Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"
Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"
I think what's important in this drama is that, despite their evil monopoly shit they're guilty of, Valve really does do the right thing sometimes to win consumers. Gamers want AI disclosures, even if devs don't.
That's why it's not surprising to see that statement from Sweeny, and why it's not surprising that people still hate the Epic Games Store.
There's nothing evil in Steam monopoly. Their evil thing is gambling.
Just curious, what is the evil monopoly shit you're referring to? Is it simply the fact they are effectively a monopoly in games distribution, and that in and of itself is bad, or are there more specific practices or actions you're thinking of?
People often point to their 30% cut of all transactions (except for large publishers) and their MFN policies that force devs to price games the same on other stores too.
Both. I'm strongly of the opinion that monopolies should not exist, and if they do it's the result of illegal and/or unethical activity, and should be fixed immediately. They break the free market and end up hurting everyone in the long run.
In addition to what @Asterisk@lemmy.world said, they also include a forced arbitration clause in their terms of service to prevent class action lawsuits from customers.
Tbh, they're very low on my personal list of monopolies to hate, so I don't really have that many arguments ready to go. I'm sure others have made a good case against Steam somewhere on the internet already.
To add, I am pretty sure most of devs are actually for AI disclosure. Who really is against are publishers.
It's a pity other platforms, especially social media / video platforms don't require full disclosure of use of AI. It might allow a lot of AI slop and misinformation to be eradicated, downvoted, or at least call itself out.
Agree 100%. It is just Disclosure, if you use AI for voice lines on a robot character but the game is good then disclosing that "this game used ai during creation" isnt a bad thing, you used a tool for a tool to help make your game. I dont think disclosure hurts you.
If your game is a simple asset swap of a unity demo and you used 10 prompts to generate all the story, dialogue and sky boxes then disclousing you used ai is simple a branding iron on a pile of shit. The branding iron aint changing the smell of your pile.
There is a lot of inbetween these 2 extreams, but the consumer havung more information in the buying process is not a bad thing.
Epic Games CEO and Fortnite boss Tim Sweeney:
everyone will have to 'fess up to using it eventually as AI will become "involved in nearly all future production."
Once again Epic games act like the moronic villains they are.
It's sad how huge companies are basically their CEO. CEO makes decisions and talks - that's the company. Even if the hundreds and thousands of workers below them [largely] disagree and would do differently.
This is especially bad in USA, but usually a bit better in European countries that have representation of the unions on the board.
As an engineer, tell that to my seat-flattened ass Tim Apple.
Companies that use AI in production are sewing the seeds of their own demise.
Why do they say these stupid things as if they were giving an order?
They can't order people to buy their stuff, they can't order their stuff to work when it doesn't. Having "AI" in it doesn't change the latter part in case they think otherwise, just got this idea.
I suppose they like the change from the old "spend lots of resources, then scale indefinitely" with software development to the more traditional in other spheres "spend constant amount of resources for constant result", and expect it will build hierarchies like everywhere.
Well, companies were going bankrupt long before personal computing.
I don't know about Epic Games, I think I'll play Oolite in free time when I'm done with my EU4 addiction. Or actually make something useful.
It’s literally a plagiarism machine, so I completely agree with them.
Disclosure is good, but it would be useful to be granular and clear.
Games could use ai for interactive dialogue or content generation and it would be really cool.
Games could run models like olmo 3 which are completely open source, and that wouldn’t be bad in my opinion.
Ai textures probably make sense too depending on context.
It would be funny if a game used the base tier OpenAI api and your wizard started slipping some ads into his dialogue.
It's like hard to draw a line as well. If I take a picture with my phone today of the city I live in and use it in a game, the phone applies some AI filters automatically.
I think different people have different aversions to why they don't like or want to use AI.
In the case of "automatic" "filters" on pictures taken on phones, this is or was called computational photography. Over time more capabilities were added to these systems until we now have the moon situation and the latest NN processing.
If someone only cares about environmental impact, then that doesn't really apply in this case if the processing happens on device, since by definition a phone is low power and thus doesn't consume water for cooling or much power for compute.
However, some people care about copying, for numerous and possibly conflicting reasons. Generating assets might violate their sense that IP was stolen, since it's a pretty well known fact that that these models were created in large part with dubiously licensed or entirely unlicensed works. I think a reasonable argument can be made that the algorithms that make LLMs work parallels compression. But whatever the case, the legality doesn't matter for most people's feelings.
Others don't like that assets are generated by compute at all. Maybe for economic or political reasons. Some might feel that a social contract has been violated. For example, it used to be the case that on large social media, you had some kind of "buy in" from society. The content might have been low quality or useless drivel, but there was a relativly high cost to producing lots of content, and the owners of the site didn't have direct or complete control of the platform.
Now a single person or company can create a social media site, complete with generated content and generated users, and sucker clueless users into thinking it's real. It was a problem before, various people getting sucked into an echo chamber of their peers, now it is likely to happen that there will be another set of users get sucked into an entirely generated echo chamber.
We can see this happening now. Companies like openai are creating social media sites ("apps" as they call them now) filled only with slop. There are even companies that make apps for romance and dating virtual or fake partners.
Generated content is also undesirable for some users because maybe they want to see the output of a person. There is already plenty of factory bullshit on the various app stores, why do they need or want the output of a machine when there is already existing predatory content out there they could have now.
Some people are starting to wake up to the fact that they have only a single life. Chasing money doesn't do it for most. Some find religion, others want to achieve and see others achieve. Generating content isn't an achievement of the person initiating the generation. They didn't suffer to make it. A person slaves away in art school for years only to take a shit job they looked up to for years, then doing the best work they can under crazy pressure is an achievement.
Ew why
Based
I want to know if AI was used or not to make a game; it's a deciding factor for me, as I will not buy anything built with AI. No matter if it's a placeholder or not, as "AI" is an ethical and environmental concern for me, every prompt, and usage makes things worse. For me, I don't want to send a message that using "AI" is okay for a dev studio by buying the product. I'll exclude them my purchasing choices to send the right message.
I want to know if AI was used or not to make a game; it’s a deciding factor for me, as I will not buy anything built with AI. No matter if it’s a placeholder or not
Same. Once they dipped into the convenience, I can't believe they wouldn't use it again when they're in a rush, crunching, etc.
I don't even touch games with AI-generated store assets, they just feel so cringeworthy. If you can't afford an artist, just use assets from the game ffs.
I'm pretty on-record as being resistant to LLMs, but I'm OK wiþ asset generation. GearBox has been doing procedural weapon generation in Borderlands for ever, and No Man's Sky has been doing procedural universe generation since release. In boþ cases, artists have been involved in core asset component creation, but procedural game content generation has been a þing for years, and getting LLMs involved is a very small incremental step. I suppose þere must be a line; textures must be human created, not generated from countless oþer preceding textures, but - again - game artists have been buying and using asset libraries forever.
Yeah. Þere's a line in þere, somewhere. LLM model builders aren't paying for þe libraries þey're learning from, unlike game artists. But games have been teetering on generated assets and environments for a long time; it's a much more gray area þan, say, voice actors. If an asset/environment engine was e.g. trained entirely on scans of real-life objects, like þe multitude of handguns and rifles, and used to generate in-game weapons, þe objection would be reduced to one you could level at games like NMS: instead of paying humans to manually generate þe nearly infinite worlds, þey've been using code which is wiþin spitting distance of a deep learning algorithm. And nobody's complained about it until now.
The thing is, with LLM code completion in every IDE, AI features and filters in Photoshop and other image editors, video/audio editing software etc, it will very soon be that there are only games made with AI assistances, and games made by devs lying they used tools with no AI.
I've made a game using AI features all the way back in 2010 - I used the brand new content aware delete & fill feature in Photoshop CS5 to edit visual novel backgrounds. That was AI.
Windows, google, photoshop now all comes with AI. Are you going to avoid any product made with these? AI isn't just a tool to generate a game with a click, it can offer all sort of feedback and tools, for example it could be used to change the color of a box without having to do it manually. Unless the whole process is documented you will not be able to tell if AI has been used or not.
Damn straight
"Calls."
There's only one call, and it's coming from Tim Sweeny at Epic. It's just more of his usual yelling at clouds, because he's got a pathological hate-on for anyone else who runs a storefont, including Apple and Google but especially Valve. He hasn't made any positive contribution to the world since about 1998, and at this point we can all safely discard his opinion with nothing of value being lost. He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform because he thinks it'll make him free money, but maybe he ought to worry about the smell coming from his own house before he goes around trying to dictate at others how they should run theirs.
It's so unfunny that the only one to contest Valve on PC monopoly is Tim Fortnite, who seemingly does the worst job everywhere yet still can still afford it. It's almost like Gaben himself created a perfect villain for his company, so it'd never be criticized.
He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform
Don't forget the blatant scams called crypto games! He proudly announced Epic Games Store would happily sell games centered around NFTs and crypto after Valve said they wouldn't allow it.
Slopification
LOL This is gonna catch on. I've seen things that this describes.
We need the disclosures now to slow the pace of the bullshit taking over, but it will not be stopped.
I mean, fuck, at this point if they're using photoshop to extend a background, it's AI. It'll just end up becoming the California this contains items known to cause cancer logo all over again. It's still the right thing to call it out, but everything, in short order, will require the label.
So why the fuck are they fighting to not do it? I'll be a couple of billable hours and everyone and their brother will either disclose that they're doing it or lie about it and we can move on with life.
Gabe wins the internet once again.
Wasn’t Gabe, but it was an artist for Valve.
A king's victory is won by his soldiers
(/j they're not monolithic or synonymous)
A smart consumer will pick the cheapest one that does the job at the best quality.
There is no such thing as ethical capitalism and fuck loyalty to brand trademarks.
I'm curious how they define AI. In my view AI has been used for games for as long as games have existed.
Funny how the meaning of AI is slowly changed by these companies.
It is highly likely art and script, there are a lot of horrible games these days with ai art and script.
So AI controlled photoshop is ok?
I think the standard is set on wrong metric. Slop is slop and it doesnt matter how ot was brewed be it asset steal or lazy ai
If you are talking about NPC AI as if their behaviour that is programmed - then you talk about the wrong thing. The buzz is about AI being used to generate textures, levels, designs of characters, text/dialogue, story/plot of the game.
I would never respond to social media drama in their position.
It is a fools errand and I do not understand why the smart people at Valve do not understand this. First…it relies on the developer to add the tag. Second the developer may not even know an asset they bought used AI in its creation. Most AI researchers agree that it will become near impossible to determine if an asset was generated with AI, and even using AI to detect will just mean when it does detect, it now knows how to create one that cannot be detected and we end up in a cat and mouse race that humans have no ability to play in.
We already have tools to rank titles and if it is AI slop, a low effort copycat game, the ratings will reflect this regardless of the tech that may or may not have been used.
I would hazard to guess that are countless titles that used some AI in its development, perhaps unbeknownst to the developer. Plus, what if a developer made everything from scratch themselves but used AI on one texture to upscale it…does this get an AI label even though it amounts to something like 0.00001% do the title? AI labels are a fools errand and we all need to just rely on the rating system and judge titles on their merits not the tools that made them as like I said, it will become into know AI was used.
A game could be good and yet contain media created with AI generation - high rating + AI tag covers that case.
Most AI use will be slop, but as you say some could be an accident. How the dev responds to users finding out will inform users how to rate the dev team themselves.
I think users finding out is a window rapidly closing as AI get so good that it is not possible to tell it is AI.
We already have tools to rank titles and if it is AI slop, a low effort copycat game, the ratings will reflect this regardless of the tech that may or may not have been used.
It is not enough for me. I want to know if AI was involved so that I can avoid it even if it is good.
What % of AI used is too much for you?
I love how Valve's strategy is basically just 'don't piss off the customers and occasionally do something super fucking cool', while everyone else in the space seems to be cutting off their nose to spite their face
Benefits of not beinp publicly traded.
Overturn Ford v Dodge
Exactly, just what I wanted to say
Valve ceo just added a $500 million mega yacht to his fleet. Valve true benefit is that thanks to window they managed to build a monopoly on videogames distribuition and that their customers are kids addicted to videogames.
Valve also gutted their LGBTQIA+ content a few months back. And they have had a MASSIVE nazi infestation basically since they set up message boards because Gabe Newell is infamously libertarian.
So... chill a bit with the glazing. They are better in a lot of ways but they are not our friends.
So libertarian he become a billionare thanks to a platform where you don't own any of your games.
Unless it's their UI, they love to do pointless changes nowadays. On top of the stuff mentioned by the other replies
any and all UI changes will make people angry
steam has had so few of them compared to idk youtube that, imo it's fine even if it's kinda pointless
I don't love much how people fall from valve marketing. Not owning any game i buy would piss me off