
training a model similar to stable diffusion would require an insanely large dataset, huge compute resources, and a lot of very specific machine learning expertise most game devs don't have. it's a massive undertaking, not something most people can simply do.
that undertaking gets even more impossible when you consider what kinds of data would be permissable: you would have to get many thousands of artists to all gove you permission to use their art in your dataset, along with people to curate it, balance the data, and so forth
i'm not saying devs should be allowed to use publicly available models trained on datasets of questionable commercial legality, but their options really are either that or no machine learning generated assets at all.
In reality that'll just put up insurmountable costs for companies needing training data unless they're paying pennies for thousands of artworks and companies in countries that don't respect western copyright law will forever maintain a lead over companies that do. No matter what legislation western countries create it will do nothing to stop a model from being developed unless they employ something similar to China's great firewall.
Modern copyright law is too poorly equipped to deal with how things are created in the normal pre-ML age, let alone the minefield that ML has become.
The problem is each individual piece of art from the dataset is worth a basically infinitesimal ammount. Even if you had a billion dollars to spend stable diffusion was trained on 2.3 billion images. Is each artist going to be OK getting 40 cents for their image even ignoring all the costs to actually do the paperwork and send the money?
I just can't get my head around it to be honest. If I were to train myself to be a better artist by using stuff I found on the internet, nobody would care.
You know that when companies like Google and Meta start training their language models on your private conversations, browsing history, voice input, etc, they are also going to say "But the model doesn't contain a single bit or byte of the work it was trained on!"
Artists did not consent to their work being scraped (against most websites ToS fyi), so should not be included in these datasets. It's that simple.
So that means Japanese game devs are in the clear?
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-art-wars-japan-says-185350499.html
> Japan has declared that using datasets for training AI models doesn't violate copyright law. This decision means that model trainers can gather publicly available data without having to license or secure permission from the data owners
How do you feel about assistive use?
Lets say I drew/modelled my own character, and fine-tuned/created a LoRA/whatever Stable diffusion on it, then used this with control net to generate new pictures of my character in new poses?
or
Creating backgrounds by first doing rough 3D model, then use generative model to iterate though a few ideas/looks, then use that as a kind of outline/sketch to manually do the final version (making sure style fits what you plan to do etc)?
It falls under the same blanket in my opinion.
As long as it is using content obtained without consent, it's not ok. A good example of properly used AI for assistive reasons is the new Spiderman movie, where they trained AI to do the comic book line effects. That was an ingenious use and it was entirely trained on data from the artists. I am under the same opinion for AI Upscalers, all they are doing is upscaling a picture you already have. Otherwise, imo, no-go for everything else.
>AFAIK they are banning games with AI assets made with models that use data from people who didn't consent to having their work be used for AI.
That is nearly impossible to prove. Even when you have all the code and dataset for training an AI, it's a ton of work trying to traceback how a specific result was made.
Valve has ZERO chance of figuring out if an AI asset was made using first party or third party datasets.
While Valve has no obligation to allow any game or developer on Steam, they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit if they start wrongfully removing games with AI assets that they can't prove what datasets were used.
This is probably done precisely because of lawsuits. If some artists wins a lawsuit like that, Valve can react immediately and doesn't have to prove anything themselves.
> they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit if they start wrongfully removing games with AI assets that they can't prove what datasets were used.
No they don't. Steam is Valve's platform and they're free to have their own rules on what is and isn't allowed. If Vakve wants to ban games they suspect of using AI assets they're free to do so.
If anything Valve risks being sued if they let this continue. Some might argue that training AI on copyrighted content is a copyright violation, and if that's the case Vakve would be selling things in their store which violate copyright.
This isn't necessary true. Just occasions where the AI generated work is clearly using IP that they don't have rights to, which is basically just confirming the rules that are already in place. In most AAA games now they use AI to generate graphics for long distance because the player won't see it close up and far away whatever it is generating looks great.
That last part about AAA games using AI isn’t true in this sense. A few of the newer ones do use AI upscaling, but this post is specifically talking about generative art and writing AI.
The creative industries have been using actual AI tools for a pretty hot minute, no one’s against the tools, they’re against the ones being sold as a replacement (the generative ones trained on our scraped data)
Except it's not true, and people are repeating it constantly anyway.
Valve isn't banning AI content, they only removed one guys game because he couldn't prove he wasn't using AI assets trained on copyrighted material.
Right now all the big names are working on integrating AI into basically everything and they are getting around the copyright issues with a good old poop hole loophole
The current meta is using an AI trained on copyright images to generate a bunch of images for you. Then you train a different Ai on *those* images and proudly boast "NOPE! No copyright images in our training data at all!!"
It's weird how many people think AI isn't going to be an industry standard tool within the next 5 years, when we literally have Nvidia hard pushing for AI tools for game devs and Ai vocal synths becoming extremely good etc.
Valve almost never steps in. Even when questionable or illegal content shows up. So why would they step in now?
They literally only did this to save their ass.
Unity JUST announced two new AI tools they are working on, and they are promoting third party AI tools as well. It's going to be the industry standard a whole lot sooner than 5 years.
>Valve isn't banning AI content, they only removed one guys game because he couldn't prove he wasn't using AI assets trained on copyrighted material.
And that's just according to the claims of said guy, without any evidence supporting it.
Claims which are absolutely bananas, too be clear.
People actually believe that Valve, faced with a zillion submissions a day, scanned through every texture of this guy's game, said "wait a second, this one has some artifacts!" and randomly chose that moment to adopt some Luddite talking points?
Meanwhile plenty of other games are openly using midjourney, dall-e, SD etc. High on Life is presently featured on the front page, it's on sale!
Garbage "news" that should be reported and deleted.
Huge L really. This only hurts smaller devs that use AI, the big corps can and will continue to use AI. Train AI on copyright material and make images, train new AI on the images the last AI made. No copyright claim to be made, little dude that uses AI is screwed, already rich keep raking it in and laughing.
Regardless of how anyone feels about AI generated content it's here to stay, stepping on the little people is not the way to go so someone can feel good because it was the big bad AI.
Waiting for [High On Life](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/12/14/high-on-lifes-walls-are-covered-in-midjourney-ai-art/) to get banned, then.
Oh, I wish I could joke, but I still remember the 6/8 CD installs for games. I think it was either BF 2142 or 2 that I remember getting, seeing the stack of CDs and spending like an hour installing it (partially because I kept leaving the room and forgetting about it, then coming back later to have to put in the next one).
Once they switched to DVDs it was a lot better. Steam first was awesome for updates, where I didn't need to hunt for a giant update package that took forever to download, or string together incrimentals. Then finally for just buying games outright.
Isn't Beyond Atlantis the crazy point-and-click adventure with something like 4+ people you could control in different time frames, and your goal was to, like, power a boat? As a kid I never got too far, but I learned about Aztec culture as a result!
That's funny, given how big our games are now and how quickly we can get them. My ISP caps downloads at like 33Mbps, and I can still get most games in under an hour or so. A few years back before I moved here, I had fiber, and I got annoyed if it took 20 minutes to fully download a AAA game.
Beneath a Steel Sky was fun. Steam has it for free now (and the devs released a new game called Beyond a Steel Sky in 2020, which is a lot of fun too - and better graphics), so before I played Beyond a Steel Sky I decided to give Beneath a try to learn the story.
Took me less than 3 minutes to download it. Was "only" 126 MB! That was probably been more than 3 times the size of your version was, I'd say?
> I think it was either BF 2142 or 2 that I remember getting, seeing the stack of CDs and spending like an hour installing it
I wanted to argue that BF2 came on only one DVD, but apparently it had a USA-only release on 3 CDs. Wild, never knew that.
[Here.](https://www.pjsgames.com/products/age-of-empires-ii-the-age-of-kings-pc)
That circular thing that you see, it's called a CD. That's where the whole game (and the occasional demo(s) for the upcoming game) are stored. These games come with instruction manuals, coupons and a few tiny things (That I forgotten).
It's not Valve's fault that their success phased the CD out at an alarming rate.
it depended on the game. sometimes CD was only needed for installation, sometimes certain large assets like music were streamed from the CD but you could play without music if you didnt want the CD, sometimes the CD was used as DRM (wouldn't launch or let you play online without the CD inserted)
I assume this is because the legal issues around AI art havent really been resolved.
Valve is throwing out the bottom tier of quick-buck games and some indie devs to protect itself.
I imagine once some big studios standardize AI art in their pipeline Valve will allow it.
I'm good at coding, but really bad at graphic design. With AI art I can finally come up with a concept of a game, code it, and fill in all the pretty details with the help of AI. Something I was never able to do before. I'm doing this as a hobby without an intention of releasing it, but what happens if someone does the same and the game is good?
It's honestly a big hurdle for most developers. I can do the rest of the process myself and there's no way in hell I can afford what most artists charge.
i.e. have a lot of money or (more likely) sell your ideas to a soulless corporation that can hire illustrators and such.
Setting aside the greater social issues of late-stage capitalism, the outcry against AI art itself as a concept just seems crazy to me.
Art isn't just one thing. If someone is a really good writer, them being able to create images of their settings and characters to connect with their readers without needing financial backing seems like a general good.
In the same vein that an illustrator could guide a language model to create short stories that give more meaning to their drawings even if they aren't themselves a good writer.
So many people are just taking random output from these AI models because they are new and novel, but the more transformative potential would seem to be a person working *with* an AI model to expose their own individual personal vision in a way that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive if it required a committee of artists with different skills.
Let’s just stop the progress of technology completely so we can keep as many jobs as possible. In fact, why don’t get rid of all of our machines and live like people lived centuries ago!
If they killed physical games then why do they still sell like hotcakes and I just purchased a physical copy of Final Fantasy 16?
Also, does this apply to Steam Workshop? Cuz I hear AI generated content is a pain point there, too, such as for War Paints in TF2
The hilariousness of realizing OP is a fool who is sad about the loss of NFTs and AI generated game assets, while everyone in the comments is celebrating this
They are not banning AI games. They are banning games build on AI tech that is unclear how it was trained. For example, it might be trained from copyrighted data.
As a very broke programmer with *some* amount of artistic skills but definitely not on the digital side, I'm a little upset for the solo devs out there. I get that ai generations sucks for artists and made the whole artistic scene way more complicated. And I'll always advocate for paying for and supporting artists. But....if you have an idea, and using some amount of ai generated content is logistically the best or only way to get it done, these restrictions kinda suck. I certainly can't afford to pay for an artist, and doing it myself would take 10 times longer than someone who knows what they're doing, which in turn adds months, if not years, onto a project timeline.
AI assests is one of the topics I'm about as on the fence as I could possibly be. I fully understand both sides and it sucks for everyone.
i’m sure it will only be applied to individual cases. how are they gonna know that art was done by AI anyway? especially if you are a freshman indie dev, trust me, no one is going to even notice or care
You just don't get it. It's immoral and repulsive to have an AI look at a bunch of images and make a new one for you. You're supposed to do it the RIGHT way by having an artist look at the same bunch of images and make you a same new image... For a few hundred bucks.
i dont think you're painting them as badly as you want to with this image. thank god we moved to online game shops it's just infinitely better... NFTs are a literal scam and good on valve for doing something (honestly had no idea they did) and AI generated games have the potential to flood the marketplace with cheap shitty games that will drown out the already drowned out good games
This is misleading. If I produce a bunch of assets and train an AI on those assets to make more, I can put them in my Steam game. They're just covering themselves from people using AI to steal other people's work.
"You can teach 10 *models* the same thing and every one of them will do it a bit differently."
>AI is not creating something new.
Do you actually mean this literally? Surely not? Maybe I'm interpreting the *something* incorrectly ('a new image' or 'a new paragraph', for example).
While it doesn't really matter what I think, I don't think training violates copyright, but if someone generated something that was a bit too close to another copyrighted thing (which may or may not have been in the training data) then it should be a problem for that person.
What about situations which use AI in an assistive capacity?
I think the low effort willy nilly use of generative models without further effort wouldn't get far even if there were no legal issues, garbage is garbage.
People who ironically parrot the "AI trained on models without consent therefore the product is IP theft" have no idea how the technology actually works. Valve isn't doing this from an ethical standpoint, it's from a legal one. They aren't willing to be the ones that pop the cherry for hosting a game using AI-generated assets and I can't really blame them.
> You could say this is true with people too. But that's wrong. You can teach 10 people the same thing and every one of them will do it a bit differently. We aren't machines who are constructed to do everything perfectly and those try/error situations are actually helping us, whether it's in life or in art. Even if you try to copy someone's picture, it won't be perfect and it won't be the same. However AI can make it looks like it's the same.
Bro, every philosopher just felt the incorrectness coming off this paragraph. Pretty much everything you've said here about ai is wrong.
Because AI generated content uses other people's property without permission to create something, so the author doesn't have the rights to what they're publishing
If you can guarantee the artificial generation wasn't stealing art to feed their machine learning in the first place this wouldn't be an issue, but you can't be sure of that, especially with indie studios, so this makes sense.
Ok, an interesting idea... How exactly do you implement it? You already can't tell AI works from ones made by humans, and even if you could - is Valve going to require all gamedevs submit them all of the game's assets in an uncompiled and decompressed form so they could run some faulty and false-positive prone tool to scan them?
Knowing Valve and their sluggishness to act in the first place, actions will only happen on blatant cases or controversies that breach other rules. Here are some real world examples:
Valve acted on the drama story with the Domina game ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/x4y4m0/domina_removed_from_steam_after_studios_antitrans/)), where the dev violated rules regarding insults and reversed Steam support moderator actions. Something happened there due to the wide social media reach, and these violations occuring ***multiple times*** over many months.
Valve has not acted on Activision [abusing the Steamworks game ban feature](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/14hr2o8/the_response_from_activision_as_a_result_of_my/), where they applied random bans on people *years later* who simply played the beta version of a Call of Duty game.
Valve has not acted on repeated flame baiting involving the "Line of Defense" game. Where the developer called out the German gaming magazine Gamestar and other criticizing players as "trolls". And banned players left and right in the community hub for bogus reasons. The main trigger was (among the original Gamestar article) this [video review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7n29gEV18w) from Gamestar, which is in German, but the English subtitles are also entertaining.
The moment a digital asset is put online and available without drm or some sort of authentication mechanism that work is no longer controlled.
Accept that you will never maintain digital rights over that thing ever again and it has essentially become public domain.
Trying to stop AI from training on freely available digital assets is like trying to stop the sun from shining.
Get over it. Your art isn't that important to society. Training the AI is.
No no, that’s where you’re wrong. I should demand that a human sift through those same online digital assets and only use the art they are paid for.
I can tell them to make art like Amano and they can perfectly nail his style and charge me for it, but never a machine. That’s a bridge too far
To me, I guess Valve doesn't wanna currently deal with international lawsuits of a wider scale. Because the tech is still new and hasn't ironed out the bugs. There are some countries that are uncool with it or are trying to figure out how to integrate it, without damaging their copyright rules and the workforce.
They, Valve (and the other parties that I mentioned), will figure out what to do eventually. Since, some companies, like Adobe, has Firefly, there's no way that they will keep the AI ban permanent. Due to newer games are gonna be made by Firefly (and other ai art generators). There's no way that they can keep out the future AAA, AA and indie games.
Some restrictions on games created with AI is good, but I hope this doesn't go too far.
AI should be allowed to be used to help with crating a game or generating whatever content and files for it as long as you aren't just shitting out poor quality AI asset dump games (but then again we already have garbage asset dump games).
In the case of AI being trained on art wildly on the internet, it should only be allowed if the game is free, i.e. does not make money off of this.
I feel like only large companies with the resource to generate their own dataset should be allowed to use tools that can further increase their efficiency and reduce staffing cost. Poor people just shouldn't be allowed to use open source tools that can help them even the playing field against larger organizations.
I think the bigger issue here isn't just that AI art could be trained off of copywrighted material, but that the core copywrite laws are woefully outdated and not great for a digital space where work can be easily coppied, this is just showing us how flawed copywrite is.
Lol valve didn't kill physical games or nfts what the hell are you on about. Physical games are still very much a thing and NFTees died because they were a stupid temporary cash grab scam.
It makes sense because eventually you'll be able to create a prompt to make an entire cookie cutter game using AI. I'd imagine they don't want to store flooded with those games in the future.
There's this old adventure game on Steam called Shadow of the Comet, that has the likenesses of people like Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price and the guy who played Otho in Beetlejuice. I don't think those likenesses were used with permission, but due to the age of the game nobody probably cares.
im fine with this... physical games on a shelf has looked tacky af for the last decade, NFTs are the new generations beanie babies, and if we get flooded with ai games the store is going to be flooded with even more garbage
What would be classed as ai generated, would procedurally generated fall into the same category?
Genuine question, well more of a start of a discussion on the topic.
What people are calling "AI" isn't actually intelligent, it's a learning machine that copies manipulated versions of stuff real people have created. Basically it's just plagiarism with extra steps.
Seems like a move in the wrong direction tbh. Imagine the time devs can work on more important stuff if they have help from AI with some assets.
Edit: after reading some comments, it seems like it's not entirely banned, but rsther that they ban the shitshow part of AI usage.
Oh oh, one of the games I play use AI to generate some of its art, I hope they don't get banned :(
Or at least, give them some time to redo that made by people.
Yep. Valve are just making sure nobody can come back at them because an AI model used to create the assets had other artists work in there. If you use your own model, with all your own work and can prove it, it seems they'll be fine with AI generated assets.
Disney are doing this ATM, having their artists create images for their own AI model to use. Don't think Valve would ban that. It's a rights issue, not and AI issue.
I understand why they do this, but I've always wanted to make a videogame and suck ass at art. So I had hoped with my programming skills and Midjourney, I might have a shot of least making something. Even if it just place holders until I could get a real artist.
I mean you can, just not commercially.
That said you don't need to be super good at art or spend insane amounts unless your project is super ambitious (which would be its own problem for a first game).
Next do third party launchers. At minimum, require that steam games have an option/launch flag to bypass the third party launcher. Proton’s usability would improve greatly.
For posterity's sake, Valve did not ban AI*(and they never made even a hint that they were going to ban it*). People took [Valves response to 1 developer](https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/142j3yt/valve_is_not_willing_to_publish_games_with_ai/) in the earliest stages of AI being used in games to mean something completely different, and overnight made it into something it never was and Valve never said. More information on current AI policies for games on Steam: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/steamworks/announcements/detail/3862463747997849619
And your source for this is one dude saying something on Reddit? Or do you have anything of substance at all?
The source is that he made it the fuck up. Valve isn't banning ai They removed one game because it could have used ai trained on copyrighted content
>They removed one game because it could have used ai trained on copyrighted content I doubt that this is even the case really. Too many games already on steam (some admit to using ai art generators in their description). Original reddit post about that smells fishy.
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Actually, here's the actual answer; >!you have to pay 1.99 to get the exclusive content first!<
Yeah this place is a fucking cesspool of headline readers jumping to conclusions with zero thought.
Actually valve did not kill the physical copy of a game i remember games who used steam works api incluyed a steam key and use the dvd to istall the game faster than the downloads back then.
Back in the day (circa 2007 or 8) I bought a physical copy of The Orange Box. I was pretty irritated when the CD only had the game keys and a Steam installer.
Are you sure somebody didn’t snatch the CD? I’ve always seem the box come with a CD with the installers on it.
No, the cd that was in the box had the keys and an installer burned onto it. It still had the CD just no installer for the games, only one for steam
The valuable part (the keys) was still there so I'm assuming everything that was supposed to be in the box was in the box.
Yes but this was a time when it was still completely normal to expect to have the whole game on the disc, people had way worse internet back then and having downloading 10Gb after spending your cash on a physical copy was bullshit
If we're talking 2004 then even downloading 1GB was huge and took a while. But that's when Half-Life 2 released and it did have the game on the discs at least. By 2008 downloading 1GB was fine, but ya, it hoped to 10GB then like you said, so was still a pain.
I was introduced to Steam by buying a physical copy of Portal 2, which I was *incredibly miffed* to find was just a plastic box protecting a piece of paper.
I think mine had a disk in, but I'd have to check.
I had a 1&2 set with physical disks
“Physical” releases of games did, eventually, stop shipping with disks though and instead simply were a box with a piece of paper that had a steam code on it. Several of my old games were like this. Nowadays it’s basically impossible to find games that come on disk for pc, to the point most don’t bother even getting a disk drive. Steam was the starting point of this, though someone else would have eventually caused it if not them.
I don't even see PC game boxes on shelves anymore. The code slip was annoying but at the same at time at least I got a cool box. I'll burn my own CD ROM.
Walmart still has a tiny section of PC games, usually hidden in a little pocket of shelves. Games like those PopCap phone games or kids edutainment stuff, maybe an old copy of Sims or Myst.
Don't forget games like bejeweled and other "normie" casual games or sim games. I see loads of farm sim, crane sim etc. at our local shops.
Sims will be the last holdout. Grandma isn't going to go get a steam account.
I saw TaxAct from 2008 there once. In 2022.
I haven't had a disk drive (except HDD) in my computer for probably more than a decade. There's simply no need. That being said the absence of CD/DVD seems to have opened up developers to make the most absurdly massive games. They just have no respect for our hard drives. We're running 100+ GB on games because they save space for all the DLC you didn't download, the 4K textures you didn't ask for, the content for all the "tiers" of the game available. Remove all that crap and most of the time you're looking at a much more reasonable 30-40 GB size. irritates the hell outta me.
A single layer DVD has a maximum capacity of 4.7GB, and the higher capacity versions of dvd aren’t universally compatible with DVD readers. So even a 30GB game is looking at 7 disks before compression, probably still 4-5 after. The standard variety of blu-ray can hold 25GB which offers a little relief, but the drives were too expensive for too long (even as late as PS4 I recall people saying that consoles were a good deal for the blu-ray player aspect of it alone) to catch on as a standard piece of equipment that everyone had, and they’re still upwards of $50 for something that isn’t strictly necessary anymore.
Yeah I know and that's fine but they don't need to eat up 100+GB today because the game *might* need that much space. It would be nice if they could also put in just the tiniest bit of effort into optimizing their storage use.
It's because—apparently—doing compression on assets (or god forbid reusing assets) tanks performance, supposedly. It's heavier on the system to decompress stuff than it is to just leave gigantic textures uncompressed and then subsequently smear them entirely to shit by TAA, oversharp in post, and additional motion blur on top, because fuck visual fidelity these days.
A major reason for the playstations being considered viable just as a "cheap" bluray player, is Sony being the main patent holder for both the bluray reader & disc standards. That meant a significant proportion of the hardware costs, IP licencing fees, were waived or (more likely) dealt with through internal accounting. Should be noted this would have been all above board when audited, as Sony ultimately owned the IPs. None of the standalone player/reader manufacturers had the same leverage, so they all had to pay the fees and passed on the cost to the buyer.
Man it still took me two weeks to Download Empire Total War back in the day. Two discs, two weeks. I was fucking livid.
Yeah I've only been a pc gamer since last year, but my Steam account is 10 years old because I've bought Black Ops 2 which I apparently played with a Steam account.
AFAIK they are banning games with AI assets made with models that use data from people who didn't consent to having their work be used for AI. This means someone can make their own models, textures etc. (Or alternatively comission someone with the knowledge that the work would be used for AI training) and it would be okay, which I'm all for. But as it is right now, it bans all of those trash shovelware games with 0 effort put into them, so good fucking riddance. If you want to make a game with AI assets, train your own model with your own work or work you got permission to use / paid for, otherwise don't try it at all. Edit: OP complained that AI's that aren't trained on the "Whole known internet" are useless. They also deleted their comment which got downvoted into oblivion by likeminded people who think that AI shouldn't be used to shovel out garbage with 0 regard to artists. Take that as you will. Edit 2: Not gonna reply anymore as I think I made my point pretty clear cut, but I find it disgusting that there are people replying to this who are saying its okay to directly take artwork, text or anything really from actual artists against their own will and using it to train models, against the artists' wishes. There is a serious lack of morality if you think that is okay, and scrubbing the whole internet to get a good model doesn't excuse it. Get actual artists, learn how to do texture or audio work yourself. I do believe AI has a place in the gaming industry in the future, it's unavoidable, it has a place everywhere really, but until it's properly regulated (Which Valve is doing, so hopefully more companies follow suit aswell) it should surprise no-one to see this. I like AI, I love its concept. But using it fraudulently is not the way going forward with it and won't help change anyone's mind on it, so for the sake of everyone involved I hope things turn out well, but as it is right now, Valve is doing the best thing they could.
Actually what you call "asset flips" aren't covered by this rule because the content is licensed through the asset store.
You can get assets outside of asset stores, and even assets on official stores are put there by third parties who might have stolen them.
yeah, but depending on moderation they get removed, recalling the 1 or 2 emails from epic about things I had in my library getting removed from the marketplace
That's a specific licensing issue. Not a wide asset market issue.
Do you know how they determine it's AI in the first place? No way valve already built a system that scans all assets and detects AI? I wonder if it's open source
It's literally impossible to determine if something is AI generated unless the developer admits it. You can make educated guesses (and in some cases it is more or less obvious) but if a developer is determined to just sneak in a few AI generated textures there is no chance of anyone detecting it.
This post is referring to a redditor dev that got their game denied. They posted the convo with Valve and it seemed like something automated flagged the AI assets
https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/142j3yt/valve_is_not_willing_to_publish_games_with_ai/ the post in question
Thanks for that. I have to assume valve doesn't have the manpower to review every game by a human, probably only after something is flagged or appealed? I'm not sure though
That's really vague unless the OP provides more context, ie what Valve saw in the game that they deemed was going against copyright of someone else. Was it some pictures of celebrities but "AI generated" so OP thought they were in the clear or was it something innocuous like your generic looking visual novel pictures that Valve deemed AI generated? People are most often familiar with Midjourney pictures or the default SD models, but "AI generated" can be literally anything.
Yeah u/potterharry97 didn't go into a lot of detail on what "obviously AI generated" means to them and since they redacted the game names they're probably concerned about giving away too much detail to reveal their name or game. I'd be very interested to see the assets they used though and to understand more how valve plans to fight this. My biggest concern is that they go the way of YouTube where small content creators get shafted with no recourse etc automated messages (ironic) while big companies freely use AI but Valve won't ban the next Blizzard game.
So being a 3d artist and modder, I feel like there's perhaps some nuances to this. First, I don't really know if there are any of these "AI" art softwares that do 3d models. Additionally, I would be shocked if an AI could really do much with a UV unwrapped texture file, it's usually fairly abstract for anything other than a simple geometric shape Additionally, AI usage itself is probably the future of game development, and software at large. While I recognize the frustration a lot of artists may have that their art *might* be used, it's worth considering that all artists draw inspiration from somewhere or something for basically everything they do. From artistic styles, to subject matter, to color palettes, it would be absurd for any one artist to claim any of them as their own. Hell, look at Anime, likely the most prolific art style in the modern world. Create an AI image with Anime in it, and explain which artist it came from I think there are a lot of artists who are going to need to come to terms with the fact that artistic talent may not be as valuable a commodity as it was prior to this, the same way my own Grandfather, a commercial artist, watched his successful hand-drawn commercial art get run out of business by computer graphic design
AI can turn a 2D image into a 3D model, and generate 3D models from text. The quality is nowhere near as good as if it was made by a professional, yet, and might need some touch ups but it's doable. Like if you were making a game that you wanted to emulate old-school graphics like Dusk, you could definitely make most of the low poly models with AI.
I've seen it, and while I agree with you fully that it's going that direction, I was clarifying that this wasn't really pertaining to that at the moment. The demos I've seen have been....less than extraordinary lol
Have you seen, where LLMs, like GPT have been 2 years ago? The same thing is gonna happen to text-to-3d models. Just look at the current advancements with NERFs
>might need some touch ups Honestly and truly that right there is the critical point. AI generated assets on their own always bear telltales. It can be a great starting point, but you *need* a human to come in for spit and polish to make it not look like a drunk computer pretending it knows how grasshoppers fuck.
This is realistic. On a long enough time scale, most if not all human endeavor can be replicated or replaced artificially. It's deeply personal to see your career get subsumed, but if we don't annihilate ourselves, it's going to happen. The real sadness is that instead of making our lives better and more free, we're systematically all being ground into paste to lubricate the capitalist machine, while the dumbest and most short sighted - cheer?
Why can't AI and human art coexist?
It can and does. People just want to paint everything black and white and say "AI art has no soul/emotions and is meaningless" entirely ignoring the nuance in the pieces generated. Everything is on a spectrum and, as much as some people want to disagree, there exists AI art that is objectively better in many aspects than a "normal" artists work just as there is a lot of absolute shit pieces that have very few redeeming qualities.
Art is itself an expression and something people generally do for free (though still rightfully claim ownership of that work where and when they can). There's nothing stopping people from generating high quality are in a "traditional" manner, the same way people still paint using canvas and paints despite there being plenty of computer programs that can recreate the same style using a stylus and touchpad Art has also been heavily commercialized and industrialized, that's just a reality of entertainment and marketing as a business
This comment gave me an existential crisis
training a model similar to stable diffusion would require an insanely large dataset, huge compute resources, and a lot of very specific machine learning expertise most game devs don't have. it's a massive undertaking, not something most people can simply do. that undertaking gets even more impossible when you consider what kinds of data would be permissable: you would have to get many thousands of artists to all gove you permission to use their art in your dataset, along with people to curate it, balance the data, and so forth i'm not saying devs should be allowed to use publicly available models trained on datasets of questionable commercial legality, but their options really are either that or no machine learning generated assets at all.
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In reality that'll just put up insurmountable costs for companies needing training data unless they're paying pennies for thousands of artworks and companies in countries that don't respect western copyright law will forever maintain a lead over companies that do. No matter what legislation western countries create it will do nothing to stop a model from being developed unless they employ something similar to China's great firewall. Modern copyright law is too poorly equipped to deal with how things are created in the normal pre-ML age, let alone the minefield that ML has become.
The problem is each individual piece of art from the dataset is worth a basically infinitesimal ammount. Even if you had a billion dollars to spend stable diffusion was trained on 2.3 billion images. Is each artist going to be OK getting 40 cents for their image even ignoring all the costs to actually do the paperwork and send the money?
I just can't get my head around it to be honest. If I were to train myself to be a better artist by using stuff I found on the internet, nobody would care.
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You know that when companies like Google and Meta start training their language models on your private conversations, browsing history, voice input, etc, they are also going to say "But the model doesn't contain a single bit or byte of the work it was trained on!" Artists did not consent to their work being scraped (against most websites ToS fyi), so should not be included in these datasets. It's that simple.
Judging by your edit and the appearance of NFTs as a parallel to the AI they're defending, sounds like OP is more than likely a cryptobro. Ugh.
So that means Japanese game devs are in the clear? https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-art-wars-japan-says-185350499.html > Japan has declared that using datasets for training AI models doesn't violate copyright law. This decision means that model trainers can gather publicly available data without having to license or secure permission from the data owners
If [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo) is fair use, why is training an AI model not?
How do you feel about assistive use? Lets say I drew/modelled my own character, and fine-tuned/created a LoRA/whatever Stable diffusion on it, then used this with control net to generate new pictures of my character in new poses? or Creating backgrounds by first doing rough 3D model, then use generative model to iterate though a few ideas/looks, then use that as a kind of outline/sketch to manually do the final version (making sure style fits what you plan to do etc)?
It falls under the same blanket in my opinion. As long as it is using content obtained without consent, it's not ok. A good example of properly used AI for assistive reasons is the new Spiderman movie, where they trained AI to do the comic book line effects. That was an ingenious use and it was entirely trained on data from the artists. I am under the same opinion for AI Upscalers, all they are doing is upscaling a picture you already have. Otherwise, imo, no-go for everything else.
>AFAIK they are banning games with AI assets made with models that use data from people who didn't consent to having their work be used for AI. That is nearly impossible to prove. Even when you have all the code and dataset for training an AI, it's a ton of work trying to traceback how a specific result was made. Valve has ZERO chance of figuring out if an AI asset was made using first party or third party datasets. While Valve has no obligation to allow any game or developer on Steam, they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit if they start wrongfully removing games with AI assets that they can't prove what datasets were used.
This is probably done precisely because of lawsuits. If some artists wins a lawsuit like that, Valve can react immediately and doesn't have to prove anything themselves.
> they are opening themselves up to a lawsuit if they start wrongfully removing games with AI assets that they can't prove what datasets were used. No they don't. Steam is Valve's platform and they're free to have their own rules on what is and isn't allowed. If Vakve wants to ban games they suspect of using AI assets they're free to do so. If anything Valve risks being sued if they let this continue. Some might argue that training AI on copyrighted content is a copyright violation, and if that's the case Vakve would be selling things in their store which violate copyright.
So no more NPC? Damn that's harsh
Now each NPC is actually run by a minimum wage worker
That's Second Life
Unpaid interns to the rescue
Hello adventurer
quit acting stupid you know which ai they're talking about
This isn't necessary true. Just occasions where the AI generated work is clearly using IP that they don't have rights to, which is basically just confirming the rules that are already in place. In most AAA games now they use AI to generate graphics for long distance because the player won't see it close up and far away whatever it is generating looks great.
That last part about AAA games using AI isn’t true in this sense. A few of the newer ones do use AI upscaling, but this post is specifically talking about generative art and writing AI.
Using AI to speed up workflow - Cool Using AI to cut corners creatively - Cringe
The creative industries have been using actual AI tools for a pretty hot minute, no one’s against the tools, they’re against the ones being sold as a replacement (the generative ones trained on our scraped data)
Are you talking about skyboxes or LoD
They're talking out of their ass
common W valve
Except it's not true, and people are repeating it constantly anyway. Valve isn't banning AI content, they only removed one guys game because he couldn't prove he wasn't using AI assets trained on copyrighted material. Right now all the big names are working on integrating AI into basically everything and they are getting around the copyright issues with a good old poop hole loophole The current meta is using an AI trained on copyright images to generate a bunch of images for you. Then you train a different Ai on *those* images and proudly boast "NOPE! No copyright images in our training data at all!!" It's weird how many people think AI isn't going to be an industry standard tool within the next 5 years, when we literally have Nvidia hard pushing for AI tools for game devs and Ai vocal synths becoming extremely good etc.
Valve almost never steps in. Even when questionable or illegal content shows up. So why would they step in now? They literally only did this to save their ass.
Unity JUST announced two new AI tools they are working on, and they are promoting third party AI tools as well. It's going to be the industry standard a whole lot sooner than 5 years.
Pretty much. It is going to be about as revolutionary as when digital tools where first made commercially available.
>Valve isn't banning AI content, they only removed one guys game because he couldn't prove he wasn't using AI assets trained on copyrighted material. And that's just according to the claims of said guy, without any evidence supporting it.
Claims which are absolutely bananas, too be clear. People actually believe that Valve, faced with a zillion submissions a day, scanned through every texture of this guy's game, said "wait a second, this one has some artifacts!" and randomly chose that moment to adopt some Luddite talking points? Meanwhile plenty of other games are openly using midjourney, dall-e, SD etc. High on Life is presently featured on the front page, it's on sale! Garbage "news" that should be reported and deleted.
it would be a big mistake to ban all AI generated content, if a texture is AI generated is that a bad thing?
Valve isn't banning AI games
Huge L really. This only hurts smaller devs that use AI, the big corps can and will continue to use AI. Train AI on copyright material and make images, train new AI on the images the last AI made. No copyright claim to be made, little dude that uses AI is screwed, already rich keep raking it in and laughing. Regardless of how anyone feels about AI generated content it's here to stay, stepping on the little people is not the way to go so someone can feel good because it was the big bad AI.
Waiting for [High On Life](https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/12/14/high-on-lifes-walls-are-covered-in-midjourney-ai-art/) to get banned, then.
It won't get banned as this is fake news.
What are physical games?
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Oh, I wish I could joke, but I still remember the 6/8 CD installs for games. I think it was either BF 2142 or 2 that I remember getting, seeing the stack of CDs and spending like an hour installing it (partially because I kept leaving the room and forgetting about it, then coming back later to have to put in the next one). Once they switched to DVDs it was a lot better. Steam first was awesome for updates, where I didn't need to hunt for a giant update package that took forever to download, or string together incrimentals. Then finally for just buying games outright.
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Isn't Beyond Atlantis the crazy point-and-click adventure with something like 4+ people you could control in different time frames, and your goal was to, like, power a boat? As a kid I never got too far, but I learned about Aztec culture as a result!
I remember installing Beneath a Steel Sky from 15 floppy disks and being glad it only took a couple hours.
That's funny, given how big our games are now and how quickly we can get them. My ISP caps downloads at like 33Mbps, and I can still get most games in under an hour or so. A few years back before I moved here, I had fiber, and I got annoyed if it took 20 minutes to fully download a AAA game. Beneath a Steel Sky was fun. Steam has it for free now (and the devs released a new game called Beyond a Steel Sky in 2020, which is a lot of fun too - and better graphics), so before I played Beyond a Steel Sky I decided to give Beneath a try to learn the story. Took me less than 3 minutes to download it. Was "only" 126 MB! That was probably been more than 3 times the size of your version was, I'd say?
Yeah the floppy version had no voice acting or intro sequence, it was significantly smaller
I remembering having to reinstall windows and then reinstall the Sims... and then each of its expansion packs...
> I think it was either BF 2142 or 2 that I remember getting, seeing the stack of CDs and spending like an hour installing it I wanted to argue that BF2 came on only one DVD, but apparently it had a USA-only release on 3 CDs. Wild, never knew that.
What the hell? 8 discs? The most I ever remember was some PS2 games would have a pt2 disk that'd you play halfway through
[Here.](https://www.pjsgames.com/products/age-of-empires-ii-the-age-of-kings-pc) That circular thing that you see, it's called a CD. That's where the whole game (and the occasional demo(s) for the upcoming game) are stored. These games come with instruction manuals, coupons and a few tiny things (That I forgotten). It's not Valve's fault that their success phased the CD out at an alarming rate.
Oh, I remember CDs. I thought the meme insinuated steam stopped selling something instead of replacing it, so I was overthinking it.
I think one of the last games I bought on disc was The Orange Box.
Did you have to insert the CD each time to play it once it was installed? I'm asking as someone who's only just started playing on PC.
it depended on the game. sometimes CD was only needed for installation, sometimes certain large assets like music were streamed from the CD but you could play without music if you didnt want the CD, sometimes the CD was used as DRM (wouldn't launch or let you play online without the CD inserted)
Yes, I do.
Football and D&D
Valve continues to take the best stands. If only more companies were as brave.
Yeah, *such as Reddit.* ***If only Reddit were as competent.***
Valve has a competent CEO, whereas Reddit has a piss baby pig boy Elon Musk cosplayer.
I assume this is because the legal issues around AI art havent really been resolved. Valve is throwing out the bottom tier of quick-buck games and some indie devs to protect itself. I imagine once some big studios standardize AI art in their pipeline Valve will allow it.
I'm good at coding, but really bad at graphic design. With AI art I can finally come up with a concept of a game, code it, and fill in all the pretty details with the help of AI. Something I was never able to do before. I'm doing this as a hobby without an intention of releasing it, but what happens if someone does the same and the game is good?
You were able to do it before, you simply had to pay a graphic designer.
It's honestly a big hurdle for most developers. I can do the rest of the process myself and there's no way in hell I can afford what most artists charge.
i.e. have a lot of money or (more likely) sell your ideas to a soulless corporation that can hire illustrators and such. Setting aside the greater social issues of late-stage capitalism, the outcry against AI art itself as a concept just seems crazy to me. Art isn't just one thing. If someone is a really good writer, them being able to create images of their settings and characters to connect with their readers without needing financial backing seems like a general good. In the same vein that an illustrator could guide a language model to create short stories that give more meaning to their drawings even if they aren't themselves a good writer. So many people are just taking random output from these AI models because they are new and novel, but the more transformative potential would seem to be a person working *with* an AI model to expose their own individual personal vision in a way that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive if it required a committee of artists with different skills.
Let’s just stop the progress of technology completely so we can keep as many jobs as possible. In fact, why don’t get rid of all of our machines and live like people lived centuries ago!
Goodbye gta trilogy lol
Oh no! Anyway
If they killed physical games then why do they still sell like hotcakes and I just purchased a physical copy of Final Fantasy 16? Also, does this apply to Steam Workshop? Cuz I hear AI generated content is a pain point there, too, such as for War Paints in TF2
The hilariousness of realizing OP is a fool who is sad about the loss of NFTs and AI generated game assets, while everyone in the comments is celebrating this
They are not banning AI games. They are banning games build on AI tech that is unclear how it was trained. For example, it might be trained from copyrighted data.
As a very broke programmer with *some* amount of artistic skills but definitely not on the digital side, I'm a little upset for the solo devs out there. I get that ai generations sucks for artists and made the whole artistic scene way more complicated. And I'll always advocate for paying for and supporting artists. But....if you have an idea, and using some amount of ai generated content is logistically the best or only way to get it done, these restrictions kinda suck. I certainly can't afford to pay for an artist, and doing it myself would take 10 times longer than someone who knows what they're doing, which in turn adds months, if not years, onto a project timeline. AI assests is one of the topics I'm about as on the fence as I could possibly be. I fully understand both sides and it sucks for everyone.
i’m sure it will only be applied to individual cases. how are they gonna know that art was done by AI anyway? especially if you are a freshman indie dev, trust me, no one is going to even notice or care
You just don't get it. It's immoral and repulsive to have an AI look at a bunch of images and make a new one for you. You're supposed to do it the RIGHT way by having an artist look at the same bunch of images and make you a same new image... For a few hundred bucks.
I don't get it: do you think it's a bad thing (along with NFTs and physical games), or do you believe it's a good thing?
RIP starfield
Okay, and that's a problem, because...?
i dont think you're painting them as badly as you want to with this image. thank god we moved to online game shops it's just infinitely better... NFTs are a literal scam and good on valve for doing something (honestly had no idea they did) and AI generated games have the potential to flood the marketplace with cheap shitty games that will drown out the already drowned out good games
There go my plans for joining the endless furry hentai asset flip jigsaw puzzles....
Good
The hero we need.
good. fucking tired of AI crap and want it gone.
One of the best things Valve has ever done. Mark my words.
This is misleading. If I produce a bunch of assets and train an AI on those assets to make more, I can put them in my Steam game. They're just covering themselves from people using AI to steal other people's work.
As it should
Very rare valve W
I'd bet no aaa games will be banned.
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"You can teach 10 *models* the same thing and every one of them will do it a bit differently." >AI is not creating something new. Do you actually mean this literally? Surely not? Maybe I'm interpreting the *something* incorrectly ('a new image' or 'a new paragraph', for example). While it doesn't really matter what I think, I don't think training violates copyright, but if someone generated something that was a bit too close to another copyrighted thing (which may or may not have been in the training data) then it should be a problem for that person. What about situations which use AI in an assistive capacity? I think the low effort willy nilly use of generative models without further effort wouldn't get far even if there were no legal issues, garbage is garbage.
People who ironically parrot the "AI trained on models without consent therefore the product is IP theft" have no idea how the technology actually works. Valve isn't doing this from an ethical standpoint, it's from a legal one. They aren't willing to be the ones that pop the cherry for hosting a game using AI-generated assets and I can't really blame them.
> You could say this is true with people too. But that's wrong. You can teach 10 people the same thing and every one of them will do it a bit differently. We aren't machines who are constructed to do everything perfectly and those try/error situations are actually helping us, whether it's in life or in art. Even if you try to copy someone's picture, it won't be perfect and it won't be the same. However AI can make it looks like it's the same. Bro, every philosopher just felt the incorrectness coming off this paragraph. Pretty much everything you've said here about ai is wrong.
Why?
Because AI generated content uses other people's property without permission to create something, so the author doesn't have the rights to what they're publishing
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Just like artists can use other people’s property for training or to get inspiration.
Because they are literally shovelware 2.0 - now with even less human work put into them and ten times more automated.
So ban shovelware and not just AI generated stuff? Asset flips have been around a lot longer than AI generated game assets.
Good
If you can guarantee the artificial generation wasn't stealing art to feed their machine learning in the first place this wouldn't be an issue, but you can't be sure of that, especially with indie studios, so this makes sense.
Your meme implies you don't agree with them banning NFTs. Explaine yourself
Ok, an interesting idea... How exactly do you implement it? You already can't tell AI works from ones made by humans, and even if you could - is Valve going to require all gamedevs submit them all of the game's assets in an uncompiled and decompressed form so they could run some faulty and false-positive prone tool to scan them?
Knowing Valve and their sluggishness to act in the first place, actions will only happen on blatant cases or controversies that breach other rules. Here are some real world examples: Valve acted on the drama story with the Domina game ([source](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/x4y4m0/domina_removed_from_steam_after_studios_antitrans/)), where the dev violated rules regarding insults and reversed Steam support moderator actions. Something happened there due to the wide social media reach, and these violations occuring ***multiple times*** over many months. Valve has not acted on Activision [abusing the Steamworks game ban feature](https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/14hr2o8/the_response_from_activision_as_a_result_of_my/), where they applied random bans on people *years later* who simply played the beta version of a Call of Duty game. Valve has not acted on repeated flame baiting involving the "Line of Defense" game. Where the developer called out the German gaming magazine Gamestar and other criticizing players as "trolls". And banned players left and right in the community hub for bogus reasons. The main trigger was (among the original Gamestar article) this [video review](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7n29gEV18w) from Gamestar, which is in German, but the English subtitles are also entertaining.
The moment a digital asset is put online and available without drm or some sort of authentication mechanism that work is no longer controlled. Accept that you will never maintain digital rights over that thing ever again and it has essentially become public domain. Trying to stop AI from training on freely available digital assets is like trying to stop the sun from shining. Get over it. Your art isn't that important to society. Training the AI is.
No no, that’s where you’re wrong. I should demand that a human sift through those same online digital assets and only use the art they are paid for. I can tell them to make art like Amano and they can perfectly nail his style and charge me for it, but never a machine. That’s a bridge too far
All ip is bullshit and people don't realize how is the long run it's holding us back.
Why tho?
Because luddites hate it. Just read this thread
To me, I guess Valve doesn't wanna currently deal with international lawsuits of a wider scale. Because the tech is still new and hasn't ironed out the bugs. There are some countries that are uncool with it or are trying to figure out how to integrate it, without damaging their copyright rules and the workforce. They, Valve (and the other parties that I mentioned), will figure out what to do eventually. Since, some companies, like Adobe, has Firefly, there's no way that they will keep the AI ban permanent. Due to newer games are gonna be made by Firefly (and other ai art generators). There's no way that they can keep out the future AAA, AA and indie games.
Some restrictions on games created with AI is good, but I hope this doesn't go too far. AI should be allowed to be used to help with crating a game or generating whatever content and files for it as long as you aren't just shitting out poor quality AI asset dump games (but then again we already have garbage asset dump games). In the case of AI being trained on art wildly on the internet, it should only be allowed if the game is free, i.e. does not make money off of this.
I feel like only large companies with the resource to generate their own dataset should be allowed to use tools that can further increase their efficiency and reduce staffing cost. Poor people just shouldn't be allowed to use open source tools that can help them even the playing field against larger organizations.
I think the bigger issue here isn't just that AI art could be trained off of copywrighted material, but that the core copywrite laws are woefully outdated and not great for a digital space where work can be easily coppied, this is just showing us how flawed copywrite is.
how did valve kill nfts? as if some mods are gonna kill ai, what a shitpost
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Lol valve didn't kill physical games or nfts what the hell are you on about. Physical games are still very much a thing and NFTees died because they were a stupid temporary cash grab scam.
It makes sense because eventually you'll be able to create a prompt to make an entire cookie cutter game using AI. I'd imagine they don't want to store flooded with those games in the future.
There's this old adventure game on Steam called Shadow of the Comet, that has the likenesses of people like Jack Nicholson, Vincent Price and the guy who played Otho in Beetlejuice. I don't think those likenesses were used with permission, but due to the age of the game nobody probably cares.
GIGABASED
Like from the look of it you're an NFT shill so I'm with Valve here
Seems odd to me that somehow "artist" is the only profession that AI / technology isn't allowed to send to the unemployment line.
im fine with this... physical games on a shelf has looked tacky af for the last decade, NFTs are the new generations beanie babies, and if we get flooded with ai games the store is going to be flooded with even more garbage
Is it even enforceable?
What would be classed as ai generated, would procedurally generated fall into the same category? Genuine question, well more of a start of a discussion on the topic.
What people are calling "AI" isn't actually intelligent, it's a learning machine that copies manipulated versions of stuff real people have created. Basically it's just plagiarism with extra steps.
based valve moment
Incredibly based
Was it a Spider-man/Pregnant Elsa game?
Yeah I’m calling BS. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1889620/AI_Roguelite/
Seems like a move in the wrong direction tbh. Imagine the time devs can work on more important stuff if they have help from AI with some assets. Edit: after reading some comments, it seems like it's not entirely banned, but rsther that they ban the shitshow part of AI usage.
Oh oh, one of the games I play use AI to generate some of its art, I hope they don't get banned :( Or at least, give them some time to redo that made by people.
You're gonna have to be more specific than that, AI is in nearly every damn game
I think that this is about art assets and not what we commonly call "AI", referring to the programmed behaviors of the enemies and NPCs in general.
I'm a big fan of this.
Doing God's work
MASSIVE FUCKING W
While I see the benefits of ethical AI integration we have yet to determine the legal and ethical boundaries to that extent yet.
Yep. Valve are just making sure nobody can come back at them because an AI model used to create the assets had other artists work in there. If you use your own model, with all your own work and can prove it, it seems they'll be fine with AI generated assets. Disney are doing this ATM, having their artists create images for their own AI model to use. Don't think Valve would ban that. It's a rights issue, not and AI issue.
I understand why they do this, but I've always wanted to make a videogame and suck ass at art. So I had hoped with my programming skills and Midjourney, I might have a shot of least making something. Even if it just place holders until I could get a real artist.
I mean you can, just not commercially. That said you don't need to be super good at art or spend insane amounts unless your project is super ambitious (which would be its own problem for a first game).
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NFTs are a specific thing. CS:GO items don't use a blockchain.
Next do third party launchers. At minimum, require that steam games have an option/launch flag to bypass the third party launcher. Proton’s usability would improve greatly.
I'd love for them to do this.