PC Gaming

It just seems Valve wants to avoid the legal minefield that is AI art, so the stance they take is just not allowing such things until there is legal precedent and with the advancing field I imagine something will occur within the next 5-10 years (if not in the next year or so). We can question the ethics of AI art and the commercialization of it but things do get a bit murky when we try to shove AI art/AI generative tools into a singular box. It would be like I insinuate that a selfie portrait is in any way comparable to a higher forms of photography like the "Saigon Execution", it would be downright insulting to have a photo that embodied many people's feelings of the Vietnam war in such a macabre photo to someone doing fucking duck lips at a black mirror for updoots or what the fuck ever people do selfies for. It seems rather unrealistic to say the process of using generative AI poisons the well (even though some argue it should) but where do we draw the line, doing touch up or drawing over it in a photo manipulation software does that make its own original work now? Like said don't know until there is legal precedent.

Some of the AI generated upscaling has been fantastic, especially some of the generative images that I've seen for game assets (such as dynamically creating rusty metal or overgrown bushes).

It's a bit of a minefield right now but that type of improvement definitely has a place in game dev, especially when the demand on indie devs gets higher each year.

Not that AI should be treated with the same rights and dignity a person, but is this not a sort of double standard? I mean, do they publish games with art made by humans who learned from works the human artists did not own?

Every day my love for valve grows stronger

Good.

The ignorance here about how AIs work is staggeringly high, almost as high as the confidence with which some users lecture based on their own beliefs.

Good. Until a studio can point to a known-dataset that isn't just ripping art illegally from sources they don't have the rights to use then it's just not worth the risk.

It's not 100% unrealistic that large studios like Blizzard and Riot (who have very clear styles that "work well" with AI generation weirdness) will eventually have huge in-house datasets that they own since it's all created under the umbrella of their employees and contractors who already sign away all the rights when they make content for the games they're working on. But until that happens, it's so obviously a red flag / great area that Valve's move is just a no-brainer.

@birlocke_ What about AI generated programming code from Github Copilot (or other similar tools)?

I really hope that lawmakers and AI companies can clear this up soon, because I think AI art could be a massive thing for gaming. In particular by generating small variances so that the world doesn't feel so copy paste.

For example, consider a map with a large office building (like in the game Control). There's so many assets needed to avoid feeling copy paste. You'll notice if the game reuses the contents of whiteboards, which isn't realistic. In real offices, we can expect every single whiteboard will likely have different contents (with the exception of blank ones). They probably will have lots in common, but they wouldn't be exactly the same. A human creating dozens of hundreds of unique whiteboards isn't a very good use of time, especially if we're talking about one of many minor assets that aren't even meant to be paid close attention to. An AI, on the other hand, could generate the many variations we'd expect to see. We can even have a human design a couple and ask the AI to make similar ones.

This isn't even all that new. We've had procedural generation (which is not AI) of stuff like height maps and trees for ages now. But we're finally able to generate entire textures (and perhaps eventually entire 3D models) very easily and while fitting into a specific theme.

Finally, for indie games, developing art can be a major challenge. There's countless programmers who want to make games and are good programmers, but they're not good artists. AI generated art could help make being a one person dev more viable. And even when the dev is an artist, it could simply save them a lot of time on what's a very time consuming part of game dev. eg, AI would be good at generating the profile pictures of characters that RPGs often show during dialogue.

won't last, before long all games will have some elements of ai generated content

Haven’t procedurally generated maps been a part of gaming for a long time now?

That sounds like a positive thing as a way to verify that the content was designed by humans, but concerning that AI has any input at all, unless it's for finding issues with the gameplay mechanics and nothing to do with game designing.

Possible, with AI the single player campaigns might closer to playing with real people but AI can never duplicate human behaviour and instinct, only imitate it.

Let the market decide. If Valve doesn’t provide them a sales avenue, another party will. Many don’t comprehend yet is that AI generation is entirely user-driven. Without hundreds of refinements, you would only receive the most generic output. As for copyright infringement, what exactly is being violated here? When we use material X or Y to generate an original output Z, how does that infringe upon any rights? It doesn’t. Rather, it highlights that people need to adapt and evolve. The sooner this realization sets in, the better. The calligraphers and and book artisans went through this ordeal so will they.

I would like to see re-releases of games with textures upscaled using AI upscalers. Nobody is going to go back and scale these up by hand, but with computer assistance, it might be viable.

Based beyond belief.

They should prepare for invasion of patent trolls who claim to have right of arts included in AI model.

Is this just AI art? Or if you had AI npcs or something like that would it also be blocked?