Players have been asking for the ability to filter out games made with Gen AI.
We've added an automatic tag on SteamDB based on the AI gen content disclosures on the store pages.
“what will happen to artists” is indeed a valid concern.
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can’t just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and “open source” Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.
“The question has come up whether a guild master of the weaving industry should be allowed to try an innovation in his product. The verdict: ‘If a cloth weaver intends to process a piece according to his own invention, he must not set it on the loom, but should obtain permission from the judges of the town to employ the number and length of threads that he desires, after the question has been considered by four of the oldest merchants and four of the oldest weavers of the guild.’ One can imagine how many suggestions for change were tolerated.
Shortly after the matter of cloth weaving has been disposed of, the button makers guild raises a cry of outrage; the tailors are beginning to make buttons out of cloth, an unheard-of thing. The government, indignant that an innovation should threaten a settled industry, imposes a fine on the cloth-button makers. But the wardens of the button guild are not yet satisfied. They demand the right to search people’s homes and wardrobes and fine and even arrest them on the streets if they are seen wearing these subversive goods.”
-Heilbroner 1666
The whole thing sounds a lot like the discussion around Open Source for software back in the 90s, between those who favoured the GPL (i.e an Open Source license where not only was the code being distributed Open Source, but also all other code it was used with must be made Open Source with the same license if distributed) vs the LGPL (were the code was Open Source but if used as a library it could be part of something that was distributed in any other model, including for Profit).
(I vaguelly remember very similar arguments back then about how programmers would end up unemployed because of Open Source software)
Ultimatelly the outcome of that was that pretty much every single Open Source library out there nowadays uses LGPL or even less restrictive licenses such as BSD - turns out nobody wants to work in making stuff for free for the community which in the end nobody else uses because it comes with too many strings attached.
The individual programmers who were making their code freely available, chose how it was made available and ultimatelly most chose to do it in a way that let others use it with maximum freedom to enhance their own work but not to be able to just outright monetise that free software whilst adding little to it.
I think that for generative AI a similar solution is for the artists to get to chose if their work is used to train Gen AI or not and similarly that Generative AI can’t just be an indirect way to monetise free work, either by monetising the Gen AI directly or by pretty much just monetising the products of it with little or no added value.
(In other words, until we get our ideal copyright free world, there needs to be some kind of license around authorizing or not that works are used in Gen AI training, discriminating between for-Profit and “open source” Gen AI and also defining how the product of that Gen AI can be used)
None the less even with maximum empowerement of artists to decide if their work is part of it or not, I recognize that there is a risk that the outcome for artists from Gen AI might not be similar to the outcome for programmers from Open Source - ultimatelly the choice of if and how they participate in all this must be down to individual artists.