Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?
There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people who want to spam art platforms.
The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared.
I don't think that this was an anti-spam policy - Steam already manually reviews all new applicants that want to publish a game, so they don't need to forbid anything to turn it down. I'm guessing that this policy was because they don't want to be entangled in IP legislation if some copyright exception is carved out to forbid the use of generative AI.
People have been trumpeting this since day one of Stable Diffusion releasing, but I'm seeing the same output quality as that day and I've been keeping up.
The reason why it's not as visible with Stable Diffusion is because a lot of the technologies around it circle the same few foundational SD models - people build on top of them, add new ways of interacting with them, but ultimately, the same thing underlies them all. Community support is seen as more important than cutting-edge tech, which is why something like Stable Diffusion XL hasn't even seen universal adoption yet.
As an aside, no one said AI couldn't achieve drawn generated text, that's been possible for years prior to stable diffusion.
Human artists might have to become used to tracking provenance. If you work with traditional media, that's easy: Here's the painting. For digital artists, software can publish encrypted, timestamped brushstroke-level histories of the work if we need that level of proof.
Part of becoming an artist is learning how to evaluate your own work, break it down, and critique the shit out of it. When you jump straight to generating art with an AI, you skip the criticism step, which means you don't have a sense of taste and you haven't really explored what your preferences for style are.
A lot of AI art generators default to an extremely cinematic, "Hollywood" art style - i.e. exactly the sort of thing that is trying to look impressive to people who don't know better, and will make them overlook all the fundamental mistakes in the image.
[0] Normally I wouldn't scarequote "artist" here, given that actual artists do use AI tools where it makes sense.
Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made pieces, everything is as it is for a reason; it’s communicating something. In ML generated pieces, things are the way they are because that’s what’s statistically likely for the type of generated image.
With art, it's more subtle, because there there's no single reference point that lets us determine if an artwork is "true". There are the glaring errors that everyone can agree on - notoriously, human hands - but those cases are improving rapidly.
Microsoft and every other tech company is indeed investing billions in the tech. I'm sure each company can fund the entire (woefully underpaid) art industry by themselves, let alone the 10 or so tech hubs altogether.
But they are happy to throw money at AI instead for the payoff of being the next big tech brand.
That's basically the argument why Jason Allen should have been allowed to win the art competition, is it?
It's not that he typed "award winning painting" into Midjourney and the image was the result.
He tried hundreds of seeds, selected one that he liked and refined it over countless iterations with infilling until he was satisfied with the result.
I honestly don't see how this is fundamentally different from other art forms.
The reality is that most legal things are determined by _convincing people of a truth_. Perhaps you can set up a whole scheme to "launder" AI art and attach names to them. And all the papertrail you generate doing this will show up in discovery in some lawsuit and the copyrights all disappear.
Laws are vibes, not code.
Art will then take less skill to produce, and be produced faster for lower prices.
An 80% price reduction on art (because artists can now produce it 5 times faster thanks to AI) is 80% as good as getting it for free.
They don't allow ai art produced by models trained on material that the model makers don't have copyright to.
In practice that's a ban (currently) but in principle it isn't.
Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise.
This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc.
If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim.
In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records.
In the case of an individual doing digital only, that's a little harder. You probably have to keep some intermediate artifacts.
Besides, it's not that easy of a problem - a lot of corporate artists are salaried workers, they don't get specified commissions with an attached bill per work, but are paid a salary so the company can ask them to draw whatever they need throughout the process. Considering this, all artists would need to retain "intermediate artifacts".
And then, how do these artifacts work for other ways of doing art? What about traditional artists whose work gets scanned in after completion - would they have to keep a camera on hand to take photographs as they're working? What about an animated film - would every intermediate step in production, from character design to storyboarding to environmental design etc etc need to have a full record for every single sketch?
Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?
I'm not sure if it's that simple - for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now. Providing complete history logs isn't normal practice, and expanding law to necessitate it isn't common sense.
> Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?
I'll make a prediction that this future is further from now than you may think it is. Sure, things like static imagery may become completely indistinguishable from human-made art in the near(ish?) future, but the production of all art is still an unsolved problem. How long will it take until some advanced multimodal algorithm can make a full game that can measure up to ones that are released today? I'm guessing that it'll take a while.
And yeah - once we do reach this scenario of hypothetical "art post-scarcity", we may as well just delete the whole copyright system from existence - it'd be a logical thing to do. But how does any of it contradict what I said in my other comments?
> for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now.
https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formva.pdf
Registration is not a rubber-stamp, it is increasingly refused because of indicia of AI tooling.
Why would adding some questions on provenance and methodology be beyond the pale?
> it is increasingly refused because of indicia of AI tooling.
Do you have a source that a statistically significant number of copyright applications gets refused on account of a work just seeming like AI? On what grounds does it get refused?
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2023/03/16/2023-05...
We can disagree on how long it will take us to get there, but if you use AI generated content, that is not product by copyright, your game as whole, sure, as long as it is not the result of a simple prompt, you're protected as usual.
Keep in mind that already, in many games, there is a mix of protected and unprotected content, for reasons of trademark, copyright, and licensing.
Generally the party asserting ownership has the burden of proof. The standard is "preponderance of the evidence", which generally is understood to mean "more likely than not" or "> 50%". So basically it means if you can prove to judge or jury that there's a >50% chance you own the work, it's good enough.
Also note that in many cases where there's a dispute over the evidence, witnesses are summoned to testify. So you might not have a "full notary log" of how it was produced or all the "intermediate artifacts", but as long as the artist is able to convincingly explain how the work was created, and the other party's lawyers are not able to poke holes in their story during cross evidence, that's usually enough.
Which is, basically, what happens today, if the authorship or ownership of a work is disputed.
That said, I'm not sure whether "assume work AI (thus uncopyrightable) unless proven otherwise" should be the default for other reasons. For one, most quality "AI art" needs some manual adjustments or touch ups, and arguably the prompt and hyperparameters may be sufficient creativity element. I mean, that's basically how copyrights dealt with photography (the mere fact you decided when and where to point the camera with what settings is sufficient for copyright to subsist in a photo).
I love when non-artists talk about art.
If it's digital media, the software can keep an encrypted record at the brushstroke level that can be played back to produce a bit-perfect reproduction. Maybe even write it to a public ledger.
For digital media - ignoring how overbearing this whole system could be, what prevents someone from taking all that data and making an algorithm that outputs brush stroke parameters instead of pixels? And digital art isn't the only thing we need to concern ourselves with - eventually, we might have AI models that could make 3D models, sounds, vector imagery and other forms of art. The idea of just documenting every workflow would be an ever-growing burden with no perfect solutions.
Um, that's a real work, you know? In what way does this differ from people who take a photograph and then, for example, creating an oil painting?
Now, there are some weirdnesses because of the copyright of the source photograph, but the oil painting would be your own work.
Yeah, you might get called into court to demonstrate that you can produce the work. But so did Michael Jackson.
So AI (or a simpler, non-statistics-based algorithm) can't produce these artifacts and will never be able to? Why? Are these artifacts "human souls" or something?
> In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records.
Outsourcing.
I think this is rather what pro-AI/spammers are trying to do by flooding platforms, that aren't so successful. People don't give as high scores they do for human generated data, and AI images are still considered a form of spam.
Why would that be relevant in court? Just show the process of making the art.
this is enough to use them without copyright violation for example for other ai models training.