The game I've spent 3.5 years on has been rejected and retired by Steam today
sh.reddit.com
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I explained exactly how this worked and that there was no AI-content directly in the build, and even since then issued a new build without this mod ability just to be super safe. [...] Then, today, I randomly received an email that my app has been retired with a generic 'your game contains AI' response.
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/167iied/the_game_i...
I’m worried Valve will strangle what I think is the most exciting use of AI - artist trained models generating NPC content, lore, and procedural game content to create rogue like RPG of arbitrary complexity.
My guess would be that they can't verify what AI you used, at least without investing the kind of resources required to actually make case by case decisions.
I'm not saying this is your position, this is somewhat tangential, but I am confused why I seem to hear from people that both AI is a force of nature and companies stand in it's way at their peril, but also that it's a delicate flower and that any kind of management may strangle it in the crib. To be clear I know you aren't making both claims, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it does feel like it's coming from the same general community of people. And I'm perplexed by that.
But yeah, I would also be interested to play and perhaps developing games like that. If someone is developing a game like that and they wants to hire a backend dev with experience integrating with models in a realtime context, shoot me an email. (I'm half kidding, I don't expect someone like that to happen to be in this particular thread, but only half.)
How do they verify copyright material isn’t in static assets? I can’t imagine it’s very thorough. I imagine most of it is based on attestation.
Regarding your question, I don’t share those views but can understand how they exist simultaneously. With an open hand, like was afforded internet and technologies, it could shape the world in hard to imagine ways as did the internet. However like the early internet it could have been strangled in the crib through knee jerk regulation and prohibitions. I think AI model builders and hosters want safe harbor similar to content hosters and providers allowing the end use of the technology to be regulated but the providers to be allowed to operate on a best effort basis. For instance the copyright question here is strangling any game that uses a generative model. A reasonable legal outcome is that it’s fair use to incorporate copyright material, but the output must not violate copyrights.
I’d note they also have no way to reasonably unpack all game assets, visual, text, and audio, and verify there’s no copyright material. To my memory there are several cases of video game publishers including copyright violating assets. It seems like a copout to take on faith a no copyright violation attestation for static content but not on models.
I'm sure you're right that's all they would need to win a lawsuit, but they would probably prefer to avoid one altogether. Or at least not to be the first publisher sued.
There's no reason to suspect a generic asset is infringing on it's face, but for models trained on the open internet it's an entirely unanswered question.
Indiscriminate crawler trained models are one thing, but models trained by the game developer directly should be handled differently. In that case they actually are the same as a generic asset, as they were assembled and curated by the game developer with an understanding of copyright compliance. But there are cases where they didn’t - particularly with audio.
If you tasked a human being with sufficient knowledge, latitude, and resources to investigate a game with a significant fraction of their time (eg they had a caseload of like 1-3 games) then I'm sure they could figure this out on a case by case basis. But I doubt they're willing to make that kind of investment.
But none of that makes it right, of course. I'm ambivalent about Valve's decisions here.
Edit for reply/clarification: "it's more likely" - I'm not speculating on the internal politics at Valve. Just stating the fact that, regardless of if assets are AI-generated or not, Valve cannot be certain they don't infringe copyright. In this respect, AI-generated assets with assurance the model wasn't trained on copyrighted works, are no worse than traditional ones.
they know that because steam is such a large store, they can influence the direction of the game dev community and set a norm that they prefer to see.
So why all of a sudden, that ai generated assets would get such attention?
Given that in the past that have been very reticent about taking down games (eg see [1][2]), I don't find it likely that they have an "anti AI" stance. I personally would need to see like, a blog post or some other statement to that effect in order to buy that hypothesis.
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/valve-gabe-newells-libertarian-stea...
This is summarizing reporting from People Make Games:
> There's no reason to suspect a generic asset is infringing on it's face, but for models trained on the open internet it's an entirely unanswered question.
As in, there's no reason not to give the benefit of the doubt to a traditional asset, but it's not yet understood how copyright works with a generative asset.
Am I missing something?
Except if you have the rights to all the works used to train your AI model. In that case, there is no risk that you are infringing.
I think it's interesting to wonder what Valve would say about games using AI exclusively server side. They cannot control (or know) what technologies a developer uses on their personal game servers.
Maybe if the rules are "your game shall not contain AI", then don't write a ChatGPT integration for it.
AI is such a broad term though. Either ban GPT/LLM architecture if that's the goal, or image synthesis, but be specific!
Probably more than 50% of all games out there contain something one could call "AI".
Then remove all the games I guess? :)
And no, it's not related to language.
Where can I go to get games that do integrate AI/AI content?
We have good decentralized protocols these days.
Though the top level comment asserting this is probably more about copyright than quality is probably right as well.
I was attacked for saying that entry barrier of 100$ was too low, but clearly that would have been only reasonable way to remove some.
Steam started their current "we allow absolutely everything" policy because they were tired of people making fun of them for constantly banning Japanese games because they think anything anime-style is child porn.
Except the actual policy implementation is that Japanese games still get banned, even if they're all-ages and on every other storefront, but now it's also full of Western hentai games.
(This is consistent with Steam getting employees from Microsoft, DirectX/Xbox were codenamed on the theme "what's the most racist thing we can say about our Japanese competitors".)
Wouldn't you say there is a different between "Games made by AI" and "Games that included AI in one build for a specific feature as a test, and removed it"? The shovelware you talked about is the first, not the second.