Valve has revealed its reasoning for removing games that make use of AI-generated art from Steam, citing potential copyright issues from the art used to train the AI.
Honestly I don’t understand how there could be a copyright issue. “Training” your brain on copyrighted works of art and making similar art does not violate copyright, so why should an AI doing the same be considered copyright infringement?
Because its very different what you refer to training your brain vs what is training an AI, which is basically photobashing stuff to the point of including watermarks from stuff they stole while scraping images they dont have the license to use.
I’m not sure about the photobashing thing.
If I remember correctly a generated image starts from noise and the AI refines that noise to form shapes. When watermarks show up, it’s not because it’s bashing the original images, but because it learnt to put watermark on an image.
I wish it was like that, and while its “true” that they “should” be starting purely from noise and form from what they have learnt the reality is that they end up using big chunks of pieces that are regularly found online.
If the training data contains a lot of copyrighted material, then when the AI could end up trained to favor results that include parts That resemble copyrighted material.
How the copyrighted material was acquired could matter. If scraped with a valid API from social media, odds are the social media company claims a license to redistribute any content uploaded to it. But what if a lot of that content was uploaded illegally to begin with? The AI company could be unwittingly paying for stolen art. Or what if the AI company buys a curated collection of training data a different group put together? Odds are that may include copyrighted work, and the company selling it is unlikely to be licensed to do so…
A third issue is the intent of copyright. There is nothing natural or real about copyright. It is a concept we invented to aid creators so they can profit from their work and continue to produce more content which then benefits society. If AI art threatens that system, a court might decide protected art cannot be included in training data in order to maintain that intent.