Video game lawyer says all her clients have anti-AI contracts
gamesradar.com
gamesradar.com
- AI is already capable of creating some assets that are indistinguishable from human made ones. Anti-AI sentiment is pointless if they can't tell the difference.
- devs in Countries that care a lot less about the legal stuff are going to be cranking out and studios will want in on it.
- If the primary blocker is legal someone will find a way to get around it and provide a model/service/workflow that allows a game with AI assets to claim copyright on said assets.
- Games are literally one of the absolute best uses for this tech. Someone is going to figure out a way to leverage this stuff as a first class function of the gameplay. Player directed assets or procedural world creation, dynamic quests like never before seen. They're going to hit the nail on the head and produce a banger with this tech and the landscape is never going to be the same again.
I disagree, you can object on moral grounds of which there's a few angles that could take.
But rather than regulate the social media industry driving the 12-year old industry, they'd rather push all the under 16 social media bans.
Regardless, the people who drive videos games are not adults and are unlikely to factor into the antiai
AI is a bad for the industry for a few reasons:
Players hate it. You think the vitriol over "asset store flips" is bad? AI is seen by players as lazy and low quality.
Copyright is uncertain. IP matters a lot to studios. Until that's settled, it's caution.
Art is never the bottleneck in games. It's why so much DLC is cosmetic items. Artists finish and gotta be making more stuff, but the rest of the studio is still powering through the final feature list.
Games are perceived as expressive, artistic, and creative works. Everyone is working together to build something with their human identity stamped in it. This is what we're making, together. The moment you invite slop in, the product isn't art anymore. It's just a product. Sure, maybe shovelware titles will use AI, but audiences will know.
The quality of AI assets is pretty mid. They feel samey and tacky. No one wants to play games that feel like the average game. They want games that are novel or familiar in unusual ways.
It's expensive to even try. Studios run on razor thin margins and tight deadlines. You want to spend two months on some spike to see if AI might pay off? Good luck, we'll go bankrupt.
Production schedules have orders, estimates, and processes. People do stuff in a particular order and timeframe. Disrupting a machine that works and replacing it with a machine that may work is a risk. Best case it pays off, worse case it's development hell, worst case it's a canceled game.
Worker solidarity. It's thin in game dev, but it's growing. There's a sense that the top is keeping the profit, and AI is a management driven tool to keep the worker suppressed. It's not universal, but it's present.
There's probably a dozen more reasons. Cost of tokens, tracking provenance (did this artist copy another artists work is really really important to be able to prove), high degree of change in AI ecosystem right now disrupting tool chains, it's uncertain how the market will react in the long term to games with AI assets (gamedev is a conservative industry). Etc.
LLMs are going to make meeting deadlines more obtainable (or just move the goal post on deadlines so you still have to do more while working the same hours).
This stuff is going to hit for indie devs, one or two man shows, working part time with no budget. The first one to get a smash hit, which will be because of the game play dynamic not the content, with 100% AI coding and be the proof of concept that will change the whole game. Its great for indie devs. No so great for AAA who will actually have to start having original ideas, not just "What if we make another FPS that copies X and Y"
After those indie devs start to make some cash they will spend it on original art. Not for moral reasons, but as you say, for originality, which even for humans is difficult these days.
AI doomers are looking at this wrong. Its the democratization of the game industry from the AAA monopolies. Platforms like Steam have made this possible.
Agree, there should be profit share and should be ownership and job security. Thats true in all jobs, tbh. Good things for a union to fight for.
LLMs won't change the ability to hit deadlines because the problem is that deadlines are being set without consulting the teams. And a lot of game dev is finding the fun - experimenting, basically. Am LLM cannot tell you if a game is fun, only playing it can. You need time to do that.
And indie devs don't need it. Balatro, Meccha Chameleon, Peak, Silksong, Megabonk, Yap Yap, etc. There's so many incredible indie games coming out and making waves, building the games their studios can build with the funds they have. They are making art, not slop. And people love them for it.
You think Vampire Survivors is technically or artistically difficult when it came out? The bottleneck isn't making the game. Indie devs with no skills but good ideas can already make their games with great tools and little effort these days. Games are already democratized.
If there is something smaller than indie, then LLM will allow them to get off the ground with a smaller/no team.
There is no practical argument against something that makes every aspect of a job easier.
The honest truth is that ppl are scared all their years of blood and sweat are for nought, but that just isn't true. The only way they will find that out is if they just give it a go and embrace it.
I see the AI boosters say this over and over again. People do not want it. Games have tried the whole dynamic NPC stuff along with generated quests and it's immersion breaking and more importantly, not fun.
There just hasn't been the Edison light-bulb/Watt's steam engine/Apple iPhone moment yet. I'm not even sure generative AI is capable of it yet but I see the potential there. While not all dynamic games are "not fun" (lotta people really like Rimworld) that kind of content tends to feel flat, like the never-ending quests in Skyrim. But I think it's easy to squint and see how those shallow Skyrim quests could become far more interesting with a system that was capable of basically writing a story as you play.
IMHO It's only a matter of time before someone gets it right.
my solution is a hybrid approach using a machine learning model trained to estimate player ratings for a quest script. you have a simple RNG that generates a ton of different script, the model picks out the ones that are likely to be fun and you give one of them to the player.
the meta might be using all the methods (maybe not LLMs) together to get a result thats fun, logically consistent and even fits into a larger narrative. like tracking NPC relationships to assign a target for combat missions, coming up with extra plot twists along the way then using ML to rate all the generated options.
Some assets, yes. But gamers are already losing their mind over single-digit number of AI assets (allegedly) accidentally left into a game. Even when 99% of assets are indistinguishable, you'll still get crucified by the anti-AI gamer mob for the 1% where they can.
> Anti-AI sentiment is pointless if they can't tell the difference.
The gamer crowd already hates it when you are caught reusing human-made stock assets. They hate any perceived laziness. AI is just another addition to this.
> devs in Countries that care a lot less about the legal stuff are going to be cranking out and studios will want in on it.
The studios have already been trying, hence the aforementioned backlash. The studios might want in on it due to higher productivity, but the publishers are against it because the negative PR isn't worth it.
> Someone is going to figure out a way to leverage this stuff as a first class function of the gameplay. Player directed assets or procedural world creation, dynamic quests like never before seen
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt. Choose-your-own-adventure did not kill the traditional book, Open-world and sandbox games did not kill linear storytelling. Procedural worlds universally feel empty and repetitive because they are.
People recognize a "kill 15 boars" quest when they see one: killing 10 wolves or collecting 20 unicorn horns doesn't change the fundamental structure of what it is. No matter the window dressing, people will get tired of repetitive quests generated from the same prompt. What makes a game like, say, World of Warcraft worth playing is that the thousands of quests tie together into a coherent overarching plot, where you and your friends work together for hundreds of hours on everything from disrupting supply lines, to smoking out infiltrators, to helping a kid who lost his parents during an attack, to eventually defeating the Big Bad Evil. You simply cannot do this with a one-off personalized storyline which makes up additional things as you play it.
Besides, apps like Infinite Worlds[0] are already a thing: it lets people create their own story world in which other people can experience AI-driven text adventures. Sounds great, right? Turns out a handful of people do indeed like it, but for the most part the communities for both readers and writers are banishing it to special AI sections because most people dislike it and are sick of it flooding the rest of the platform.
There are already enough books and games out there to meet everyone's desires. AI-driven storytelling does not meaningfully tap any market of unexplored narratives, while at the same time sacrificing story quality and any sense of shared experience. AI storytelling won't replace traditional storytelling in the same way that AI waifus aren't going to replace real-world (platonic or romantic) relationships.
I work in Consulting and we're seeing this across our industry as well. Multiple clauses popping up around no or limited AI use, which comes from those organisations being risk averse, through not knowing how to deal with the reputational risk if AI were to cause an issue.
We see some organisations being very strict on no AI usage, to other organisations naming particular platforms or particular classifications of information, which is a smart way to go about it.
If there is mixed usage of AI and human design then like the article said those components generated likely aren't copyrightable but the specific way you cobbled them together could be and that wouldn't need much change it seems. I'd like to follow the revenue anyway, last article I read was from about 6 months ago that steam AI-gen declarations accounted for almost 700million in revenue but it was unclear then to what extent ai tools were used (https://www.gamesradar.com/games/steam-games-that-openly-use...)
Is it worth the risk, though? AI-generated content has become good enough that it isn't always immediately obvious that it is AI-generated. This means some poorly-paid QA tester isn't guaranteed to flag it, so it might very well end up slipping into the final release - as has already happened multiple times now.
Need a placeholder four-headed dog? Grab a dog model from any random library, cut off its head, add four Blender Cubes on stalks, and you're done. Less than five minutes of work and it will stand out as "obviously a placeholder" during QA.
It's like a web developer using their own photo as a placeholder for the CEO on an "About Us" page: seems like a fun little in-joke, until it accidentally ships and you get an angry phone call from your boss's boss. It's better to do the boring thing and play it save by using a big red cross with "REPLACE ME" on it so you'll definitely catch it during the final review.