Remember when Microsoft was saying, in 2021-2022, that they were going to provide legal assistance to anybody contesting the license of Copilot-generated code?
You’re saying we should support the billionaire overlords because some indies trying to use new tools will produce results that people parrot on the internet as slop?
Steam is in a weird position as a marketplace. It has to serve mainstream developers, indie but relatively large developers or at least polished games (the kind of thing that would've past steam greenlight fairly quickly back when that was around) and tiny, single indivial indies who may or may not put out something nobody else will (occasionally slop clones) (the kind of thing that've taken a while to pass greenlight). I'm not sure if and how they can create a system that works for everyone. A $1k ceiling is maybe the worst idea. It hurts poor indies but not ai slop studios as much. It's possible that the return of some greenlight-esque curattioj could work, but it'd be devastating if your game got rejected as a false positive for ai slop or anything.
I think this is a bit disingenuous. The stance they’re taking seems consistent to me. I’m
Interpreting their view as “Using AI to create something new isn’t theft, using it to recreate or access an existing product is copyright infringement” - makes sense to me
You can’t have the first one without the second one.
AI doesn’t create something out of thin air, it is only recreating from training data. Which is infringing portion of the argument.
I don't think that's how it works. From experience from working on an experimental online learning system... it can't remember verbatim unless it is _really_ in there many many times. It can reconstruct it pretty close though.
source: online learning of codebases in the hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code
If the material that you train the AI on is copyright protected you are by definition violating it.
Otherwise AI becomes a glorious copyright-laundering machine, use something that you want to copy to train an AI, then ask that AI to replicate the stuff it was trained on. Of course it will make a perfect copy, but who is the creator of that intellectual work? The AI itself not for sure, but the original author of the stuff that the AI copied.
An no, it doesn't matter if the AI doesn't copy exactly but does a bit of shuffling of stuff, if not you are arguing that it's not cheating if you copy the homework of your classmate but you rearrange some words to make it not identical...
How does that follow from the definition of copyright or the protections it offers? This is law we're talking about. Cite the black and white.
From copyright.gov "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed"
What rights does copyright provide?
Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.
Prepare derivative works based upon the work.
Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.
Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This right also applies to the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.
Training an AI isn't on this list. An AI may produce infringing outputs, but training an AI isn't a violation of copyright.
"Copyright laundering" is a nonsense idea. Copyright is not designed to prevent people or machines from producing things in a style or similar things. It protects against exact reproduction or reuse, and that only to the extent that the form is separable from function. If the form is inseparable from function, the expression cannot be copyrighted at all.
These companies would love to slurp up your game (via AI) but replicating theirs (via AI) is no bueno. Whether you've infringed comes down to whether you can afford the legal fees.
Remains to be seen how it plays out but I always liked Sega's approach to Sonic fan games. They are their own rich genre, which have largely symbiosed with corporate. Though, I suspect most studios won't understand the value of that approach.
I don't really think this is the case. The rules feel very consistently applied. Training is fine. Output may still be copyright infringing in some cases (but difficult to prove and none of these tech companies have tried yet). Publishing decomps is not fine and never has been. Piracy is not fine and never has been (and anthropic got in trouble for it). The only case that I know of where an AI company got off free for something an individual would be punished for is the various hacks that they've "accidentally" done.
You say training is fine but mention Anthropic losing because of whoopsies in training. You say no company got off for free, except for literally most of human copyrights that OpenAI got away with training on.
Nah, they want the benefits of AI and reducing labor expenses without the cons of "LLMs can reliably replicate anything they've been trained on and will only continue to get better."
I agree. I'm not sure why anyone thought that these companies would be okay with someone releasing an unofficial title in their flagship franchise, AI created or not.
It seems like the news outlet is running this as "suddenly they object to AI" and ignoring the fact that they're objecting to it because it's clearly an infringing product. It would be infringing whether it was made with AI or not.
This is akin to somebody saying we should be allowed to own knives for cooking, and then calling them a hypocrite when they object to knives being used to stab people in the face.
Sadly the low hanging fruit is cloning other peoples games.
This takes away from all the indies that AI is empowering. I use AI on the game I am creating. It is wonderful in many ways. (I say this as I watch it burn thru 2m tokens with out informing me of the scope of what it was going to do).
I for one would love for someone create a clone of ms office with a good exchange implementation and decent outlook client plus self-hostable private cloud counterparts. Free Azure anyone?
I gave up reading the article due to silly phrasing and editorialising: "punishment", "AI tools many publishers have brazenly admitted to using are a double-edged sword." And so on.
The nonsense about "hypocrisy", companies act in the best interest of their shareholders.
It isn't hypocrisy to use AI tooling and also attempt to protect their IP. Not wanting to be stabbed and using a knife to cut my steak dinner up doesn't make me a hypocrite.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 7.1 ms ] threadIt could be a Napster moment.
That being said, Valve should increase their Steam fee to at least $1k now.
I’ll take the slop.
Sorta sucks if your in a middle income country, but there's always itch.
Does that violate copyright? What if we us the binary source code of MacOS, Linux and Windows, then ask it to recreate Windows?
Does the fact that we added some other ingrediants violate the idea that the LLLM will create a substantially similar product?
I'm not defending windows, but indicting LLMs as anything but "fair use".
source: online learning of codebases in the hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code
Otherwise AI becomes a glorious copyright-laundering machine, use something that you want to copy to train an AI, then ask that AI to replicate the stuff it was trained on. Of course it will make a perfect copy, but who is the creator of that intellectual work? The AI itself not for sure, but the original author of the stuff that the AI copied.
An no, it doesn't matter if the AI doesn't copy exactly but does a bit of shuffling of stuff, if not you are arguing that it's not cheating if you copy the homework of your classmate but you rearrange some words to make it not identical...
From copyright.gov "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed"
What rights does copyright provide?
Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.
Prepare derivative works based upon the work.
Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.
Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This right also applies to the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.
Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.
Training an AI isn't on this list. An AI may produce infringing outputs, but training an AI isn't a violation of copyright.
"Copyright laundering" is a nonsense idea. Copyright is not designed to prevent people or machines from producing things in a style or similar things. It protects against exact reproduction or reuse, and that only to the extent that the form is separable from function. If the form is inseparable from function, the expression cannot be copyrighted at all.
These companies would love to slurp up your game (via AI) but replicating theirs (via AI) is no bueno. Whether you've infringed comes down to whether you can afford the legal fees.
Remains to be seen how it plays out but I always liked Sega's approach to Sonic fan games. They are their own rich genre, which have largely symbiosed with corporate. Though, I suspect most studios won't understand the value of that approach.
It seems arbitrary.
It seems like the news outlet is running this as "suddenly they object to AI" and ignoring the fact that they're objecting to it because it's clearly an infringing product. It would be infringing whether it was made with AI or not.
This is akin to somebody saying we should be allowed to own knives for cooking, and then calling them a hypocrite when they object to knives being used to stab people in the face.
This takes away from all the indies that AI is empowering. I use AI on the game I am creating. It is wonderful in many ways. (I say this as I watch it burn thru 2m tokens with out informing me of the scope of what it was going to do).
Weird how this stuff only applies when it's not you doing it.
The nonsense about "hypocrisy", companies act in the best interest of their shareholders.
It isn't hypocrisy to use AI tooling and also attempt to protect their IP. Not wanting to be stabbed and using a knife to cut my steak dinner up doesn't make me a hypocrite.