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Comment by kemayo | Hacker News Reader

> After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.

Valve's worried that AI-generated art is in a murky copyright state, and don't want to open themselves up to being sued.

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It's just a random reddit post. The OP on reddit didn't even post his game.

Three possiblilities:

1. It's just fictional. Probably written by a troll or generated by ChatGPT.

2. Steam refused to publish the game due to some obvious copyright issues (like they told Midjourney to generate superman or one-piece characters)

3. Steam is banning any AI generated assets.

My bet is 1 > 2 > 3.

It's a really strong indictment of the state of journalism that "I read it on reddit" has become sufficient to turn into a news story.

The internet is flooded with content right now to the effect of "Valve might be doing this thing", but not one of those sources has actually reached out to Valve for comment. Instead they all cite a random commenter on Reddit (or they cite each other).

What journalism? This is a link to reddit

https://news.google.com/search?q=valve

There are dozens of articles that are just summaries of this reddit thread with no further effort put into them, and that's pretty much the norm these days for a lot of content.

Soon they will be auto-generated with ChatGPT from reddit threads...

A lot were already automated prior to ChatGPT

Sure, but I like to think that I could pretty quickly recognize them. Much harder with GPT.

True dat

I see three relevant articles (the rest aren't relevant, e.g. talking about Steam summer sale), from sites that look more like content farms than legitimate news websites.. but yeah, there are too many content farms nowadays.

Ah very true, thanks

Here's one from Ars Technica.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/06/steam-mods-reportedly...

> Neither Valve nor potterharry97 were immediately available to respond to a request for comment.

I wanted to point out that journalists at least check their sources...

"Immediately available" could mean "we sent out the email right before we pressed submit". That's better than nothing, but it's still not journalism.

"Journalists" are like vultures now, they just run towards anything to publish as much as possible with absolutely zero regard for any journalistic ethic.

Might as well just replace journalists by AI at this point, to a large group of people (me included) they've all made themselves more hated and untrustworthy than a company, economist, politician or civil servant.

By and large, it's true. But Reuters still does some decent investigative journalism, imo.

I bet it's 2 because OP said they used "admittedly obviously AI generated from the hands" and a lot of AI generation makes really funky hands that you have to fix because it looks so bad.

So it sounds like OP slapped some half-assed generated images into a game and tried to submit it. Valve now can't really trust someone that does that to have done any due diligence.

The OP's only other reddit post says that they want to start a corporation to avoid associating their name with the game, which is a pretty big red flag to me.

"I've been developing a game for a while now, and am near ready to release it on Steam. I'd prefer it not to be associated with my name (as in I'd prefer people googling my name and future employers being unable to find out i developed this game )."

There’s a high likelihood that it’s probably pornographic or otherwise controversial.

Use copyrighted material in porn that you charge money for and you’ll get slapped with a lawsuit faster than you can load the home screen.

Depending on the genre, that may be a reasonable action. If I were to uncharitably assume OP submitted an adult game with rip-off characters, that would explain both OP & Valve's behaviors. If this transpired at all.

Given the tech involved and allegations I agree with the others that this is a smut game, but shielding yourself with an LLC is a smart move for anybody doing anything controversial, commercially.

Ask Alex Jones...

I wouldn't put my name out there for any piece of media I wanted to publish. People on the internet are insane.

ehh, I've thought about it too. It's almost recommended if you want to make adult games. Even if I don't care about employers who'd reject me for that stuff I don't want crazies harassing my family just because I wanted to make a game with penises in it.

>Steam refused to publish the game due to some obvious copyright issues (like they told Midjourney to generate superman or one-piece characters)

from post:

> contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties.

So I'm guessing 2

I'd be less sure about that, Valve has taken stances for reasons of public demand and/or their personal ethical standards (depending on what you believe) before, for example the ban on Blockchain games.

But not for Tyrone vs. Cops[0]

"When a game comes up as problematic, it gets flagged a bunch by steam users, and there's a meeting that takes place where they decide if these things stay on steam"[1].

0: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1853200/TYRONE_vs_COPS/

1: https://youtu.be/hDjxBrgtJXc?t=974

Well... Valve is a very interesting study in that regard. They have voted for violence, topics bordering to meme hate speech, pornography, but have voted against crypto shit and now AI.

Not making a verdict either way but I find it interesting. I'd like to know more about the internal discussion(s) that took place to establish their frameworks. Especially given the company is private.

For what it's worth, I think I would vote the same way, perhaps with the difference being against the hate speech depending on how bad it was.

Games with significant Crypto and AI art components bring significant risks to Valve in both legal and social contexts (99.9% of modern crypto-related projects are an intentional scam, and AI art is a legal minefield right now).

On the other hand, violence and pornography are much more accepted by society (in the context of fictional enterntainment).

I think it makes perfect sense that they care more about their users not falling for a crypto scam on their platform than the actual content of the games

This developer's next game was banned though: https://twitter.com/Team_SNEED/status/1651022411368628224. They're fairly inconsistent about it.

Valve's ban on blockchain games was more related to their cut of revenue and desire note to bolster systems that bypass it, probably along with KYC concerns converting steam wallet money into crypto.

I usually read HN comments before articles. Is a good filter. Seeing that article was just a Reddit post, I stopped reading comments at this one.

But it is just a random HN post!

I don't visit reddit anymore so I need to see more substantiated claims before I give this any thought.

Besides my already established biases towards AI: It's threatening to creative endeavors, not because it exists, but because it will impact the earning potential of creatives.

4. This is intentionally floated with nebulous veracity in order to gauge public reaction before making it official.

If so, the reaction I've seen is quite positive. Very unlikely though.

Sounds like a cop-out. They can't possibly verify that any content they're hosting isn't already copyrighted, let alone in a "murky copyright state"

They have a manual review step when you submit a game. Although you're right that they can't catch everything, they can certainly catch obvious things.

I'm sure they mostly just don't want to wind up in court with a lawyer being able to say that they let [blatant example here] get published on their store. So long as they can credibly claim that there was no way for them to tell something was in an objectionable category, I'd imagine they're fine with it.

Their rules, if you're curious: https://partner.steamgames.com/steamdirect

I doubt their manual review actually does much of anything. There are already tons of "games" that don't actually function that are just pre-built engine assets shoved together.

Those games aren't breaking any rules, why would them being allowed through imply the manual review "doesn't do much of anything"?

I wonder how automated their system is. They obviously wouldn't boot the game up and start walking around because they can just extract the media files and check. But I'm curious if there is a system that identifies copyrighted images/video stills and searches for copyrighted words.

> Sounds like a cop-out.

Sounds like due diligence.

And a sound business decision until the copyright law works itself out.

> Sounds like a cop-out.

Adhering to legal and copyright standards isn't a "cop-out"

And neither is choosing to act in a situation where the legality isn't clear.

I understand that OpenAI et al would like to assure all their investors and customers that there's nothing legally problematic with using an AI to launder away copyright infrigement, but we're going to need a few lawsuits to have the matter settled.

And valve leadership has made a decent decision of 'we don't want to be the ones being the defendants on what could be a costly and time consuming lawsuit for something they didn't make'

someone failed their ethics class in college....

And which standard is that for ai generated art ?

A lot of AI generated images retain the watermark of the copyright image it was trained on. If you sell something with that image with no agreement from the rights holder it is not fair use.

It is completely reasonable for Valve to forbid this until it is sorted out. Keep mind they are a company of IP creators, creating a marketplace for IP creators. The whole reason Steam was created was to establish a DRM that fought the piracy of Half Life. I am on the side of Valve in this.

I believe the AI generates a watermark because so many examples contained it.

Imagine taking a really dumb gig worker, showing him 10000 images, some of them with watermarks, and then telling him "draw a red car, kinda like the kind of images you saw". There's a decent chance you'll get a red car that looks nothing like any cars with the data set (original work), and yet he'll paint a memorable watermark on top because so many examples contained it, you said "kinda like the kind of images you saw", and he doesn't understand that the watermark isn't meant to be part of the picture. I believe that's whats happening.

They don’t ‘retain’ a watermark. They ‘reproduce’ the watermark.

It’s entirely possible for a diffusion model to produce an original work and yet still hallucinate a ‘shutterstock’ watermark onto it, in much the same way as GPT can hallucinate valid-looking citations for legal cases that never happened.

That's a completely fair point a few people have made. But I think the idea is, if you are a creator, the AI is doing something that you might call copying if it were a person. If it does that, what is your redress as the creator?

To correct the common misconception: Sometimes AI image generators insert a watermark because they have seen a lot of watermarks on certain kinds of images during training. This does not mean that the image itself is a copy of any particular image in the training data.

Producing (distorted) copies of images in the training data takes some real effort, and typically only occurs for images which are heavily repeated in the training data... Most of the complaints along these lines can be compared to complaints that cars cause massive bodily harm if you steer them into lightposts: The problem is easily preventable by not driving into a lightpost.

I think the "well it's transformative" argument is pretty bad faith and I think a lot of the people making it might know that.

Generative AI cannot exist without pre-existing bodies of work created by human labor. It also displaces that labor and hurts the people whose content was a requirement for AI to exist. From this view, AI is not fair use.

There are multiple jurisdictions where there have been rumblings that an AI-generated work is possibly a derived work from every single work that the AI was trained with. This hasn't been properly tested in court, but I would give very high odds that the standard will be upheld at least somewhere where Steam sells things.

If this is true, then ordinary copyright law means that AI-generated media cannot be used unless you have a release from every bit of training data you used. At least some of the currently existing AI:s were trained with datasets for which such releases are impossible, so they should not be used.

Also, for the love of god, do not use any of the AI coding assistants, or if you do, at least never publicly admit you do.

> multiple jurisdictions where there have been rumblings that an AI-generated work is possibly a derived work from every single work that the AI was trained with

This should apply to humans as well then because brains ultimately do the exact same thing. Nobody creates art in a vaccuum.

Good

What are they copping out of? What are you suggesting their real motivation is?

I'll suggest a real motivation: they want to make their own game generated by AI and have first mover advantage while they work out all the scary AI copyright issues they have to deal with that they already deal with because the same problem exists with human generated art.

Why do I say that? They want the developer to prove they only used material they created to do the training and Valve has the resources to follow that rule unlike the rest of us.

I don't think valve wanting to make a game is a realistic argument for anything in 2023. I'd believe any other reason than that lol.

> They want the developer to prove they only used material

No, they only want the developer to "affirmatively confirm" it. It doesn't say anything about Valve demanding some sort of proof.

yea, and the game is half-life 3

Well, they verify. Think again or say something that isn't just "I know something I made up about them that I didn't look up".

Risk management. AI generated content has high likelihood of copyright infringement.

funny, a while ago MSFT said Copilot was not stealing code, it was merely reading it...

Microsoft wants to leverage LLMs to expand their influence in the software development market. For them, Copilot is both revenue source and a moat, so it behooves them to claim that these models don't constitute copyright infringement. But there's no business benefit to Valve in allowing AI-generated art assets on Steam, and a small (though nonzero) amount of risk.

The best case scenario for Microsoft would be supplying the world with programming tools far ahead of all others (no idea, haven't tried any of that stuff), while maybe not getting sued to bits. The best case scenario for Valve would be not getting sued to bits while getting even more spammed by low-effort money grab attempts that hope to luck into virality than they already are.

At first approximation, yeah, the risk of getting sued to bits might be roughly the same. But the upside is not.

I'd say that too if I was Microsoft, but that doesn't make it true.

And Microsoft isn't the government. So I see no bearing on the actual issue at hand, which is valve protecting it's own ass from lawsuits that are in the realm of murk at best.

It isn’t a settled legal issue yet. It could be that Valve and Microsoft are responding to different incentives, because they have different business models. But it could also just be that their lawyers have different legal opinions.

It's incorrect to say that Valve can't verify any content they are hosting is copyrighted.

They are obviously able to identify some copyright material.

Why would Valve be on the hook for copyright? If a particular game developer happens to get sued (which happens regardless of AI), all Valve has to do is remove the game from Steam.

Assuming this is even real, it may have more to do with preventing another 1989 video game crash resulting from the market being overwhelmed with crappy games.

Then again, most AAA games today are broken pieces of suck, so IDK.

If Valve takes a % of sales from a game that is full of copyright infringement, they can be sued for their cut from the sales plus maybe more and they need to pay the lawyers.

They also care about their reputation amongst content-producers (game makers). Youtube faced this exact dynamic back in the day and have found it better to side with the large creators who care very much about protecting IP rights and so they exercise a heavy hand against copyrighted material.

"all Valve has to do is remove the game from Steam."

And take the reputation hit that would go along with that. Valve's business is 30% technology and 70% the reputation of being much less untrustworthy than the alternatives. If they lose that they can close shop.

Valve's business is its user base, as long as it has that I think they will survive.

How are reputation and user base not the same?

99.9999% of user base won't care about a few game Valve removed from its store. And they will care even less if they decide to not publish a game at all like they did in this instance. Valve is not really losing any reputation among users for not releasing some games

Valve might lose some reputation among the devs if they keep rejecting or removing games but that is far from reality, at least for now. Things perhaps might change if game studios starts picking up AI generated stuff more and more and Valve decides to blanket ban them. But even then the users of Steam is a juicy target for devs and it is a hard market to ignore.

Man, getty images is sitting on a goldmine opportunity to get into AI here. They have enough images to train something quite useful!

AI is already trained on Getty's image set... it's why people have to exclude watermarks from their prompts.

Sure, but that doesn't relate in any way to the legal problem that this post is about.

Well, that was the entire point of banning AI generated content, right? Or, are you implying that the article states different reasons for the ban?

> that was the entire point of banning AI generated content, right?

But AI generated content is NOT banned. You just have to prove you have the copyright (or permission) for the training data.

Which honestly sounds rather reasonable and should be the expectation of all current AI products.

The only reason it wouldn't be easy enough to provide is if you just scraped any available data set with a complete disregard for intellectual property.

Humans take in inputs and transform what they learn into distinct outputs. Training data is essentially just a machine doing the same thing. Knowingly scraping pirated material would be one thing, but essentially having the machine view publicly-available material is not clearly at odds with existing IP law.

And if your output isn't distinct enough from the inputs, you too aren't allowed to claim copyright or sell your work without proper licensing.

With the AI we can at least be 100% certain of which input you trained it on and under which licens, making the whole a lot easier to deal with, as compared to humans. The liability is the same, but it's much easier to avoid legal implications, so why not play ball and ensure that you have the correct licenses?

Have what correct licenses?

It's not clear that you need any license to train on data in the vast majority of cases. Having a license to train on it won't guarantee that you can grant your users a license to any particular output, especially given the addition of user input. And most of the utility is in creating outputs that are indeed distinct.

So the answer to "why not play ball?" is: 1. It's not clear that it's legally required 2. It would be incredibly expensive and/or slow progress dramatically, or limit you to pre-existing licensed content (e.g. Adobe) which drastically reduces some types of capabilities 3. Given #1, for any company that doesn't have an Adobe-style library, "playing ball" is essentially betting the company that it will become legally required, because on top of developing an AI model you're going to have to become an expert content licensing and documentation studio

What humans do when they learn is a completely separate issue and has absolutely nothing to do with how this technology is regulated.

It's the most analogous process we have; the courts may not end up treating them the same, but it's unlikely they'll say it has nothing to do with how AI gets regulated.

I'm quoting the relevant bit from Valve's email in the reddit post, to indicate exactly what they're actually forbidding.

Notably: not all AI-generated content, but rather AI-generated content from models that were trained on material that's not owned by the person submitting the game.

Can that even be proven/tested?

They can ask you to say that you own all the relevant rights, and then if it turns out not to be true later they can say they don't know.

Which seems like as much as you can hope for in a policy?

But how does this work for YouTube for example? People still upload copyrighted stuff, even if the ToS says you shouldn't.

The key is that it protects YouTube (and Valve in this case) since they can say “we weren’t allowing our users to upload copyrighted content but they snuck it in”

YouTube has to comply with things like DMCA takedowns.

So, shouldn't Steam too?

Yes and they do.

It just has to be enough that Valves legal team can claim that they approved the game in good faith and that they can be held responsible for a game developer lying and knowingly violating the terms of service.

Most sd guis save the generational data in the final pngs as default. The metadata includes the model hash. The model can be easily checked against a data from civit or hugging face.

Depending on the court, burdens of proof can vary a lot...

In court, it would be the entity claiming infringement that would have the burden of proof that their exclusive rights under copyright were violated by the assets in question, not the distributor of the asset that had the burden of showing ownership of every item in the training set of the model used in some part of the workflow.

What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed.

Given the whole "Stable Diffusion reproduces the Getty Images watermark" lawsuit[1] that's still ongoing, it's not an idle concern.

> What I'd assume Valve is worried about is that it only takes one major decision against Stable Diffusion in court to suddenly leave us in a state where "this game used Stable Diffusion" is the proof that's needed.

Hard to see how any plausible outcome that would have that result for users of SD (if model training isn’t fair use, that’s definitely a blanket-liability issue for Stability.AI — and Midjourney, and OpenAI, and lots of people training their own models, either from scratch or fine-tuning, using others' copyright-protected works.

But “using a tool that violates copyright in the workflow” is not itself infringement; whether and in what situations prompting SD to produce output makes the output a violation of copyright (and whose) would be a completely different decision, and while Ibcan certainly see cases (such as deliberately seeking to reproduce a particulaflr copyright-protected element, like a character, from the source data) where it might be (irrespective of the copyright status of the model itself), I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”.

Lots of blanket ethical arguments about using it, but that’s a different domain than law.

> I haven't seen anyone propose a rule that could be applied (much less an argument that would justify it as likely) based on copyright law that gets you to “used SD, in violation”.

The speculative worst-case outcome for these tools that I've seen suggested is the legal system deciding that an image generated with them is a derivative work of every image that was used to train the model. Since none of these models were trained on images that they had rights releases for, this would mean they're incapable of outputting images that aren't infringing on the copyrights of vast numbers of people.

I can't say how likely that is to actually be the legal outcome, of course, but it seems like the sort of concern that might lead to Valve's policy here.

I may be wrong, but I believe they were just intending to summarize.

Wouldn't the DMCA safe harbor apply, it's user submitted content?

This is a bullshit argument. There is zero liability for Valve here. They are a publisher, and are fully protected by the DMCA. Have they received a single takedown request for AI generated art? Why are they judging it to be possible infringement then?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contributory_infringement

The Copyright Act does not expressly impose liability for contributory infringement. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, the "absence of such express language in the copyright statute does not preclude the imposition of liability for copyright infringements on certain parties who have not themselves engaged in the infringing activity.

One who knowingly induces, causes or materially contributes to copyright infringement, by another but who has not committed or participated in the infringing acts themselves, may be held liable as a contributory infringer if they had knowledge, or reason to know, of the infringement. See, e.g., Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005); Sony Corp. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).

IANAL. Considering Valve not only gives games a retail platform, has to approve games before sale, and takes a cut of that sale and assuming the reddit post isn't a lie then I am gonna guess Valve's probably well staffed legal dept decided not to take a seemingly iffy legal gamble on a game that probably wasn't going to rake in a ton of sales anyway.

Consider for just a moment that they have almost certainly thought about this much more deeply and thoughtfully than you have

I agree with your sentiment but this is a poor way to dismiss an argument.

"No big company can ever do a bad thing because I'm sure they've thought deeply and thoughtfully about it."

Actually no, me pointing out that “a literal anon in their armchair probably hasn’t thought through a challenging legal problem as thoroughly as the billion dollar company making the decision has” is not actually the same as saying that “every big company is infallible” but nice try

That may be true but that won't stop people from trying to sue undoubtedly - clearly they've decided the effort and legal fees required to deal with that aren't worth it.

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