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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
To add, I am pretty sure most of devs are actually for AI disclosure. Who really is against are publishers.
There’s nothing evil in Steam monopoly. Their evil thing is gambling.
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.
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.
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.
Jean completely agree, but for me that just underlined the point above of making it more granular. But there will be almost no big games where you can say truly nothing was done by the AI.
Ew why
People like when the phone cleans up their face
I like when my phone captures actual unedited pictures. I think it’s dangerous to modify recordings automatically without the user’s express consent.
Phones have been doing a lot of post-processing for a long time.
Tbh, most phone cameras would look crap without it. It’s something of a miracle what they can achieve with a tiny sensor and a tiny fixed lens.
Have you used a phone camera recently? This has been baked in for many years on every out of the box camera experience on flagship phones.
So you’re saying even MY pictures have probably been edited by my phone without my consent? That’s really bad. I didn’t opt into this. I don’t like what this could be used for.
Yeah, just because it’s been “baked in” for many years, doesn’t make it OK
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
I don’t love much how people fall from valve marketing. Not owning any game i buy would piss me off
Benefits of not beinp publicly traded.
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.
Overturn Ford v Dodge
Ford V Dodge is a meme
Exactly, just what I wanted to say
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.
Gabe Newell is infamously libertarian.
So libertarian he become a billionare thanks to a platform where you don’t own any of your games.
You are aware the game removals are due to MasterCard and Visa right?
At best you can argue that Valve will not protect you. Hence, not your friend.
This is a shit take because Valve had no leverage there. It wasn’t their decision
They also let your children gamble, so that’s cool too
I’d rather have control over my digital items than gambling protection that infringes on what can I do with them
What items do you think that you have control over? You don’t own anything in your account and it can be taken away for any reason or for no reason at all.
https://www.valvesoftware.com/en/legal/site-terms-of-use
All right, title and interest in and to this Site, the Materials and all associated Proprietary Rights is owned by Valve or its licensors, and no ownership of any of the foregoing items is transferred to you by virtue of this Agreement or Valve’s permitting you to use the Site.
So your argument is because valve allows me to do whatever with my items, they should allow me less?
As we all did when we were young playing pokemon, Mario, Mario party, marbles, mighty beans, hot wheels, etc
I don’t remember playing with real money doing any of that or international crime and extortion rings developing around them.
Yeah but it feels a little more scummy when it’s Visa, Mastercard and American Express
Shh don’t tell them things that make sense, they want to feel persecution. Jk. But i did hear that most/a lot of those were incest or rape based since that’s super illegal in many countries, so payment processor companies pushed for their removal. Not to mention, many removals were country-specific, not worldwide. Frankly that’s fine by me, not sorry your anime rape and incest games are gone
Listen. I’m not saying these games are wholesome. But if it’s not illegal in my country, I should be able to access it on principle. And frankly there’s very few things it should be illegal to make media about
But it’s country specific/payment processor rules.
don’t piss off the customers
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
So much this. You can fix blatant bugs sometimes and have people whine because it breaks their flow to have it work correctly.
What do you mean you made it so it no longer freezes for 20 seconds after clicking the Q-button?! I count on that pause to ensure my J-Flame comes at the right time! How dare you?!
At least they kept some of the old ones, still kinda dumb that to access the old tags system you have to click search with an empty search field of all things. Also kinda weird that they killed old skins so fast, I don’t have anything against using SFP and patching in a new one but it’s gotta be really demotivating for skin creators.
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.
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 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.
You can tell most everything you need to know about a company by looking at the CEO. That’s because they’re the leader, they set the tone, contrary to lemmy beliefs. Happy or unhappy employees? Look to the CEO. Solid earnings, year after year after year? CEO. I ask at every interview, “What’s the CEO like?” BUT…
A) Ultimately, CEOs do what the fucking board of directors wants, or they get fired, hence, the golden parachute. Would you take a monster job knowing that you could be forced to fuck your industry reputation and not hedge that bet? Nah. Force me to do something stupid yet needful? I want paid when you fire me on purpose for doing what you said.
B) I think you are in an echo chamber around here. Most CEOs are great folks, you only hear about the major fuck ups at the major companies. Also, the decisions the big dogs make that lemmy tells you are unpopular, really aren’t unpopular in the wider world. EA Games still exists after all.
Board of directors
Correct. The board defines the company, not the CEO.
CEOs are usually puppets. Whatever role they play, you can bet they were hired specifically to play it, and were incentivized to stick to the script.
Their job (legally, their fiduciary obligation) is to maximize shareholder value, to take the credit or blame, and fuck off.
The board (typically key stakeholders) are so pleased when the public focuses on their CEOs, even if it’s for their shitty opinions, behavior, or obnoxious salaries.
Because the worst thing that could happen to them would be for the public eye to actually follow the money, and it’s easy to see why.
If the rabble truly fathomed just how many of those “golden parachutes” stakeholders stockpile with every disgraced CEO, however ceremoniously disavowed…
Accountability would shift to more permanent targets yes but, more importantly, it would quickly become common knowledge that, all this time, there were in fact more than enough golden parachutes to go around.
everyone will have to 'fess up to using it eventually as AI will become "involved in nearly all future production.
True enough! No reason not to say it up front, right?
Look y’all, not 1-in-20 people give a flying fuck about AI like we do on here.
That is true, but for instance Ian M Banks predicted AI being able to make art already back in the 70’s in his Culture series of books.
Even accurately simulating famous artists. And his conclusion was that AI should not make art at all, because it would end up detracting from the value of art.I think the reason the CEO is wrong, is that it will be a legal shitshow, and I think AI art may become illegal, or at the very least required to be clearly labeled as AI art.
We will see how it turns out.
I’ll call your bet and say that Sweeny is right. I think AI will become so commonplace that there will be no way around it and the market has already been streamlined in this direction.
I would love it if my “feels” could be seen. But that is not reality. This battle is already long lost. Lemmy and the like can rage about it til their flames die out but it is a lost cause.
There have already been several lawsuits against AI companies, where it is revealed that AI art is copied from existing original works.
You may be right, but I don’t think that battle is lost quite yet.
AI is mostly good for memes, beyond that it tends to quickly becomes repetitive, and of little value.
Of course AI art generally has a human “director” guiding the AI on what to do. As I said previously we will see how it turns out.
I’m not sure the end result of this will be within 10 years.The result is that this is unsustainable unless copyright and IP law except for trademark and authorship are dropped, to avoid imbalance between using AI on existing work to generate commercially clean substance and using your ability, helped by existing culturally meaningful material.
It’s basically an IP laundering technology. Supply to satisfy demand.
When libertarians say that regulations make barriers for those more vulnerable, but not for those who can bend those barriers, they are right. Except I doubt many a libertarian expected to be proven right this way 20 years ago.
And I think they might even drop IP laws. When enough elite types are certain that control of computing power and datasets allow them to remain on top in such an environment.
That’s also where all the advice to get used to AI in all production comes from, I think, they are already salivating at the thought of just reusing old stuff from enormous datasets, legally, not paying anything, and keeping staff only to do basic control of what the machine generates. Basically people who expect that they’ll be able to do the theft of the century and remain elite.
The headlines about AI killing human creativity don’t help, they are telling these people what they want to hear.
It won’t kill all human creativity. It will kill those relying upon killing it. It’s like a gold mine in EU4, except giving inflation 10x the original.
I’ve just read yesterday what the Russian idiom “red price” means (said about the biggest price one can give for something, and already a robbery). So - the opposite of that was “white price”. No, it’s not about civil war. It’s about copper and silver money. There were not that many silver mines in Russia, so when someone decided to turn the printer on, they’d mint a lot of copper coins. While silver money was mostly foreign (“yefimok”, from Joachimstaler, same as taler, dollar, you get the etymology, the international coin of that age, which is also why metropolies had their traditional money and colonies had dollars - dollar meant a silver coin of the same weight as Joachimstaler).
Since I’ve remembered Russian history, that’s also similar to USSR’s advertised strong side - instead of relying upon complex evolution process to achieve big things, we’ll just build a command system in charge of all our resources and plan the path we already know. As you might see, it doesn’t answer where future evolution will come from. It didn’t come at all.
All the nuance is lost in these discussions. It’s something else when you’re pushing slop made 100% with AI, and something else if you’re using AI for mundane stuff like secondary voice lines in ARC Raiders for example
So, then you are in favor of the disclosures?
I’m in favor of the disclosures for my own personal reasons, but I see a lot of people who are anti-AI usage based on “vibes” and that does not sit well with me. If people are disregarding the positive benefits of the technology because “vibes”, it makes me doubt the validity of those opinions.
Dude, I think you’re making up a guy to be mad at. People more often like AI because of vibes. There’s a fucking thing called vibe coding, and I’m supposed to take people seriously as software developers as they use the phrase.
Based
It’s literally a plagiarism machine, so I completely agree with them.
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.
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
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.
Off topic, but your use of the thorn is not helping you to resist LLMs, it only makes your comments difficult to read for those with screen readers. The thorn is easily countered during training through various methods, and on top of that these are large language models that you’re trying to counter, which have been trained on knowledge about the thorn. Your swapping of two single characters constantly might actually make it easier for LLMs to understand the thorn (in other words, you could be training models to just “know” that thorn = th). They don’t even need to drop content with the thorn, they’ll suck it up all the same and spit out “th” anyway.
Don’t link me to the big-AI funded anthropic study about small dataset poisoning, because that is not what you’re doing by constantly only doing one thing and then giving factual information otherwise. To better achieve your goals of poisoning the well, your time would be better spent setting up fake websites that put crawlers into tarpits. Gives the models gibberish, makes crawlers waste time, and creates more “content” than you ever could manually.
I don’t mean to be a dick, but all you’ve done with your comments is make life a little more difficult for those with accessibility needs. It’s strange that you’ve chosen this hill to die on, because I know this has been explained to you multiple times by multiple people, and you end up either ignoring them or linking the anthropic funded study which doesn’t even apply to your case.
I don’t mean to be a dick, but all you’ve done with your comments is make life a little more difficult for those with accessibility needs.
It’s not even just people using screen readers, it makes sighted people have to do extra mental work too. Whenever I come across a thorn character, it distracts me from processing the actual meaning of their comment, and I just give up the effort after a few sentences. (Case in point: I just skipped the 2nd half of their comment and read yours instead 😅)
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.
And I don’t really care. All I care as a consumer it’s if the game is fun to play
So the companies should not be trying to hide their use of AI, right? It’s a disclosure, not a penalty.
You and I are 1-in-50 purchasers, if that. Nobody gives a shit if AI is in the game.
Go grab a random dude on the street,
“Hey! Just one question? If you’re considering buying a video game, is the fact they used AI in making it a deal breaker?”
Nobody cares. I’m with ya. Don’t fucking buy it, I won’t. But enough other people will that it won’t make a difference.
“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.
Gog (and to an extent, itch) are also competing with steam but while they might not be coming close to their market share they don’t draw anywhere near the ire that epic does and just similarly just rely on their strengths.
I think that both GOG and Itch.io not only rely on their strenghts, but has their own niche market to cover, so they don’t directly compete but complete each other in the whole gaming scene and they can easily coexist. That’s Epic who wants to get a slice of general gaming pie Steam eats.
Your comment just made me realize I did a kind of GOG holiday sale shopping spree this year after having not done a steam holiday sale purchase in like a decade.
And the majority of it was having cheap easy drm-free access to some very good and very old games. Like yeah I know I have my ISO of the TIE Fighter collector’s cd-rom somewhere around here, but if I can permanently have legit drm-free access to all versions of the game for just a few dollars, then supporting the business enabling that is a no brainer.
Yeah. GoG and Humble (as well as many MUCH smaller stores) have very much criticized the de facto Valve monopoly over the years (… decades?). As have many devs who have criticized just how much of a percentage Valve takes (and how they reduce that for the big games). They just generally are smart enough to say it VERY obliquely because they know they don’t want to antagonize a rabid userbase.
Epic… Epic increasingly are poised to “not need” PC gamers as it were. Fortnite is its own platform and Unreal Engine is increasingly used by film and industry. So they are much more willing to criticize Valve (and only occasionally remember EGS is sort of a thing…) which… tends to highlight why nobody else does.
He wants to allow AI slime on his own platform
Don’t forget the
blatant scams calledcrypto games! He proudly announced Epic Games Store would happily sell games centered around NFTs and crypto after Valve said they wouldn’t allow it.
How many reasons to overthrow and kill the CEOs do we need
Don’t need more reasons, need the means to do so.
I feel like we’re all following Mangione’s case for a little hope.
That needs just two words:
Thank you.
Slopification
LOL This is gonna catch on. I’ve seen things that this describes.
