[srackey]

Completely unenforceable. How can you even tell if an image was made by AI? What if AI created an outline that was worked on by a human artist (or vice versa)? Who would the burden of proof be on?

Steam has a “no AI art” policy, and it’s rapidly turning into a “no obvious AI art policy”. How could they tell?

[kmeisthax]

The thing about AI art is that, absent lots of prompt engineering, seed grinding, and touchups, you're likely to have a bunch of images that are obvious tells if your entire project is AI. Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

There's also another advantage to having a "no obvious AI art" policy; and that's to cut down on spam. AI is extremely useful to people who want to spam art platforms.

[tavavex]

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing - we don't know if it'll ever reach the threshold, but the amount of effort required to stamp out all the wonkiness from an AI generation has been going down ever since the first viable algorithms appeared.

I don't think that this was an anti-spam policy - Steam already manually reviews all new applicants that want to publish a game, so they don't need to forbid anything to turn it down. I'm guessing that this policy was because they don't want to be entangled in IP legislation if some copyright exception is carved out to forbid the use of generative AI.

[krainboltgreene]

> The gap of being distinguishable from manually drawn images is still closing

People have been trumpeting this since day one of Stable Diffusion releasing, but I'm seeing the same output quality as that day and I've been keeping up.

[tavavex]

Just because the pace of progress isn't exponential (like what some people would want to believe) doesn't mean it isn't happening. I remember getting an early invite to DALL-E 1 all the way back, and while I don't use it anymore, the modern improvements made seem very substantial. From plain comparisons of different versions where the same inputs produce substantially better outputs, to the mere fact that the latest version can actually generate decent, often discernible text at all (something that people joked would be impossible from AI to achieve) shows that some progress is being made.

The reason why it's not as visible with Stable Diffusion is because a lot of the technologies around it circle the same few foundational SD models - people build on top of them, add new ways of interacting with them, but ultimately, the same thing underlies them all. Community support is seen as more important than cutting-edge tech, which is why something like Stable Diffusion XL hasn't even seen universal adoption yet.

[krainboltgreene]

I'm telling you the progress isn't happening based on my own consistent observations of various releases across multiple platforms. The only people who don't seem to agree with me are those who have the art literacy of a highschooler and think "discernible text" is a improvement.

As an aside, no one said AI couldn't achieve drawn generated text, that's been possible for years prior to stable diffusion.

[PixyMisa]

In just the past two years it's gone from obvious horrors like hands attached directly at the elbow to much more subtle errors like chair legs that cross over each other like an Escher drawing or doorknobs adjacent to the hinges.

Human artists might have to become used to tracking provenance. If you work with traditional media, that's easy: Here's the painting. For digital artists, software can publish encrypted, timestamped brushstroke-level histories of the work if we need that level of proof.

[numpad0]

IME, if GenAI ever reaches human parity, whatever that amounts to, the relevant subgenre of art will just move into surrealism. Invention of paintbrushes didn't kill art.

[luqtas]

the fight about AI is using copyrighted stuff for its weights... i wonder which % of artists that wouldn't tweak or use heavily AI that has a transparent/ethical data-base (read it: they didn't added anything proprietary without authorization)

[numpad0]

It's been tried. Numerous times. There's a reason why GenAI controversy is stuck at ethics and filled with rage, the generated images just aren't that great and so that part isn't so controversial.

[kmeisthax]

There's a lot of AI "artists"[0] who think their text2image prompt generations are equivalent if not better than actually drawing or photographing an image.

Part of becoming an artist is learning how to evaluate your own work, break it down, and critique the shit out of it. When you jump straight to generating art with an AI, you skip the criticism step, which means you don't have a sense of taste and you haven't really explored what your preferences for style are.

A lot of AI art generators default to an extremely cinematic, "Hollywood" art style - i.e. exactly the sort of thing that is trying to look impressive to people who don't know better, and will make them overlook all the fundamental mistakes in the image.

[0] Normally I wouldn't scarequote "artist" here, given that actual artists do use AI tools where it makes sense.

[jwells89]

And this will continue to be an issue until ML models have achieved something resembling sentience, because many of these tells are the result of the model not truly comprehending the subject matter and thus struggling to maintain internal consistency in everything from geometry and kinetics of human bodies to lighting and physics.

Less obviously, ML models also lack the ability to bake in intent. In human made pieces, everything is as it is for a reason; it’s communicating something. In ML generated pieces, things are the way they are because that’s what’s statistically likely for the type of generated image.

[PixyMisa]

Absolutely correct. This is a far more obvious problem in text models, because you end up with internally flawless arguments as to why your next scuba diving vacation should be in Ulan Bator.

With art, it's more subtle, because there there's no single reference point that lets us determine if an artwork is "true". There are the glaring errors that everyone can agree on - notoriously, human hands - but those cases are improving rapidly.

[johnnyanmac]

>Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

Microsoft and every other tech company is indeed investing billions in the tech. I'm sure each company can fund the entire (woefully underpaid) art industry by themselves, let alone the 10 or so tech hubs altogether.

But they are happy to throw money at AI instead for the payoff of being the next big tech brand.

[nothercastle]

That also devalues the work of the original creators whose work got knocked off by ai and they should be compensated for the damage done

[Gigachad]

This has never happened ever in history. So many jobs were devalued by new machines. And the people doing them were never compensated.

[fho]

> Anyone trying to hide it would be spending time equivalent to just making the art themselves.

That's basically the argument why Jason Allen should have been allowed to win the art competition, is it?

It's not that he typed "award winning painting" into Midjourney and the image was the result.

He tried hundreds of seeds, selected one that he liked and refined it over countless iterations with infilling until he was satisfied with the result.

I honestly don't see how this is fundamentally different from other art forms.

[rtpg]

"I claim this art was made by this person" "Who?" <gives name> "OK <name>. did you work on this?" "Where are related work products? Are there any? What about invoices? Simultaneous employment?"

The reality is that most legal things are determined by _convincing people of a truth_. Perhaps you can set up a whole scheme to "launder" AI art and attach names to them. And all the papertrail you generate doing this will show up in discovery in some lawsuit and the copyrights all disappear.

Laws are vibes, not code.

[klipt]

The way that AI will be laundered into art is by including it into things like Photoshop. There'll still be a human touch just with "smart brushes" and "smart auto fill" that paints 90% of what you want.

Art will then take less skill to produce, and be produced faster for lower prices.

An 80% price reduction on art (because artists can now produce it 5 times faster thanks to AI) is 80% as good as getting it for free.

[numpad0]

Art will take more skill to produce, not less, at faster speed by select artists. GenAI will become another tool that artists and clients alike must understand and use effectively within unspoken guild rules, that is, if it stays.

[geysersam]

Googled this because that was an astounding claim but Steam does in fact not have an anti ai art policy.

They don't allow ai art produced by models trained on material that the model makers don't have copyright to.

In practice that's a ban (currently) but in principle it isn't.

[jwells89]

It makes perfect sense because much of the friction around generative ML models has to do with the data it was trained on. There’s not much reason to ban images generated by a model that was trained entirely on consensually gathered material.

[bsder]

> Completely unenforceable.

Complete wrong. You just flip the defaults--something is AI unless you can prove otherwise.

This is done already and has precedent. Producing porn requires that you keep artifacts demonstrating that who the performers were, that they were of age, etc.

If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim.

In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records.

In the case of an individual doing digital only, that's a little harder. You probably have to keep some intermediate artifacts.

[tavavex]

I'm really struggling to conceptualize a world where every picture that's drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced, all for the sake of removing generative AI.

Besides, it's not that easy of a problem - a lot of corporate artists are salaried workers, they don't get specified commissions with an attached bill per work, but are paid a salary so the company can ask them to draw whatever they need throughout the process. Considering this, all artists would need to retain "intermediate artifacts".

And then, how do these artifacts work for other ways of doing art? What about traditional artists whose work gets scanned in after completion - would they have to keep a camera on hand to take photographs as they're working? What about an animated film - would every intermediate step in production, from character design to storyboarding to environmental design etc etc need to have a full record for every single sketch?

[omeid2]

It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work. It seems rather simple to me.

Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

[tavavex]

> It is for the sake of copyright, if you want society to protect your work, provide evidence for your creative work.

I'm not sure if it's that simple - for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now. Providing complete history logs isn't normal practice, and expanding law to necessitate it isn't common sense.

> Keep in mind that in the not so far future, producing art will be as cheap as consuming it, this means that the original benefits society got in return for copyright no longer applies, so why should they protect it?

I'll make a prediction that this future is further from now than you may think it is. Sure, things like static imagery may become completely indistinguishable from human-made art in the near(ish?) future, but the production of all art is still an unsolved problem. How long will it take until some advanced multimodal algorithm can make a full game that can measure up to ones that are released today? I'm guessing that it'll take a while.

And yeah - once we do reach this scenario of hypothetical "art post-scarcity", we may as well just delete the whole copyright system from existence - it'd be a logical thing to do. But how does any of it contradict what I said in my other comments?

[semiquaver]

  > for one, this requirement is a complete departure from how copyright systems work now.

A complete departure? Here is the current form used to register an artistic visual work for copyright. Its more elaborate than you might think.

https://www.copyright.gov/forms/formva.pdf

Registration is not a rubber-stamp, it is increasingly refused because of indicia of AI tooling.

Why would adding some questions on provenance and methodology be beyond the pale?

[tavavex]

Nothing in the form seems out of the ordinary to me. It is a lot of fields, but ultimately the main goal is establishing ownership, not discerning the specific methodology in which a person made the work. It's a departure in that the current system is results-based, where you register a final product, while the proposed system also must take into consideration every intricacy of creating the work.

> it is increasingly refused because of indicia of AI tooling.

Do you have a source that a statistically significant number of copyright applications gets refused on account of a work just seeming like AI? On what grounds does it get refused?

[omeid2]

> How long will it take until some advanced multimodal algorithm can make a full game that can measure up to ones that are released today?

We can disagree on how long it will take us to get there, but if you use AI generated content, that is not product by copyright, your game as whole, sure, as long as it is not the result of a simple prompt, you're protected as usual.

Keep in mind that already, in many games, there is a mix of protected and unprotected content, for reasons of trademark, copyright, and licensing.

[semiquaver]

This is a really good point that I think will be hard for a lot of people to come to terms with. The basis for the whole idea of intellectual property rests on assumptions that look increasingly fragile.

[hnfong]

I think there's a lot of confusion about what records are needed presumably due to lack of understanding of what the law requires for proof of ownership.

Generally the party asserting ownership has the burden of proof. The standard is "preponderance of the evidence", which generally is understood to mean "more likely than not" or "> 50%". So basically it means if you can prove to judge or jury that there's a >50% chance you own the work, it's good enough.

Also note that in many cases where there's a dispute over the evidence, witnesses are summoned to testify. So you might not have a "full notary log" of how it was produced or all the "intermediate artifacts", but as long as the artist is able to convincingly explain how the work was created, and the other party's lawyers are not able to poke holes in their story during cross evidence, that's usually enough.

Which is, basically, what happens today, if the authorship or ownership of a work is disputed.

That said, I'm not sure whether "assume work AI (thus uncopyrightable) unless proven otherwise" should be the default for other reasons. For one, most quality "AI art" needs some manual adjustments or touch ups, and arguably the prompt and hyperparameters may be sufficient creativity element. I mean, that's basically how copyrights dealt with photography (the mere fact you decided when and where to point the camera with what settings is sufficient for copyright to subsist in a photo).

[krainboltgreene]

> drawn must have a full notary log of how exactly it was produced

I love when non-artists talk about art.

[tavavex]

The word choices were kind of on purpose - I meant to highlight the partial absurdity of having to entangle yourself with all these legal considerations and obtaining sufficient legal proof, all for the sake of making some art piece.

[PixyMisa]

If it's physical media, you have the physical media.

If it's digital media, the software can keep an encrypted record at the brushstroke level that can be played back to produce a bit-perfect reproduction. Maybe even write it to a public ledger.

[tavavex]

All of these things have loopholes. For physical media, depending on the quality of the output, one could pay a sufficiently skilled person to reproduce an AI output on physical media in a fraction of the time it'd take to come up with and draw for real.

For digital media - ignoring how overbearing this whole system could be, what prevents someone from taking all that data and making an algorithm that outputs brush stroke parameters instead of pixels? And digital art isn't the only thing we need to concern ourselves with - eventually, we might have AI models that could make 3D models, sounds, vector imagery and other forms of art. The idea of just documenting every workflow would be an ever-growing burden with no perfect solutions.

[bsder]

> All of these things have loopholes. For physical media, depending on the quality of the output, one could pay a sufficiently skilled person to reproduce an AI output on physical media in a fraction of the time it'd take to come up with and draw for real.

Um, that's a real work, you know? In what way does this differ from people who take a photograph and then, for example, creating an oil painting?

Now, there are some weirdnesses because of the copyright of the source photograph, but the oil painting would be your own work.

Yeah, you might get called into court to demonstrate that you can produce the work. But so did Michael Jackson.

[raincole]

> If you claim a work is not AI generated, you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim.

So AI (or a simpler, non-statistics-based algorithm) can't produce these artifacts and will never be able to? Why? Are these artifacts "human souls" or something?

> In the case of a corporation, that would be easy as you have payment records.

Outsourcing.

[scheeseman486]

The end result of this will be end to end cryptographically authenticated pipelines. I'm sure Adobe will be very happy about having yet another way to extract money from artists.

[numpad0]

> something is AI unless you can prove otherwise.

I think this is rather what pro-AI/spammers are trying to do by flooding platforms, that aren't so successful. People don't give as high scores they do for human generated data, and AI images are still considered a form of spam.

[JumpCrisscross]

> you should have to produce some artifacts to back up that claim

Why would that be relevant in court? Just show the process of making the art.

[thurn]

A company today has the burden of proof to demonstrate authorship of a claimed work when they sue for copyright infringement. This isn't a crazy expansion of that concept -- companies do not generally break the law just because there's a low chance of getting caught. Furthermore it's not hard to imagine, for example, a whistleblower calling out their employer for copyrighting AI works.

[colordrops]

Furthermore, what is the threshold for something to still legally be considered AI art once an artist's hand has modified it? What if they change the brightness? Fix a hand? completely replace a character in a scene? Illustrate most of the scene themselves but add an AI figure or background? Use AI to sharpen a hand drawn image?

[two_in_one]

It's a gray area. But if someone generates AI images at scale without human in the loop it's likely not copyrightable.

[colordrops]

What does "at scale" mean here, and how would it be detected or enforced?

[two_in_one]

that means that openai cannot claim copyright on images produced by dalle generator. no can other online services and offline software owners/producers.

this is enough to use them without copyright violation for example for other ai models training.