Are you okay with AAA studios using GenAI that was trained only on licensed works?

To me there's a difference between using assets that were generated by AI and a game using generative AI to create assets. A person hired as an artist to make dialogue portraits could have shoveled some slop to meet a deadline. That's a production issue. But if the games are being integrated with a generative AI model to cover minor assets, that's a fundamental development issue and I can possibly see how that's good for anything.

I'm not OK with any business practices of AAA studios, and I don't think there's a way for them to get enough educated consent for creations (i.e. not just someone accepting a shitty TOS on deviantart 6 years ago) to make a good GenAI model. But if I were to put aside the first part and assume a magical reality where the second could manifest without coercion and lies, I would theoretically be OK with it.

It sounds like we disagree on some fundamentals here, so I'm happy to bow out. Have a good midweek! ️

Hard to convince a studio to embrace it if this article is the kneejerk response to some PNGs. Which leads the loudest complainers to act vindicated, because what could it possibly be good for, except the few PNGs they notice?

Huh, it's almost like this new tool is fine for placeholder art, and placeholders can be good enough to ship. Did you know The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" was supposed to have a brass section? That driving riff with the fuzzbox guitar was a placeholder. They released it as-is, the song hit #1, and distortion became mainstream. At what point do we stop lamenting all the horn players who were robbed?

> It sucks that players are having to scour every asset and line of dialogue Im sorry. But this is pathetic if it's true. And I mean that on part of the players.

So I'm in two minds about this. I am a software engineer by trade and have an idea for a game I'd like to try making. The problem is that I don't even really know how to make games, not do I have any artistic abilities myself. I can't afford to pay a load of artists for work for a game that might never be finished and might never make money. So I'm stuck in this hard decision of do I try and make my game, invest a lot of money and potentially lose it all, or do I try and find a publisher who can front the money but lose creative control of my game? Or do I use AI to give me a head start in building something that I can use to garner interest in, in the hope that enough people like it that I can fund the development? Essentially, AI offers me a way to create something that I would not otherwise be able to create and that's really hard to accept.

The 20-80 rule really saves your ass when you're a solo dev. Be really good at the one thing, nail the game mechanics, and then learn the 20% you need to be 80% good at everything else. If the game is kick ass, it'll be forgiven if everything looks like stick figures(but well drawn stick figures, mind)

Yeah I've never been able to draw in my entire life, believe me I tried. I have an eyesight impairment and that doesn't help.

Fair point, I should have asked about commercial games in general That said I didn’t mean that the game studio itself would do the AI training and own their models in-house; if they did, I’d expect it to go just as poorly as you would. Rather, I’d expect the model to be created by an organization specialized in that sort of thing. For example, [“Marey”](https://nofilmschool.com/marey-ethically-trained-ai-video-model) is one example I found of a GenAI model that its creators are saying was trained ethically. Another is [Adobe Firefly](https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/get-set-up/learn-the-basics/adobe-firefly-faq.html), where Adobe says they trained only on licensed and public domain content. It also sounds like Adobe is paying the artists whose content was used for AI training. I believe that Canva is doing something similar. StabilityAI is also doing something similar with [Stable Audio 2.0](https://stability.ai/news/stable-audio-2-0), where they partnered with a music licensing company, AudioSparx, to ensure that artists are compensated, AI opt outs are respected, etc.. I haven’t dug into any of those too deep, but they seem to be heading in the right direction at the surface level, at least. One of the GenAI scenarios that’s the most terrifying to me is the idea of a company like Disney using all the material they have copyright for to train their own, proprietary GenAI image, audio, and video tools… not because I think the outputs would be bad, but because of the impact that would have on creators in that industry. Fortunately, as long as copyright doesn’t apply to purely AI generated outputs, even if trained entirely on your own content, then I don’t think Disney specifically will do this. I mention that as an example because that usage of AI, regardless of how ethically the model was trained, would still be unethical, in my opinion. Likewise in game creation, an ethically trained and operated model could still be used unethically to eliminate many people’s jobs in the interest solely of better profits. I’d be on board with AI use (in game creation or otherwise) if a company were to say, “We’re not changing the budget we have for our human workforce, including for contractors, licensed art, and so on, other than increasing it as inflation and wages increase. We will be using ethical AI models to create more content than we otherwise would have been able to.” But I feel like in a corporate setting, its use is almost always going to result in them cutting jobs.

My guy you can literally use MSpaint and circle tool and eraser to clear some lines to make a guy. I conceptualized and drew this in like 5 minutes. Some angel platformer fighter character. I imagine the bandana flowing and trailing behind the character as they jump. Could probably use the halo as a weapon or something. The hardest part was the bandana which was the only part I did free hand. This is obviously a first draft concept art and needs to be seriously polished and prepped for animation, but in the second picture I shrunk it down to 64x64 and a lot of the flaws disappear. You just need to learn some technical stuff about composition and color theory to make something that's even half decent and it will be enough. Or hell, literally steal this character idea because I'm not doing anything with it. Here's you're written permission. Make a cool game and put MSpaint art in it! (but actually use a better program because MSPaint kinda sucks.)  

> It's not going away. Imagine saying this about asbestos, lead, freon, bitcoin, or cigarettes. You don't want it to go anywhere, why the hell would I listen to you?

Yewahh.... How does that help?

It's not allowed. There's only one opinion on AI allowed on social media: It's the worst thing to ever happen and produced by stealing from starving child artists. The ouput is somehow simultaneously the worst quality imaginable with no redeeming qualities and also about to put every creative out of a job by next quarter. The fact that you don't hold this opinion tells everyone what a horrible person that you are for not knowing the right opinion to have. Enjoy being downvoted out of the conversation between tech illiterate children who believe everything they're told and tech illiterate creatives who haven't found a hyperbole that they cannot employ in their Luddite quest to stop advanced linear algebra

I'm just showing you there's ways around limitations.

I don't care about AI in video games, seems silly to give a shit. I DO care if they are using AI to analyse or harvest my data. Otherwise.... its a freaking video game. Whatever.

I don't know. I think you used a computer. That is going to put people out of work. As a former graphic artist, this really shits on my field. That no longer exists, because computer.

I appreciate that, but that isn't really a solution for a saleable game. Concept art sure but that's it.

I would really like to see both: Artists creating their vision, drawing and sketching out ideas. Then using their own work, bring that to life with generative AI. Use it to help with rigging and modeling. Use it to take mashes and apply them in the holodeck as it is generating the world you are exploring. It is not just one or the other. It just become a little more complicated.