I don’t see why this stuff even matters. Like say they fully AI generate a loading screen for their game, and therefore they don’t have copyright on it. That doesn’t stop them from selling the game, it would only stop them from suing someone copying that specific part of the game for their own purposes. But such a person would have no way of knowing whether the image was fully AI generated or not, so even though in actuality they couldn’t be sued successfully, they will still be taking the risk. And there isn’t much reason to anyway that I can think of.
So why would a company like Activision even give a shit?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.
I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.
Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.
People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.
But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.
They could send a DMCA claim and Steam would probably just take it down right? Again, really hard to prove it was 100% AI, and in the case of a full usable 3d character model, with current technology it definitely was not. I guess what I mean by “why it matters” is, it doesn’t seem like it would practically make any difference to how things will go or what will happen.
When it gets to be possible to just about fully autogenerate games, yeah then they might have a reason to wish they could have more copyright.
I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.
Games using AI used to be banned from Steam, but they changed it to allow them. Requiring tags seems like a nice compromise.
I don’t see why this stuff even matters. Like say they fully AI generate a loading screen for their game, and therefore they don’t have copyright on it. That doesn’t stop them from selling the game, it would only stop them from suing someone copying that specific part of the game for their own purposes. But such a person would have no way of knowing whether the image was fully AI generated or not, so even though in actuality they couldn’t be sued successfully, they will still be taking the risk. And there isn’t much reason to anyway that I can think of.
So why would a company like Activision even give a shit?
I’m not sure exactly what you mean by why this stuff matters, but the stuff that you’d be generating with AI for a game wouldn’t be a loading screen or something - it would be assets. Character models, weapons, buildings, textures, voices, that’s the kind of stuff that companies want to generate with AI. Right now, you can buy stock assets to use, and that’s where all the garbage asset flips come from, but companies want to replace employees with software that makes their own assets for them for cheap. Replace the people who make games with software that spits out gacha products. But if they aren’t protected under copyright, then any asset flipper can use your main character - taking the model right from your AAA game - and throw it into their 99-cent asset flip scam, and you can’t do anything about it.
I believe Steam has the policy on AI that they do both because of public opinion about the use of AI (and the way it’s being used to steal from creators) and because AI generated games tend to fall into the same category of outright scams that NFT games do, and games containing NFTs are straight up banned from Steam.
Edit: Going back and reading through the article, I see that they were straight up putting in AI generated images into the game as skins and loading screens and stuff. These also fall under the asset flip thing, especially if they’re so obvious that they have six fingers like the zombie Santa. The same goes for their social media promotional material. You can just straight up use CoD’s ads for your own game and they can’t do anything about it.
People are upset by the use of it because of the poor quality, and, as I said, these companies want to replace the people who make games with software that churns out slop to consume. They think of gamers as pigs at a trough and developers as leeches stealing their hard earned profits.
They could send a DMCA claim and Steam would probably just take it down right? Again, really hard to prove it was 100% AI, and in the case of a full usable 3d character model, with current technology it definitely was not. I guess what I mean by “why it matters” is, it doesn’t seem like it would practically make any difference to how things will go or what will happen.
When it gets to be possible to just about fully autogenerate games, yeah then they might have a reason to wish they could have more copyright.
Games using AI used to be banned from Steam, but they changed it to allow them. Requiring tags seems like a nice compromise.