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NEWS: Steam's New Regulations Allow Games Developed with AI




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yeehaw



Joined: 09 Sep 2018
Posts: 427
PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2024 12:48 pm Reply with quote
As long as they display it so it's easy to know what games not to buy.
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MFrontier



Joined: 13 Apr 2014
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PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2024 6:49 pm Reply with quote
Would an AI generated game even feel fun?
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Gnarth



Joined: 06 Oct 2023
Posts: 175
PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2024 7:45 pm Reply with quote
MFrontier wrote:
Would an AI generated game even feel fun?

A fully AI-generated game would 100% be total garbage. However, and I say this as someone who dislikes so called "tech-bros" and is very negative towards AI, it's almost guaranteed that AI generation will become normal in the future, whether I like it or not. So Steam had to do this and I expect we'll all have to accept the cost-cutting advantages AI offers to companies.

I can only hope it'll be mostly used to enhance real people's work, not replace it, something that admittedly might be positive. It's unfortunately much easier to imagine a scenario where greed will allow it to get out of control and do unprecedented damage to pretty much all artforms, though.
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The_Daytona_500



Joined: 14 Aug 2015
Posts: 76
PostPosted: Mon Jan 15, 2024 8:25 pm Reply with quote
MFrontier wrote:
Would an AI generated game even feel fun?


It could be. If you had an AI take the most elements from three of your favorite games and mashed them together, it's very possible you could have fun with it. Now it wouldn't be original in the least, but if the question is just about fun, and on that point it should pass.
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prime_pm



Joined: 06 Feb 2004
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Location: Your Mother's Bedroom
PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 12:02 am Reply with quote
Imagine the generic Adult games we're gonna get from this. And that's saying a lot.
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WoodDude



Joined: 22 Dec 2022
Posts: 66
PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 1:26 am Reply with quote
This may be a dumb question but don't video games already use AI? Or do people consider AI generated art and voices to be different than enemy AI adapting to your playstyle and inputs or procedurally generated elements like worlds during the game? Skyrim's patented "Radiant AI" quests, Minecraft's endless world generation for example.
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AsleepBySunset



Joined: 07 Sep 2022
Posts: 209
PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 1:54 am Reply with quote
WoodDude wrote:
This may be a dumb question but don't video games already use AI? Or do people consider AI generated art and voices to be different than enemy AI adapting to your playstyle and inputs or procedurally generated elements like worlds during the game? Skyrim's patented "Radiant AI" quests, Minecraft's endless world generation for example.


When people criticise ai in art, media, voice (etc) they're criticising neural network based AI, (esp AI with large datasets), not cpu players and procedural generation in video games. Procedural generation in video games like minecraft isn't even called AI.

Saying if you're against AI generated art you have to be against CPU players (sometimes called AI) is just a fallacy. A really irritating fallacy AI bros like to pull. Just because they have the same name doesn't mean they have the same technology and the technology is what's being criticised.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 1:25 pm Reply with quote
And even then, the criticism isn't nearly so much "This technology exists" as "This technology currently functions by scraping a vast amount of content whose creators never gave permission for it to be scraped, with the end goal of putting said creators out of work." If someone created a bunch of original artwork/voicework and willingly ran a machine-learning algorithm on it themselves to generate new content based on it, then I'd have no problem with that. However, that's not how it's currently being used or why obnoxious techbros are drooling over it.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2316
PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 1:43 pm Reply with quote
Before LLMs and GANs really took flight and pissed everyone off, I remember reading this paper on extracting representations of specific art styles from an ANN, and then applying that to output images cheaply. If copyright issues could be worked out, always thought that would be a really neat, flexible filter to make available in Photoshop/GIMP or Blender/Maya/etc. Or maybe even just embedded directly in games themselves, though having it everywhere would make it much less special and interesting.

Limited uses like this intrigue me, anyway. More skeptical of the quality you'll get from aggressively trying to skip large parts of the indie (or triple AAA/corporate, even) creative pipeline and replacing them with AI, but it will be curious to watch the attempts. Though, the indie market is already super-saturated with mediocre low-effort titles; it's an, uh, interesting question whether videogame search tech and 'market forces' will effectively deal with the number of such titles multiplying considerably from people aggressively using ANN AI who may not have been able to create anything like a game before.

I kind of like the idea of asking for an explicit flag on ANN AI-generated games, though it seems hard to police, since there's a huge continuum between "Uses ANN AI to generate a small subset of art assets or generate a custom screen-space filter in a particular level" (e.g., Blender actually has an embedded AI subroutine for improved image denoising, which presumably you'd want to not cause such a flag) and "Replaced all artists and coders with ANN AI; only retained staff was Idea Guy". Maybe it's the kind of thing that could be a decentralized community vote, with the community trusted to keep "AI-generated" faithful to its intended meaning, and separate from evaluations of quality.
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TestSubject29



Joined: 16 Jan 2024
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PostPosted: Tue Jan 16, 2024 8:57 pm Reply with quote
MFrontier wrote:
Would an AI generated game even feel fun?


Fully AI generated? I don't think that's even possible with the current level of AIs. So in this case, the question is moot.

Partially AI generated? Yes, it could, and it did.

There already exist a game using AI generated assets called High On Life, which the dev openly admitted to in this article: https://www.eurogamer.net/high-on-life-contains-ai-art-and-voice-acting.

And no, they didn't just use AI as an idea generator or brainstorming aid. The arts themselves are included in the final product: https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/12/14/high-on-lifes-walls-are-covered-in-midjourney-ai-art/

Yet it has a 'Very Positive' rating on Steam, and an 7.9 user score on Metacritic. Won't be winning any award anytime soon, but it's a fun game to play. Stupid, wacky fun, but fun nonetheless. I'll take it over any fully-human-created CoD game any day of the week.
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Vanadise



Joined: 06 Apr 2015
Posts: 500
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 12:56 am Reply with quote
WoodDude wrote:
This may be a dumb question but don't video games already use AI?

This is actually a good illustration of one of the problems with "AI"; it's a buzzword that changes meanings about once a decade. The first kind of "AI" you're talking about are human-designed algorithms that try to make games respond to players in ways that feel natural. The latter kind are better known as applied statistics; they analyze millions of samples of input to build probability tables that are then used to generate data that matches known patterns.

In both cases, techbros and marketers refer to them as "AI" because they want you to have a mental image of robots from sci-fi movies when you think about them. It's propaganda. There is nothing going on here that is remotely like real intelligence.

The real problem with popular generative neural networks like ChatGPT or Stable Diffusion, though, is that they're deeply unethical. They were trained on millions of samples of copyrighted input that were used without permission, making them effectively the largest cases of copyright infringement and plagiarism that have ever existed. If that's not bad enough, the training data sets used in them have also been found to contain CSAM, and thus they're also capable of generating it, sometimes unintentionally if you're not careful with your prompts.
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oilers2007



Joined: 23 Sep 2022
Posts: 93
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:40 am Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:
However, that's not how it's currently being used or why obnoxious techbros are drooling over it.


I never really get these complaints. he only obnoxious people I see tend to be the anti-AI people who pop up every time the topic comes up here and use words like "bro" to describe people, which seems odd because I don't think it's even a negative word and also seems kind of sexist. Most of the pro responses to these threads tend to just be 'interesting' or "I don't care, if it's good it's good". In terms of judging things based on who's repping each side, I think the anti-AI people are a lot more obnoxious and intrusive personally. It makes me hope it succeeds out of spite sometimes despite not caring one way or another myself.
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AsleepBySunset



Joined: 07 Sep 2022
Posts: 209
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 6:58 am Reply with quote
oilers2007 wrote:
Top Gun wrote:
However, that's not how it's currently being used or why obnoxious techbros are drooling over it.


I never really get these complaints. he only obnoxious people I see tend to be the anti-AI people who pop up every time the topic comes up here and use words like "bro" to describe people, which seems odd because I don't think it's even a negative word and also seems kind of sexist. Most of the pro responses to these threads tend to just be 'interesting' or "I don't care, if it's good it's good". In terms of judging things based on who's repping each side, I think the anti-AI people are a lot more obnoxious and intrusive personally. It makes me hope it succeeds out of spite sometimes despite not caring one way or another myself.


It's just tech bro + AI = AI bro, don't think too hard about it. Bro can refer to women and the only way the claim "tech bro/ai bro is sexist" can make sense is if you assume sexism can happen against men.

As for the claim its anti ai people who're more intrusive. I disagree. Besides, I have seen way to many unconsensual ai thumbnails, covers, memes, etc. I'd call that intrusive.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2316
PostPosted: Wed Jan 17, 2024 7:37 am Reply with quote
Vanadise wrote:
In both cases, techbros and marketers refer to them as "AI" because they want you to have a mental image of robots from sci-fi movies when you think about them. It's propaganda.


I don't think this is really fair; use of the term 'artificial intelligence' for a variety of techniques, but especially computational, artificial neural networks, has been common in academic circles for decades (though often competing with 'machine learning' and other, similar labels). I guess you could accuse the relevant academic communities in computer science and computational neuroscience of propaganda -- they do have grants to try to get funded -- but I think it's more reasonable to view the term as aspirational. Computational neural networks have long been studied as a way to try to understand what makes humans so much better than standard 'expert system' software programs at flexibly solving general tasks with ambiguous, imprecise definitions and boundaries, i.e., at better understanding what roadblocks there are to artificial general intelligence.

Granted, the term is very useful to people who don't care to think about how far removed something like LLMs, GANs, CNNs and so forth are or aren't from human performance, and when. It is certainly very convenient to marketers and people who just want to sell tech. In this case they're reusing a term the academic community chose first, though.

There was actually a smaller hype cycle around AI back in the 1980s, which backfired for the relevant academic communities pretty badly, with disappointment in the algorithms and tech leading to loss of interest and funding. The current hype cycle seems more long-lived, although it's still not exactly stable.
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