Players have been asking for the ability to filter out games made with Gen AI.
We've added an automatic tag on SteamDB based on the AI gen content disclosures on the store pages.
If you’re making it for profit, and using public resources (like GenAI trained on all the commons), then the game itself should be in the commons as well. (You can still sell it or request donations though) I support the GenAI in FOSS, but for-profit closed-source games should respect their own ideals (copyrights)
Perhaps the logical compromise is to disclaim ownership of the AI-generated assets, releasing them as public domain, while retaining the copyright only on the code he’s written himself, etc
A person working to make profit might not actually believe in copyrights. Nor hold any ideological kinship with the system they exist in.
Further, virtually all resources to do anything originated in “the commons” and the sort of person who’s trying to produce a game as their means of making money probably are just trying to get away from a miserable 9 to 5 (or not live under a bridge).
People who work and give away their shit for free are good people, but they are also usually people who are financially comfortable already. Its not right to dictate what resources some individual game dev is trying to use to make a living off their work.
I totally agree that the things I make with Gen AI are public property.
What doesn’t make sense is that all of my work must also become public merelly because it’s alongside public works.
What I’m doing is years worth of my work, not just tic-tac-toe.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind making free for everybody games all day (I have a TON of ideas) if I could live were I wanted and all my own living costs were taken care of, but that’s not the World we live in so, not having been born to wealthy parents, I have to get paid for my work in order to survive.
If Copyright for you is an ideology (rather than a shittily implemented area of property legislation), then fell free to have your spin of it for the product of your time and effort, including having Contagion for public resources, just don’t expect that others in the World we live in must go along with such an hyper-simplifying take on property of the intellectual kind.
I suspect that your take is deep down still anchored on an idea of “corporation” and making profits for the sake of further enriching already wealthy individuals, whilst I as a non-wealthy individual have to actually make a living of my work to survive and you’re pretty much telling me that I can’t use a specific kind of free shit to do my work better without all of my work having to be free for everybody (and I go live under a bridge and starve).
Don’t take this badly but you’re pretty much making the case that the worker can’t have any free tools to earn their livelihood, which is just a way of making the case for “those who can afford it buy and own the tools, those who can’t work for those who own the tools”.
Whether you realise it or not you’re defending something that just makes sure than only those who have enough money to afford paying for artisan work can make great things whilst the rest have to work for them and maybe do tiny things on their spare time.
I don’t support the current system whatsoever and aim to dismantle it. But if you do, and you otherwise play by the rules of the system, then you have to accept that your “free tool” that improves your work comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators and is therefore immoral to use in for-profit products. I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
All capitalist practices are immoral in functionally the same way. Capitalism works to use worker exploitation but also use of the commons for private gain. Generative AI is now part of the commons that capitalists will inevitably use for profit. The fight over worker disenfranchisement in this case was functionally instantly lost the moment generative AI became usable at all.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
They already do and are going to regardless. In fact, using Generative AI will likely become functionally mandatory given a capitalist market system. If you take on labor costs that other firms don’t, then you will not be able to compete. This applies to big corporations and small indie devs already. A company wont abstain from Gen AI if their competition wont and all it takes is one company to start using Gen AI.
comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators
I’m not that guy, but what livelihood of artists and creators? It’s one dude working alone, where’s the money for that going to come from?
I sometimes record music and put it on bandcamp, I recorded a signle recently and it needed album art. I could take a picture and put a shitty filter on it, or I could generate an AI art that looks nice and more specific to my idea of what I wanted it to be.
I don’t have $200 kicking around to comission art for something I did as a hobby.
Hence, can’t release my recording as FOSS, since it’s not software.
The music is out there for free (pay tip if you want)
This kind of stuff is what allows people to stop living shitty miserable lives of working shit jobs for low pay. Maybe if we wish on a star, we can be the next Balatro guy.
Oh, I would totally be happy for a property-free world in all senses (so, one were I could just occupy a piece of land, were I would make my own house and grow my own food), what I’m not happy with is the idea that I still have to obbey all the rules on the side were I have to work within the system to make money in order to survive but on the other side what’s mine is everybody’s. Your ideal world is not one we can transition into by starting with making the tool users have to pay for all their tools but everything else “we’ll solve later”.
Further, I don’t think Gen AI should be monetised - if it was trained on public works then what comes out of it are public works.
I play by the rules of the system because I have no choice: I was born in a World were everything is owned and wasn’t born in the Owner Class - for me it was always play by other people’s rules or go live under a bridge.
Your specific formulation in the last post was similar to saying that use of Open Source tools should make the product of one’s work Open Source: if the Gen AI was trained with works that authors made freely available for any use as public works, then the resulting generative tool is akin to an open source piece of software (Edit: specifically, tools and libraries for software development) only instead of being something that creates or enhances very complex control code for a processing unit it’s something that creates images or audio clips and when those images and audio clips are used as part of a much greater work, they’re just as small a fraction of the work as, say, open source libraries are in software applications.
However, “what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern. If the same happens as it did with Open Source software in the Programming world, such a tool being freely available just means that people will expect even more complex works to be done - so in the case of games, for them to have more and nicer visuals - or in other words, for the amount of work that needs to be done to grow and pretty much nullify the gains from having the new tools. If that is not what happens, then we indeed have a problem.
Given the way things are, that formulation you defended will de facto result in Gen AI that is entirelly trained on paid for works, hence is paid for, hence only those who can afford it get to use it - which in the game making world means you’re basically defending an option that helps the big for profit publishers and screws the small indies trying to make a living, which I suspect is the very opposite of the World you seem to want.
“what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern.
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can’t just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and “open source” Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.
I ain’t reading all that. Anyway you keep insisting that the world allow you to do what you want to do, I don’t think it’s going to work out the way you expect, no matter how big walls of text you write. Using GenAI in for-profit ventures is going to put you into a specific box. Make of this what you will.
If you’re making it for profit, and using public resources (like GenAI trained on all the commons), then the game itself should be in the commons as well. (You can still sell it or request donations though) I support the GenAI in FOSS, but for-profit closed-source games should respect their own ideals (copyrights)
Perhaps the logical compromise is to disclaim ownership of the AI-generated assets, releasing them as public domain, while retaining the copyright only on the code he’s written himself, etc
A person working to make profit might not actually believe in copyrights. Nor hold any ideological kinship with the system they exist in.
Further, virtually all resources to do anything originated in “the commons” and the sort of person who’s trying to produce a game as their means of making money probably are just trying to get away from a miserable 9 to 5 (or not live under a bridge).
People who work and give away their shit for free are good people, but they are also usually people who are financially comfortable already. Its not right to dictate what resources some individual game dev is trying to use to make a living off their work.
I totally agree that the things I make with Gen AI are public property.
What doesn’t make sense is that all of my work must also become public merelly because it’s alongside public works.
What I’m doing is years worth of my work, not just tic-tac-toe.
I mean, I wouldn’t mind making free for everybody games all day (I have a TON of ideas) if I could live were I wanted and all my own living costs were taken care of, but that’s not the World we live in so, not having been born to wealthy parents, I have to get paid for my work in order to survive.
If Copyright for you is an ideology (rather than a shittily implemented area of property legislation), then fell free to have your spin of it for the product of your time and effort, including having Contagion for public resources, just don’t expect that others in the World we live in must go along with such an hyper-simplifying take on property of the intellectual kind.
I suspect that your take is deep down still anchored on an idea of “corporation” and making profits for the sake of further enriching already wealthy individuals, whilst I as a non-wealthy individual have to actually make a living of my work to survive and you’re pretty much telling me that I can’t use a specific kind of free shit to do my work better without all of my work having to be free for everybody (and I go live under a bridge and starve).
Don’t take this badly but you’re pretty much making the case that the worker can’t have any free tools to earn their livelihood, which is just a way of making the case for “those who can afford it buy and own the tools, those who can’t work for those who own the tools”.
Whether you realise it or not you’re defending something that just makes sure than only those who have enough money to afford paying for artisan work can make great things whilst the rest have to work for them and maybe do tiny things on their spare time.
I don’t support the current system whatsoever and aim to dismantle it. But if you do, and you otherwise play by the rules of the system, then you have to accept that your “free tool” that improves your work comes at the expense of the livelihood of artists and creators and is therefore immoral to use in for-profit products. I don’t agree with the scolds who claim that every GenAI use is immoral by default, but I do think that the tech itself when applied within capitalist practices is immoral as it’s meant to deskill and disenfranchise workers.
Anyway, any defense you can make for your “little indie game” can be made by mega-corporations using GenAI just as well.
All capitalist practices are immoral in functionally the same way. Capitalism works to use worker exploitation but also use of the commons for private gain. Generative AI is now part of the commons that capitalists will inevitably use for profit. The fight over worker disenfranchisement in this case was functionally instantly lost the moment generative AI became usable at all.
They already do and are going to regardless. In fact, using Generative AI will likely become functionally mandatory given a capitalist market system. If you take on labor costs that other firms don’t, then you will not be able to compete. This applies to big corporations and small indie devs already. A company wont abstain from Gen AI if their competition wont and all it takes is one company to start using Gen AI.
I’m not that guy, but what livelihood of artists and creators? It’s one dude working alone, where’s the money for that going to come from?
I sometimes record music and put it on bandcamp, I recorded a signle recently and it needed album art. I could take a picture and put a shitty filter on it, or I could generate an AI art that looks nice and more specific to my idea of what I wanted it to be.
I don’t have $200 kicking around to comission art for something I did as a hobby.
If you did it as a hobby, then release it as FOSS.
I’m not that guy
Hence, can’t release my recording as FOSS, since it’s not software.
The music is out there for free (pay tip if you want)
This kind of stuff is what allows people to stop living shitty miserable lives of working shit jobs for low pay. Maybe if we wish on a star, we can be the next Balatro guy.
Amazingly bad take here, holy shit
Oh, I would totally be happy for a property-free world in all senses (so, one were I could just occupy a piece of land, were I would make my own house and grow my own food), what I’m not happy with is the idea that I still have to obbey all the rules on the side were I have to work within the system to make money in order to survive but on the other side what’s mine is everybody’s. Your ideal world is not one we can transition into by starting with making the tool users have to pay for all their tools but everything else “we’ll solve later”.
Further, I don’t think Gen AI should be monetised - if it was trained on public works then what comes out of it are public works.
I play by the rules of the system because I have no choice: I was born in a World were everything is owned and wasn’t born in the Owner Class - for me it was always play by other people’s rules or go live under a bridge.
Your specific formulation in the last post was similar to saying that use of Open Source tools should make the product of one’s work Open Source: if the Gen AI was trained with works that authors made freely available for any use as public works, then the resulting generative tool is akin to an open source piece of software (Edit: specifically, tools and libraries for software development) only instead of being something that creates or enhances very complex control code for a processing unit it’s something that creates images or audio clips and when those images and audio clips are used as part of a much greater work, they’re just as small a fraction of the work as, say, open source libraries are in software applications.
However, “what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern. If the same happens as it did with Open Source software in the Programming world, such a tool being freely available just means that people will expect even more complex works to be done - so in the case of games, for them to have more and nicer visuals - or in other words, for the amount of work that needs to be done to grow and pretty much nullify the gains from having the new tools. If that is not what happens, then we indeed have a problem.
Given the way things are, that formulation you defended will de facto result in Gen AI that is entirelly trained on paid for works, hence is paid for, hence only those who can afford it get to use it - which in the game making world means you’re basically defending an option that helps the big for profit publishers and screws the small indies trying to make a living, which I suspect is the very opposite of the World you seem to want.
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
-Heilbroner 1666
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can’t just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and “open source” Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.
I ain’t reading all that. Anyway you keep insisting that the world allow you to do what you want to do, I don’t think it’s going to work out the way you expect, no matter how big walls of text you write. Using GenAI in for-profit ventures is going to put you into a specific box. Make of this what you will.
I shall extend to you the same “courtesy”. It’s only fair.