Players have been asking for the ability to filter out games made with Gen AI.
We've added an automatic tag on SteamDB based on the AI gen content disclosures on the store pages.
This is definitely a topic where a vast majority of people have been “informed” of their opinions by social media memes instead of through a reasoned examination of the situation.
People who’re probably too young to have ever lived through major technology breakthroughs.
This same “debate” always happens. When digital cameras were being developed, their users were seen as posers encroaching on the terf of “Real Photographers”.
You’d hear “Now just anybody can take pictures and call themselves a photographer?”
Or “It takes no skill to take a digital photograph, you can just manipulate the image in Photoshop to create a fake image that Real Photographers have to work years developing the skills to capture”
Computers were things that some people, reluctantly, had to use for business but could never be useful to the average person. Smartphones were ridiculous toys for out of touch tech nerds. Social Media was an oxymoron because social people don’t use the Internet. GPS is just a toy for hikers and people that are too dumb to own paper maps. Etc, etc, etc
It’s the same neo-luddite gatekeeping that’s happening towards AI. Any technology that puts capabilities in the hands of regular people is viewed by some people as fundamentally stealing from professionals.
And, since the predictable response is to make some arcane copyright claim and declare training “stealing”: Not all AI is trained on copyrighted materials.
Sure, you can make an AI without stealing but all the major ones have done it. At this point, the burden of proof is on the LLM to prove they did not steal.
When we’re talking about legal issues, the terms are important.
Copyright violation isn’t stealing. It is, at worse, a civil matter where one party can show how they’ve been harmed and recover damage. In addition, copyright law allows use of the copyrighted work without the author’s permission in some circumstances.
You’re simply stating that ‘AI is stealing’ when that just isn’t true. And, assuming you mean a violation of copyright, if it was a civil violation then exactly how much would the model owe in damages to any given piece of art? This kind of case would have to be litigated as a class action lawsuit and, if your “AI is stealing committing mass copyright violation” theory is correct then there should be a case where this has been successfully litigated, right?
There are a lot of dismissed class action lawsuits on the topic, but you can’t find any major cases where this issue has been resolved according to your “AI is stealing” claim. On the other hand, there ARE plenty of cases where Machine Learning (the field of which generative AI is a subset) using copyrighted data was ruled as fair use:
Google has won two important copyright cases that seem relevant to the AI debate. In 2006, the company was sued by Perfect 10, an adult entertainment site that claimed Google had infringed its copyright by generating thumbnail photos of its content; the court ruled that providing images in a search index was “fundamentally different” from simply creating a copy, and that in doing so, Google had provided “a significant benefit to the public.” In the other case, the Authors’ Guild, a professional organization that represents the interests of writers, sued Google for scanning more than twenty million books and showing short snippets of text when people searched for them. In 2013, a judge in that case ruled that Google’s conduct constituted fair use because it was transformative.
Creating a generative model is fundamentally different than copying artwork and it also provides a significant benefit to the public. The AI models are not providing users with copies of the copyrighted work. They’re, literally, transformative.
This isn’t a simple matter of it being automatically wrong and illegal if copyrighted work was used to create the models. Copyright law, and law in general, is more complex than a social media meme like ‘AI is stealing’.
This is definitely a topic where a vast majority of people have been “informed” of their opinions by social media memes instead of through a reasoned examination of the situation.
People who’re probably too young to have ever lived through major technology breakthroughs.
This same “debate” always happens. When digital cameras were being developed, their users were seen as posers encroaching on the terf of “Real Photographers”.
You’d hear “Now just anybody can take pictures and call themselves a photographer?”
Or “It takes no skill to take a digital photograph, you can just manipulate the image in Photoshop to create a fake image that Real Photographers have to work years developing the skills to capture”
Computers were things that some people, reluctantly, had to use for business but could never be useful to the average person. Smartphones were ridiculous toys for out of touch tech nerds. Social Media was an oxymoron because social people don’t use the Internet. GPS is just a toy for hikers and people that are too dumb to own paper maps. Etc, etc, etc
It’s the same neo-luddite gatekeeping that’s happening towards AI. Any technology that puts capabilities in the hands of regular people is viewed by some people as fundamentally stealing from professionals.
And, since the predictable response is to make some arcane copyright claim and declare training “stealing”: Not all AI is trained on copyrighted materials.
Sure, you can make an AI without stealing but all the major ones have done it. At this point, the burden of proof is on the LLM to prove they did not steal.
When we’re talking about legal issues, the terms are important.
Copyright violation isn’t stealing. It is, at worse, a civil matter where one party can show how they’ve been harmed and recover damage. In addition, copyright law allows use of the copyrighted work without the author’s permission in some circumstances.
You’re simply stating that ‘AI is stealing’ when that just isn’t true. And, assuming you mean a violation of copyright, if it was a civil violation then exactly how much would the model owe in damages to any given piece of art? This kind of case would have to be litigated as a class action lawsuit and, if your “AI is
stealingcommitting mass copyright violation” theory is correct then there should be a case where this has been successfully litigated, right?There are a lot of dismissed class action lawsuits on the topic, but you can’t find any major cases where this issue has been resolved according to your “AI is stealing” claim. On the other hand, there ARE plenty of cases where Machine Learning (the field of which generative AI is a subset) using copyrighted data was ruled as fair use:
(from https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/an-ai-engine-scans-a-book-is-that-copyright-infringement-or-fair-use.php )
Creating a generative model is fundamentally different than copying artwork and it also provides a significant benefit to the public. The AI models are not providing users with copies of the copyrighted work. They’re, literally, transformative.
This isn’t a simple matter of it being automatically wrong and illegal if copyrighted work was used to create the models. Copyright law, and law in general, is more complex than a social media meme like ‘AI is stealing’.
“Everyone who disagrees with me is misinformed”
I’m sorry, it gets better.