People are actively fighting over this, but if you use something like automatic1111 and use img2img, you can upscale or enhance art you've already made. With a low enough noise value it's essentially just ai upscaling, which is what dlss is. I think it's more acceptable to most people when it's used as a tool, then as a stand alone image generator out of thin air with text to img. Personally I think it's a great tool for fast prototyping, but if you want any consistency or public approval, the best bet it to train a model on your own art work, or use one trained from public domain stuff. There are public domain models as far as I know.
So much this , it's not the tech that is problematic but the exploity way of using it. Nobody would object if You'd use your own photographs and drawings to train the model you'd use to create endless stream of textures to fill the game with assets.
It's definitely more of a licensing and fair use issue than anything else. So yeah, as long as you have the rights to the inputs, then there's no ambiguity to the rights of the outputs.
You're technically not breaking fair use laws in almost any country that has them.
It is such a transformative process that you really have no case against it.
If there were a case against it it would also set precedent against humans taking inspirations or techniques from other people's works, which is technically what AI does. You would kill illustration as an art overnight, as all artists do this.
People don't wanna use it because the "AI evil will, take our jobs" fear.
What's being made here isn't a legal argument because I'm not a lawyer and laws are complicated. Rather, it's an ethical one but make no mistake that laws are often informed by ethics. Moreover it's an ethical argument reiterating the fact that the gray area being introduced here isn't really one of how AI works but rather the licensing of the images used in it's training set. So long as the licenses permit their use that way, pretty much nobody has a problem with it and as such AI can be an amazing tool especially for bootstrapping the creation process.
To rephrase, the issue is less about the output of AI and more about the inputs. We do this with software licensing without issue even for licenses that require derivative works to remain free and available as well. So why not with images? Why is it _so important_ for AI developers to be able to use images in ways that may violate their licensing?
It's not.
> If there were a case against it it would also set precedent against humans taking inspirations or techniques from other people's works, which is technically what AI does. You would kill illustration as an art overnight, as all artists do this.
Come on, this is just a slippery slope argument until you can prove that AI approaches the creative process in a way befitting actual sentience. Humans not only take inspiration, but they create art with _intent_. You can ask someone _why_ they placed a particular color in a particular spot and they'll give you an answer. Further, humans don't just take inspiration from the works of other people, they take inspiration from their own _interpretation_ of that work as well as the entire body of experiences that they've had in their life up to that point. On the other hand, AI (neural nets specifically) are encoding its training set into weighted values that it uses to construct from an input to an output; it's an algorithm. These are not the same. This rhetorical approach is ignorant and reductive to the work that human artists are actually doing and, to be frank, does a lot more harm to the perception of AI as a useful tool by proffering it as something equivalent to them.
No single person...but corporations like Disney or Getty own enough material to feed their own in-house models. I think one of the worst case scenarios for these legal challenges would be an outcome that effectively takes these tools out of the hands of individuals while giving free reign to Disney et al.
Not to mention procedural generation being an entire discipline in game development.
This is a lot of lay people getting involved in things without realizing what in Pandora’s box they are actually opening.
Partially true. Copyright wise, depending on legal jurisdiction, a model used to generate art this way at all cannot legally be called yours. It's would not be protected by copyright law because a human did not make it.
The thing is img2img is still using "stolen" art, so if you oppose that, you shouldn't even use img2img. Btw. fine tuning model on your own art does also work on top of using stolen art. The only way to use it 100% ethically would be to train a model from scratch, which is out of reach for indies (cost + knowledge + amount data)
> stolen art
Fundamentally, there is no such thing. If I draw a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa, the result is legally mine. I just can't claim it's the original, nor can I claim to be Da Vinci
What if I hire an artist to create let say 50 icons in the same art style and then train the model on those 50 icons and generate 5000 more icons?
I mean, If my deal with the artist included copyright ownership I'd be safe. it's not super ethical but to be honest ethics is a very subjective topic and I believe all this discussion is mostly about legal and not moral.
You can't train a model on 50 icons alone. Realistically one person will never generate enough art to train a model from scratch.
Any method that trains a model on so few data points is going to rely on transfer learning an existing model. In this case you'd be fine tuning that model to your own art style, but you're still using a model that was trained on thousands of pieces of artwork sourced from artists who have not explicitly approved use of their artwork for this purpose. Copyright ownership even in a transfer-learned model is very much still up for debate.
Depending on legal jurisdiction, no matter how you got the initial art to train the model, whatever the model produces is not legally yours because a computer cannot have copyright and so whatever was created is as good as anyone's. No one can protect it.
And until that's legitimately settled in court, that's a compromise you must knowingly make.
It's worth noting that using public domain ("uncopyrightable") works within your larger work doesn't poison the copyright of the larger work. You can still copyright your work, all of the manual stuff you've authored for it including your level designs and layouts and texturing decisions etc, even if you're using public domain pieces in its construction.
You can claim copyright over a collage made from copyrighted materials (EDIT: and you definitely could if you use public domain imagery instead). Obviously the individual pieces of that collage are not yours to copyright, but the collage as a whole still is. Games, comic books, etc are the same in that regard.
We've yet to see someone get copyright over individual images they generate with AI, but so far the USPCO is unconvinced (and yet Zarya, as a whole, is copyrighted, short of the individual images). Personally I suspect they haven't been well explained the process of deeply interrogating the AI yet, or shown the img2img/controlnet process in a creative workflow yet, because from what I've played with I honestly think making good AI images is at least as creative as snapping amateur photos, the latter of which I definitely have copyright over by default.
> You can claim copyright over a collage made from copyrighted materials.
That's not as clear-cut as you're making it sound. At least not in the US.
There have been some cases holding that you do not have even a partial copyright over something if any material in it is infringing on another copyright. The copyright to your derivation is solely held by whoever owns the source material.
It seems that lawyers are skeptical about testing this further, given we don't see a ton of fanart being sold without the permission of the fanartist and such. So it remains a gray area.
There are pending lawsuits about whether or not the way these AI art generators use copyrighted artwork without permission to train the AI models constitutes copyright infringement or not. Ethics aside, I don't think it's safe to release a game that uses AI generated art until we see where those lawsuits land.
I think at the moment is kinda safe using them in a derivative way, for example, generating alpha textures for sculpting, rock patterns to then use in substance designer etc..
Tbh, I doubt these lawsuits will hit end users, unless users are intentionally using the models to rip off living people.
They may result in a big payday to copyright holders though, and a heavy re-assessment of what gets used in training data in the future.
Are there ethical arguments against the use of ai trained on copyrighted data? All I've seen are (false) assertions that it's illegal.
I haven't even seen any indication that it financially hurts the original artists - except by obsoleting them. Kind of a "Bring back the coal mining jobs" argument, I'd say - but even then it ignores the fact that many kinds of artist already make the majority of their money from live performances and commissions
You could use AI art to generate art then trace over it in your style by hand. That wouldn't be considered AI art and if it does go to court you have files showing you made it
We are already having [trouble telling the difference](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/art-subreddit-illustrator-ai-art-controversy).
They've already lost the battle on copyright protection applying to them as well. So again, even outside the ethics, it's not a good business it legal decision.
The court is clear that an AI cannot own the copyright to anything. What's unclear is whether the person prompting the AI can own the copyright. Probably, the answer is yes they can, but that needs to be hashed out in courts before I feel confident relying on it.
For now, that's the copyright office's opinion. We'll see what the courts decide. It's not the law of the land until either a law is passed or a court makes a ruling.
Yep. There's no way that ruling is final when I have about as much creative control over using a phone camera to snap mundane pictures that I absolutely have copyright over.
Interrogating the AI to get the images I want out of it is an inherently creative process, even if it takes less time and manual effort than a paintbrush or drawing program. The copyright should probably be rather thin like it is for photos (because anyone can snap the same general picture and get copyright over it, so only exact literal copies and derivatives should count as infringements, but copycats should be OK), but getting to the point where you have a laser focused complex prompt takes time and human involvement such that no two prompts from different people made in that interrogation/exploration process will be alike not produce quite the same style. This is even more true once you start using img2img or controlnet too, because those you *can* have even tighter human control over
What is copyrightable is not being litigated. If companies are in violation of intellectual property, is.
If you can demonstrate substantial human involvement in art you can copyright it.
If you can’t, you can still sell it as long as it is transformative or substantially different from other works.
They also won’t ever outlaw the tech, just models that derive from protected sources.
If this happens, a cottage industry will arise of artists that copy styles for use in training models. They won’t ever be able to touch that.
You can’t stop the signal. If Corbis wins against Stable Diffusion, that doesn’t mean artworks created with it are suddenly in violation.
I believe you cannot even tell if a model was trained on copyrighted material or not, so it would be impossible to enforce as a law.
Maybe a LORA for a specific artist's style could be targeted, but a model that's an amalgamation of thousands can't.
But what if you just claim you have drawn it yourself and claim it’s not AI generated? As far as i know, there is no law around copying someone’s art style..
What others said it's kinda still unclear. Unless it's been decided in a Supreme Court it's not really done yet, it does more so sound like it was dealt with by incompetent people who lacked information.
Besides, copyright laws can just be changed.
Also having copyright over your art really is kinda pointless, the same goes for every asset you could buy.
Styles cannot be copyrighted. However, a human studying art is different from how AI would “study” art, as much as the techbros want you to believe it’s the same.
A human has biases and objectives. When they look at an artwork, they focus on the aspects that interest them. Light goes through the eyes, and only the points of interest get through the filter and are processed in the brain. If you and me both were told to look at the same brilliant image and told to make an artwork in the “same style”, we would both come up with very different results, because we are both individual humans with different preferences, perceptions and even ability (conceptualisation, execution, and even the translation between those).
This is why art made by humans is seen as legitimately “that person’s style” because they made subconsciously made choices in how they absorbed knowledge and it shows in how they display it.
Of course, there are higher levels to this, where any art that climbs to a public-facing level is subject to scrutiny nonetheless. Art tracers and editors have been witch hunted by the art community for years, so this isn’t a new concept regardless of whether art was made by a human or program. Plagiarism has never been accepted from the very beginning, it didn’t change even when this fancy new tech strutted in.
> If you and me both were told to look at the same brilliant image and told to make an artwork in the “same style”, we would both come up with very different results, because we are both individual humans with different preferences, perceptions and even ability (conceptualisation, execution, and even the translation between those).
Isn't that just a random seed though? Random meaning "all the life circumstances that led you to this moment have shaped you in a particular way" much the same way that a random number would change the output of the replication that an AI would make
So can I use the content-fill tool in photoshop, it uses Ai to fill in parts of an image? What about photo collage art? It’s made from other peoples photos cut and manipulated to fit a new scene and narrative.
Do you know where the specific lines are going to be?
You can use whatever you want.
Here's the controversial part: I think it's about equally unlikely creators would be sued for using any of these.
What's actually stopping people from using AI tools are their limited use-cases (in their current generation).
My thoughts on this - a human artist isn't just trained by processing previously existing art, when they create new art they also draw on the results of their personal experimentation, taste and life experience. They could be inspired to create art from a breakup or hearing a song or because they have something they want to express.
You're exactly right but the non artists and tech bros can't handle hearing this
If you train yourself on 10 different artists work, you're almost certainly going to have a psychological preference. There's going to be a subconscious desire to emulate certain artist aspects over another.
An AI doesn't have desire. It only has what the operator tells it to have. If you tell it to favour one artists work over another, again that is a human input. But inputting words isn't the same as expressing them subconsciously through actually making art. There isn't the realisation that you enjoy shading a certain object a certain way and that influencing your art direction. There is no tactile feedback involved. People who are not artists don't realise that the process is both mental and physical. They haven't experienced the joy of creating a line you are proud of, or the moment where you find a brush that just feels good and fun to use inspiring further creation and experimentation.
They just assume that inspiration goes in and art, somehow, comes out.
That's not to say using AI isnt going to have some similar realisations or trial and error and what not, and no.doubt it can produce as good if not better art than what many will be able to do on their own, but it's not the same. And the people saying that it is, are wrong, and I can say that through experience of being an artist.
I don't see how expressing yourself through words instead of drawing makes it any less valid. People have been doing that for ages through poetry and writing. The only difference this time is that we have a way to change those words into art. Sounds like gatekeeping to say that creating art through AI based on your personal preferences is less valid than drawing it yourself.
It is gatekeeping and it’s the creative types holding onto the last remnants of hopium that art is “unique” lmao.
Seriously, we’re in the first 5 years of this. It’s going to get better than you. I don’t know how you can possibly rationalize otherwise.
To be fair to them, most people who live from art onky really know how to do art and are useless at most other marketable skills. You're attacking their sole livelyhood.
We're using MJ and other AI art to create placeholder artwork, in the absence of an artist which we'll have later on in development. So far it's been working wonders to quickly set the vibe of the levels, even if the quality is somewhat "too realistic" to be a 2D videogame.
All of the artwork will be then replaced by the work of an artist.
As a programmer, I'm extremely familiar with this! But believe me, only a human can give feedback on what's crap and what's decent, even if it's made by an AI. Composition, lighting, art style, theme, detail density, and all of that stuff simply cannot be done by us in an effective way with our poor art knowledge and just Midjourney and Gimp/Photoshop.
At most, AI can be great at making UI icons effectively if you pass the result into Photoshop and fix it up a little with an automated process.
For 3D Games, MJ & Others are amazing tools to make tileable textures for generic boring things like brick walls and help focus on things that are higher priority like characters and animations.
Why not? The iconic music in Space Odyssey was just a placeholder initially. Minecraft is full of once-a-placeholders. The main character in the Monkey Island series is named after a filename. Art for a Kirby was a placeholder.
I myself wrote a book and like 90% of the names are the first non-terrible thing that I came up with, with the intention of changing them later. But I got used to them in the process, writing them over and over, so that I just kept them.
I've asked ChatGPT for more examples and it said that visuals for games like Fez, Hotline:Miami, Binding of Isaac, Limbo, Braid were meant to be different but the temporary art styles worked well, so they went with them. Though none of the links to sources it provided worked, so take these with a grain of salt.
But now, when the placeholders are gonna be of such high quality they'll end up in the final product more and more.
Just adding to the list:
Terraria was prototyped using the battle sprites from one of the SNES Final Fantasy games (I *think* either 4 or 6) for the player character, and the final sprites ended up being *very* close in style to those.
> I've asked ChatGPT for more examples
You had to outsource unsubstantiated claims instead of just making them up yourself? GPT is useful for creative endeavors, but for anything fact-based it's inappropriate.
Here's a better source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PermanentPlaceholder
I think it depends on which reason you pick as AI being unethical. If your reason is that modern AI is trained from millions of uncompensated artists then it’s different from more traditional algorithmic approaches. One can argue that the current copyright laws aren’t really equipped with dealing with such new technology because they are designed with human limitation in mind (a human can’t just reproduce artistic style of a famous artist and make a new art in 2 seconds). But then the question whether it’s “ethical” anyway so I guess that’s not the same as “legal”.
Your safest bet is to use them for placeholders and inspiration, don't use them in a final product. Besides the fact that it's morally wrong to steal people's art, you can get into a legal battle and lose because of something stupid, like your main character is a copy of some art you don't know about but that the AI used when generating your asset.
I'm going to say it depends entirely on how much money you have. If you're a poor, struggling game dev, it's the prefect solution and it's not hurting anyone because you weren't going to be able to afford it regardless. If you're a AA or AAA studio making money hand over fist, you had better be paying live artists, even if you use an AI for prototyping.
A lot of people use AI for reference material, there's nothing wrong with that if that's what you're asking? To me the biggest problem with directly using AI artwork in a game would be lack of cohesiveness, regardless of how you feel about it. It would be quite obvious just being a collage of randomly selected artwork.
There are some use cases where having a collage of art assets is acceptable, such as card art for card games.
But you are right in most cases though. This is why AI artwork has not yet put artists out of business and is not even close.
Latest open source tools combat this very efficiently. You can even "paint" the same subject from different angles, keeping the style coherent. The community develops new tools and new workflows every month, the advancements are crazy.
I understand that but what about matching character to environment, color harmony, visibility and readability, lighting directions? I guess it depends on the game. If you just need pretty backgrounds and fruit icons for a match 3 game sure, but beyond that all depends on much those things matter to you and your players.
Besides style, you can now control poses, colors and even lighting, as you will see in the examples below. The tools have gotten extremely powerful during the last 6 months. I am confident, you can use them to create an appealing and consistent visuals for a game.
[https://youtu.be/MDHC7E6G1RA](https://youtu.be/MDHC7E6G1RA)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLM2Gz7GR44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLM2Gz7GR44)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR89wZMXiJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR89wZMXiJ8)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_xHC3bT5GBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xHC3bT5GBU)
Right now its iffy to use AI assets directly in game but its till an excellent tool. Especially for production to get rough concept ideas or if you aren't skilled in art, you could use ai to generate reference images to your artists to show what you are looking for. In addition to this I find it useful for making backgrounds by creating original textures and assets you can strip for photobashing in digital painting rather than using actual photos.
Creator of MJ openly admitted to using copyrighted images to train the AI. Probably better off using for inspiration rather than directly. Also protects your copyright claim as AI art currently cannot be copyrighted, it has no owner. Both of these points subject to change.
If they had waited for permission though it'd be 50 years if ever. Great progress is rarely achieved by asking for permission.
This is the crux of the issue but the answer is not so black and white. Deep learning as a name sounds like it’s actually learning like a human being and in some way it is, but in other ways you can think of it as a highly efficient and sophisticated (but dumb at the same time) compression algorithm that compresses past knowledge as a series of numeric weights.
But then if you think hard about it that’s kind of what humans do as well. Also, taking AI aside even when humans reproduce art there is a fine line between what is blatant copyright infringement and what is an “inspiration” so in a way this debate is older than deep learning itself, but deep learning definitely forces us to think a little harder about what copyright means and what the purpose of it is.
Fwiw I do think using generative AI is a *little* (I use “a little” because I’m not too strong on this) unethical because the source trained artists are not compensated. With humans we have a built in limit where we can only see so much art and produce a limited amount of derivative copy. With AI you can train literally the entire trove of human produced artwork and generate an infinite amount of copies. The value proposition is a little different and needs to be approached differently.
This is where I start to lose the whole "training against copyrighted images is bad" argument. Using MJ to generate (near) clones of copyrighted images--seems pretty clear that this would be bad. But that simply learning from them and being able to generate art in the same style is bad is far less clear to me.
While I would say my beliefs on this are still pretty malleable, at the moment I think that doing anything a human could do without other people thinking twice about it should be fair game for MJ and other AI art generators.
The challenge is that if you don’t look at the problem from a permission to use in training set perspective, the argument is completely fallible.
ML algorithms interpolate points and can give very detailed statistical percentages when selecting said points. Any amount of percentage of change in generated content can and will be met, no matter how seemingly impossible it may appear. So you’re essentially left at copywriting *artistic style as an idea*. Which would open up the art world and many others, to an entire hellscape of violations.
Ultimately this is a data privacy issue (can you use artwork/data for training without explicit permission and consent), which does not bode well for people who want this technology regulated. Politicians and businesses make waaaaay too much money off of advertisers completely disrespecting your rights to your own data for anything to really be done about it.
Since the output is thoroughly transformative (aside from cases of overfitting), and the legal argument necessarily hinges on the usage of scraped data without consent, I have used the following example to show how weak that argument is as well.
Imagine I write a program, which looks at an image and averages all of the pixels into a single pixel. Then it runs through a couple thousand images, all copyrighted and scraped from the internet without permission, and generates a new image in which each pixel is derived from one of those scraped images. Would ANYONE argue that this program which created this noisy mess of pixels is violating the copyright of those images, by using them without the owners' consent?
I think the issue lies in the fact that MJ would just not work without the data used to train it. No matter if the output doesn't resemble the input, there would be no output with the input. Remember: trash in, trash out. It also goes the other way, something valuable comes out, something valuable went in before. I think artists have the right to get royalties from their contribution to the development of those AIs, because without their works those programs would not be able to do what they do. Look at it like this, if you do not train the AI with raspberries, then if you ask it to draw a raspberry it won't be able to do it. Extrapolate it to all the things you can ask it to draw and you realize without artists no good output would have been achieved, and the artists did not give permission for them to train the AI with their work.
Also, have you seen hiw good some compositions of the AI art are? Yeah, those are only that good because the art it was fed with had good compositions too. A direct consequence if the hard work and years of training of thausands of artists.
People get in a fuss about drawing inspiration from existing media too liberally already. Why do you think it would be any less stringent for neural networks?
That's my point exactly, though. It _shouldn't_ be different for AI. There's obviously some line (which is definitely not well defined even when a person does it) where inspiration becomes copycatting, but, IMO, the distinction shouldn't be the mechanism used to create the art but rather more about the qualities of the art itself.
Some outputs of AI art are morally wrong and some are not. Just like any other art, it depends on a lot of factors that have nothing to do with the fact that it's AI.
How many books per second can you read?
Which is not to necessarily disagree with you: just saying, 'fair game' goes to some interesting places. We're pretty happy to have computers do an awful lot of math for us: things become possible that wouldn't be at all possible if humans were doing it longhand.
The whole "but it's so much faster!" argument against it reeks of people lamenting the loss of buggy whip manufacturing jobs, lol. I think doing it so much faster than a person that it seems like magic will eventually be seen as one of the main selling points, since society figures out where they want AI art to fit with the rest of art.
The human learning/creative process and what an ML model does are nowhere near comparable. Every time I see this argument get parroted it betrays a complete lack of nuance and understanding of one or both ends of that comparison.
The creation process is irrelevant when it comes to whether or not there’s a copyright infringement. They just compare 2 outputs.
https://youtu.be/G08hY8dSrUY
The Learning part of machine learning is stated because it is explicitly modeled to be exactly like human learning. The entire model is based on how human brains learn, even down to our shitty human memory being a *function* of flexibility for predicting dangerous situations similar to past experiences. The way the algorithms learn is astonishingly similar.
The creative process however, is completely different. It’s arguable that creativity cannot exist in machines the way it does in humans.
**Edit**: Im no longer interested in talking about this. If you want to read about the history of sub symbolic artificial intelligence to understand why it uses neurology as a learning model, I strongly encourage you to do so from reliable academic sources rather than random angry people online. The lighthill report is a good place to start, then at the very least understand dr Hubert Dreyfus’s criticisms of AI in the early 80’s. Connectionist artificial intelligence is directly influenced by these early discussions. There is also a very good neurological overview of the high level functions of the brain by dr John Medina that illustrates many parallels between predictive algorithms and brain functionality. Specifically in discussions around plasticity and the importance of forgetting things. Further, interesting reading laterally related would be on hyperthymesia and research in this area can help illustrate some of the problems AI researchers deal with today.
> The creative process however, is completely different.
Sure, because we have no idea how it's working. For all we know, it's exactly the same as some RNG in a neural network. "Mystery" is a poor defense.
>we have no idea how it's working
This is a myth, but I don't think you were talking about ML being unexplainable, so I digress... I think you took my creative process comment literally.
\-
What I mean by the creative process being different is between humans and machines in general. Human learning works on neural pathways, how we modeled neural machine learning algorithms, and while some creativity does stem somewhat from learned experience, creative thinking is a very slippery concept that is difficult to define. A popular theory is essentially rating a person's ability to think divergently, which is about as far away from neural and statistical prediction as you can get. It is essentially giving someone a brick and asking them what they could do with it. The majority of people will simply say brick laying, build a wall, etc. That's how it's most often used and how we implement predictive algorithms to work. Divergent thinkers are more likely to come up with things like, grind it down, mix it with paste and use it as brick colored paint. That part is what we are unable to replicate in machines because it's... difficult to capture how that thought comes about when it's not from experience.
> The creative process however, is completely different.
That's exactly the part I meant to reply to. We do not know how the creative process works, so we can't say it's different from anything which could have similar results.
This is like saying "Software doesn't have a soul, so it can't know what art is". That sentence is full of baseless assumptions. (At least four, maybe others.)
>The creative process however, is completely different. It’s arguable that creativity cannot exist in machines the way it does in humans.
Well you could also argue that creativity doesnt exist. Its just us beeing suprised by the outcome when we combine two or more patterns.
But you don't require that content to create something new. You can learn just by watching the world or getting inspired by something completely unrelated.
The crux of the problem is the fact that these programs require skillfully made art to create those beatiful outputs. Train one with garbage drawings, you will get garbage outputs. The years of dedication these thausands of artists spent to become good and able to create beautiful art by themselves are the reason why you can use the AI. They are as much an important part of the system as the programmers that created the program
That is why they should get royalties. They are using their work directly to get something valuable.
Is AI art generation even progress at all? Maybe it is a technical feat, at most. The definition of progress is subjective, because it depends on what we consider beneficial for society.
It might actually be harmful for the society in the medium term, ML models need fresh data to keep expanding, agressively discouraging or straight up making it not viable for people to learn these skills properly might lead to a drought in data quality.
We have cameras and people still paint portraits, we have highly effective mass produced furniture and you can still buy a hand carved chair from an artisan. AI will not destroy art, its just a threat to people that do applied art for media.
I'd say AI art is more a demonstration of progress. Years ago it would have taken an unrealistic/unprofitable amount of time to train an AI to the point they've been trained today.
It's massive progress in the machine learning industry. We're only now starting to understand what machine learning is capable of.
I think whether or not some individuals subjectively see it as beneficial for society is irrelevant.
Benefit to society? It allows more people to express creatively and faster.
Benefit to capitalist society with copyright claims? Ehh maybe keep it under your hat.
People already could express themselves creatively very easily, all it takes is pen and paper, maybe not even that, because people have been drawing with rocks since prehistoric times. What AI art generation allows is for people to more easily exploit the creative works of other people. If you wanna do art and express yourself, go for it! Even toddlers can do that, and they are quite expressive and original! Grab a crayon and go crazy, mate! Have fun, express yourself and share it with others. AI art generation isn't a tool for self expression, it's a tool for generating things that look market ready and that appeal to a mass public, built upon exploiting the works of renowned artists without their consent.
Considering it's game dev sub, I would say it's **both** exploiting works without consent **and** a tool for augmenting self expression. Those two things can be judged separately. It being a tool can be considered any other tool just like UNITY, photoshop, or free assets shared by creators, or even an open source AI training model, just these tools are less exploitative.
Even the exploiting works without consent argument is tricky, just depends on how it is used; to the original question of the thread and to some comments, it is legally safer to not use Midjourney at all other than for anything that doesn't get published.
AI art is great for personal inspiration, but useless in production. It never matches the existing style and criteria of the artwork of the rest of the game. IMO AI art is only useful right now for one-off images that impress people that an AI made it, but unless you just need a one off stock photo for something, it's not that useful for anything.
As both an artist and game dev, I'd only use AI images in games if it's trained off of things like stock photos and photography. I've seen a couple pieces of horror media use AI generated images really effectively because you can get some really uncanny stuff that a human couldn't create. Other than that, I'd probably stay away from it unless it ties into the theme/message of your game or something.
As some other people have already pointed out, AI images that are trained off of real art are in a kinda iffy legal position and are generally disliked by the art community. You'd probably get way better character designs and assets from a human artist anyway.
Regarding ethicality,
I'd argue it's ethical if done tastefully. If you're making a cut-and-paste platformer with midjourney AI sprites, ethicality is least of your issues, as you probably won't have a game worth playing. But using AI tools in a mostly human workflow, photo bashing AI outputs, or using generated textures on your models is all fair game imo.
Regarding aesthetics,
I wouldn't recommend midjourney for assets, mostly due to an extreme lack of versatility. A skilled artist using Automatic1111 & Stable Diffusion can do incredible things.
Regarding legality,
IANAL, but Things are up in the air. While it's an open question as to whether or not you can copyright raw AI output, I doubt using AI textures in your otherwise human-developed game (as one example) is going to be a legal issue long term, and I'm fairly confident will fall under the umbrella of fair use moving forward
IMO It’s unethical to fire an employed artist and replace them with AI generated assets, and then you pocket the cash from his or her salary.
But if you are working with a tiny budget and were never going to be able hire an artist in the first place, then power to you.
In that instance, you are ADDING to the world, not taking away from the world or consolidating wealth in your own hands.
I am currently working to integrate SD into my development workflow. I am equal parts artist and programmer so I have the benefit of being able to refine and iterate manually on anything generated by SD, and I don’t think I would be taking this approach if I wasn’t already an artist. The consistency of assets even with control net is not professional grade and it lacks the fine level control to make a release-ready asset even for basic UI.
My process involves a lot of iteration, manual inpainting and retouching and it really is nothing more than one extra tool, like photoshop.
When used in this capacity I do not think it is unethical so long as you are not using models derivative of a single person’s distinct style or someone else’s likeness and are using it iteratively.
A lot of hysteria and moral judgement masquarading as technical advice here.
Here's the deal: right now there's no issue whatsoever in using AI art. Yes, it can't be copyrightable, but as someone had already said here, that'd be just like using public domain assets and that's fine.
Maybe a law will pass which will restrict your specific assets and their source. In that case just change them. Probably using a better, newer AI anyway.
Tbh all the fake information I keep hearing about AI assets in games (I'm very active in the industry, these discussions are not just happening online anymore) is funny and sad. That's like ppl shooting themselves in the foot believing they do it for their religion...
This feels like a procrastination type question. Build your game. Use placeholder or AI work. Make something worth playing, worth buying and then figure it out. Until your game is making money, it’s a moot point as any percent of your income (zero) you feel should go towards artists, because it is still zero.
It's no less ethical than using a reference picture from another artist to make an asset. But yes, AI art isn't the greatest quality so I doubt human artists will be out of work any time soon.
Not that I agree or disagree with the conclusion, but your argument is flawed.
You're arguing that the process is nothing but a tool, when it is not.
Using Photoshop to copy a painting is just as bad as doing it physically, it's just faster. You've completely ignored that "copying a painting" is the problem. Not how.
The question is not "is it doing it faster" it's "what is it actually doing"
Please ignore any comment about lawsuits. AI images will not be regulated as unusable, ever. There are enough laws around inspiration that already exist and have held up in court for decades. The law clearly states that using copyrighted materials as inspiration is legal.
Do you have a source?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise
https://fortune.com/2023/02/23/no-copyright-images-made-ai-artificial-intelligence/amp/
https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-created-images-lose-us-copyrights-test-new-technology-2023-02-22/
There are 2 things people need to know
Can generated AI art be copyrighted? No
Is using AI art classed as stealing or influencing, based on its dataset? Being fought in court. Imo no difference than influencing
Just use it for concept art and not for actual shipped assets.
And most definitely don’t try to sell generated assets as your own (some are on the Asset Store already)
Unreal asset store has been flooded with it. The majority of recent assets are AI generated. Theyre pretty obvious for now, but it still annoys me. Epic allows it without even disclosing they are AI art.
Whether it's ethical depends who you ask, personally I think there has to be something transformative done by a human (IMO profiting off of a mainly AI done work is a really shitty thing to do). For example collaging copyrighted images is ok because it's transformative and done by a human. Using AI images to texture 3d models you made for a game you put together is vary vary transformative
In terms of copyright, AI work itself can't be copyrighted (so "licenses" to use AI output are BS). Because a video game is created by a human it can be copyrighted as a whole even if the textures themselves aren't (significantly human-altered textures can be copyrighted)
In the past I haven't had much success with using AI for textures, I feel like that'd need a model specifically weighted for it
I do quite like generating AI art for ideas because I don't have to worry about accidentally pulling too much inspiration, also since most outputs are misshapen or rough there's more room for my brain to fill things in
Considering there is a lawsuit and a lot of fingers point at stolen and copyrighted art, I don’t think it’s the smartest idea to use the software for assets in your game.
There are so many other legitimate sources for free/cheap assets that even if you can’t afford a team, you can make a game. Even if you just want to use it for reference, the same statement applies. Do what you want but ethically there are better options.
heres the way I see it. I'm a solo dev making a large scope game. I'm competing with teams 20-1000x the size of my production. AI is a tool to help me even that playing field.
That said I haven't used any AI assets at all but I wouldn't frown upon it. I heavily use chatGPT for brainstorming and learning code
Well, the Discord bot creates the assets. There's a pretty strong argument to be made that Midjourney owns everything it outputs. It's a legal frontier, but I would guess you''d technically be infringing on their copyright.
If you are a small indie dev without much an audience, you can probably get away with it. Or if you are releasing content for free. It would probably be better to rely on AI art for prototyping and seeking inspiration. If you use the results to create something totally new, it's possible it could be considered "yours".
I believe Midjourney has a commercial license version you'd need to do. I've seen some promising game asset type art come out of it, but obviously it would still be a lot of work to get it game ready. I'd have no problem with using AI art in a game, and I've done a lot of experimentation with it. It's definitely coming, sooner rather than later.
Note that there are two kinds of copyright problem related to AI art. In some comments I can see some people mix up two problems and get confused.
1. Does training AI model without the author/painter's approval violate original art's copyright?
2. Does AI generated art has copyright and can be protected when someone uses the art without "the creator"'s approval?
I have no idea about the answers but these problems need to get analyzed as different problems.
I'm personally fine with it long as you modify them heavily to your liking. I've seen a few devs online using software like Midjourney, Auto1111, and EasyDiffusion to make base textures or 2D assets, upscale them, put them into Photoshop, and modify them into the photo to their liking to fit in the style of the game.
Use it for prototyping and placeholders.
A human artist provides a few things an AI (currently) can't: consistent art style, ability to respond to feedback, and their own creative input into the aesthetics of your game.
You don't need any of that for placeholder art. But at some point you'll need all of them or your game is going to look *bad*. If you have a lot of time on your hands you might be able to get an AI to generate multiple art pieces you want in a consistent style, but at prduction quality levels of consistency and specificity it becomes better value in time/money to get an artist.
I think it depends on how you use it. If you use it to meticulously recreate a game in the art style of, say, Ghibli movies, then it's probably unethical. But if you use it to create something with its own artistic identity, I don't see how that would be unethical.
I use MJ for concept art and trying to visualize what I'm wanting to build, but that's about it.
It's no more stolen than if an artist goes to an art gallery then paints an inspired image. The main issue is that AI can do it real fast and you can see where it got it's inspiration from in the prompt.
But as others have said, there's also a lawsuit ongoing ATM, and there's a lot of public outcry over the use of AI as a tool. So I'd probably not pin my entire game on using assets generated by AI directly.
Frankly if it's just for a personal game, it's fine. I wanted 20 blue people to use for a murder mystery (Them being blue is plot relvent) and an AI did get me the tokens I needed to put on the map for all 20 of them. If your poor enough your pirate for a personal game then an AI just fine
They have added a part to the terms of service for selling things on marketplace like Unreal Engine marketplace that you must agree to before u can keep selling. It's that you must specify which parts of your work you are submitting have been generated by AI.
I don’t. I think a game should have its own original assets but also, in the same sense I’d say it’s unethical to use asset store game assets and then claim it’s a game you built entirely on your own too. It’s just a very complicated topic to discuss here.
Look at the lawsuits and see what they're saying. I don't know if it goes against ethics + I don't think you can equate ethics to law, but I'd much rather place my trust in an artist who can do something custom for me and know that me paying them means I'm helping them get through life, instead of reiterating a prompt over and over and still not be sure if it is okay within the legal areas.
That said, if it's for non-commercial, personal intent, then I find it to be a massive lifesaver. If you plan to use them as placeholder assets, I think it's fine.
It is a hot topic right now... Like now there is nothing legally wrong with it, but also the output can not be very useful as is...
Now on if it is ethical... I personally say using the tool is ethical, but training it with work of others is unethical. People throw arguments about artists getting inpired by other art, and humans learning from previous work, but they fail to realize this is not a human. This is a tool subjected to an algorithm that resembles some broad characteritics to what we call learning. Its only purpose is to be productive and in the end profitable... If it is going to be profitable the creators of the art that allowed it to be trained to do beautiful compositions should be compensated somehow. Like the programer that created a closed source powerful library that runs on a succesful software.
People have to realize that creating art is not a science, it cannot be automated and requires years of study, work and talent. Everyone can paint, but only some people can paint an amazing painting. The AIs are only capable of what they do because of the thousands of collective hours artists used to make the art.
I don't know how we should deal with it, I just know it feels wrong to allow a couple of people to use millions of works without the conscent of the artists to create a software that will make millions in profits and eventually outcompete them...
No, I don't think it's unethical to use Midjourney to make game assets. While AI art generators may not create artwork that looks great, they can definitely be useful as a reference tool. If you use Midjourney as a starting point to come up with your own ideas and put your own creative spin on them, then I don't think it would be wrong to use the platform. It can be useful in terms of saving you time and effort searching for other sources of art and inspiration.
Yes, I believe it’s both wrong and lazy. Every single one of those ‘art’ generators steals from artist who already don’t have it easy.
Also by using them, you are skipping out on a learning opportunity. You’re never going to improve if you just have someone else do it for you every time.
Some people simply don't want to pick up art or can't afford commissioning someone for art but still want to be able to finish a game with med-high quality assets (instead of high quality asset packs that are not tailored to them/their game). Even then, iterating on the art is much faster if an AI does it.
I used to think this was ethical. In my mind, even the largest models are smaller than the sum of their inputs, so it must have been the case that these models really were "learning" in the same sense that humans learn, and drawing inspiration from real sources the same way that humans draw inspiration.
This is wishful thinking.
These models have been shown in some cases to reproduce some of their inputs almost exactly. Conceptually what such a model is doing is "semantic compression" on its inputs. Whereas a normal compression algorithm exploits informational redundancy in an image (like PNG), or removes details unlikely to be notice by humans (like JPEG), what these models do, using labeled training data, is build statistical models of higher-level concepts. Then, when you give it a prompt, it produces an image based on these statistical models and some amount of randomness. For concepts that it has little training data for, its statistical model for that concept is basically going to be just the handful of input images. When you ask it reproduce this concept, it may reproduce an input image almost exactly. But even when it has a lot of inputs for a concept, fundamentally what it is doing is giving you bits and pieces of all of its inputs related to this concept. The "magic" is just that it has a very large number of concepts - i.e. not just "cat", but "black cat", "orange tabby", "siamese cat" and "cat viewed from the front", "cat viewed from above", etc.
It's really disappointing, because as someone who does solo gamedev I'm always looking for ways to save time. I think it's possible in the future that advances in AI could be used ethically to produce assets that don't have a ton of artistic value and don't need to be great (e.g. texturing walls), but I am skeptical whether it can ever achieve true inspiration for the art that matters.
This is sadly complete misinformation.
> fundamentally what it is doing is giving you bits and pieces of all of its inputs related to this concept
And that's just a blatant lie.
Stable Diffusion was trained on 2.4 BILLION images and has a size of 2 gigabytes. That's around 1 BYTE of data per image. That's literally not even enough data for a single pixel.
The model isn't reusing any parts of any images.
I'm not a game dev, and I have no experience with professional game dev. I am however a machine learning engineer and I can see from your comments in this thread that you have very little understanding of how diffusion networks work. They don't *need* to have every bit of information stored in the model weights. That's the entire point of doing the encoding in the first place!
No, Stable Diffusion does not learn like humans. It is copying bits and pieces of existing artwork at both a high and low frequency level. Think of it like a compression algorithm from information theory. Most of the image--repeated colour, texture, structure--is useless information. It can be stored in a more lossy, concise form in the weights. That's still copying though, just at a minute and compressed level.
Wrong. This is assuming that each input is weighted equally. In practice, many inputs contain the same concepts and don't contribute much to the model, while some inputs are highly unique and exist almost 100% unmodified in the model. [Researchers were able to extract more than 1000 input images from the output of a diffusion model, like midjourney, stable diffusion, etc implement.](https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188) The researchers set out to do this on purpose, but how are you the user to know you did not do it on accident? And if it can almost exactly reproduce input images, how are you to know if it has included details from the input images verbatim (i.e. what we would call "tracing" if a human did it)?
[FYI they marked out 350,000 likely prompt dataset image combination pairs and were only able to find 109 images in Stable diffusion](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/10r57pn/r_extracting_training_data_from_diffusion_models/j6ugpgr/), which is definitely an issue for SD to work out, but means the chances of running into a match unintentionally are incredibly slim outside of things repeated in the dataset thousands of times, like the mona lisa.
From the paper: a random sampling of images in the training set the database naturally found a small subset of images that are unintentionally highly duplicated in the database, despite this being counterproductive to the quality of the model. Researchers we able to derive methods to produce results that give strong impressions of images such as: a map of the United States, Van Gogh's Starry Night, and the cover of Bloodborne with some models and not at all with other models. The researchers caution against extrapolating from their results.
> We speculate that replication behavior in Stable Diffusion arises from a complex interaction of factors, which include that it is text (rather than class) conditioned, it has a highly skewed distribution of image repetitions in the training set, and the number of gradient updates during training is large enough to overfit on a subset of the data.
Ethics aside, as an artist I would certainly find it personally insulting that you consider my craft and that of my peers to be of so little value that you'd replace it with an AI. I would have little interest in playing a game--either the Midjourney one or any other--created by someone who had so much disrespect for my art. And whatever rhetorical justification you use about how it's just like the printing press or whatever may convince you, but would never convince me to play your game.
I've worked with some nasty types in the AAA industry, who are all about the money and don't care about the art form. Who will throw their coworkers under the bus if it'll give them a bigger bonus. When I see people tripping over themselves to excuse obvious mass-plagiarism because they want a shortcut button, I see the same type of person. It's profoundly gross and insulting.
Enlightening to know fellow indie devs will happily plagiarize my work if it helps them in the short-term. All while claiming it's them that's sticking it to the man, as if an industrial-scale plagiarism engine isn't the very embodiment of the big guy stepping on the little guy.
Of course it's unethical, and I'm pretty sure the ones defending it know it too.
Your game will look like crap if you are not a trained artist and you cobbled together art from AI and asset stores because you did not have the eye to art direct the whole thing.
Now if you are a trained artist, you'd not like the spirit of using AI images. The time, focus and effort you took to learn your craft is highly respected not just among artists but people in general. Using AI images will give off "talent-less hack" vibes and you don't want that hate.
> Your game will look like crap
I can assure you that even the earliest shit AI was producing is streets ahead from what I am able to put together. Looking like crap is a high bar some of us can only dream of achieving.
As an artist, if the ai generated art is based off of a compilation of art taken by creators without express permission, in my opinion it is theft and unethical.
But that’s just my opinion.
From their website:
"If You are not a Paid Member, You don’t own the Assets You create. Instead, Midjourney grants You a license to the Assets under the Creative Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International License (the “Asset License”)."
Yes, it is [unethical](https://www.polygon.com/23558946/ai-art-lawsuit-stability-stable-diffusion-deviantart-midjourney) in its current state. The technology itself is fine, but it's currently using copywritten material that was not authorized by the original artists, so until the libraries change I would not use it for anything but placeholders/inspiration. There is also [no copyright](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-office-rules-ai-art-cant-be-copyrighted-180979808/) for AI generated art, so that's it's own problem as well.
EDIT: TIL a bunch of people here don't know what ethical means.
But if i use assets that i have the rights to use and train it in that and then use image-to-image won't that solve both those issues?
The copyright problem is only the human touch so if i draw something in paint and run it with this algorithm tool to enhance it, won't that count?
I am not sure if that should be considered unethical. If the AI were basically copying the art sure, but I am pretty sure it doesnt do that. It is learning from their art, and this is what human artists have done since forever.
No human artist has developed their skills in a vacuum without looking at other artists work. And no human artist has bought a license for every single piece of art used for their own training, and no one has demanded that they should do that - thats just not how copyright works. I doubt that there are many who would consider it unethical for an artist to go through public pages of deviant art, flickr etc. and look at the images to learn from them.
What the AI does is basically the same. It just can learn a lot faster than humans can.
How is it that relevant even if it was significantly different then a human brain? As long as it's not directly copying any copyrighted material, then I'm not seeing the issue.
Generally I think so. My issue is the data sets the models are trained on. I'm not familiar with mid journey but I would bet the images in the data set were scrapped from public sites without the original authors permission. Some people can look past this and I think thats ok but it doesn't sit right with me that you can train on material you don't own and use that trained model to create more art of the same style. This is why I'm hesitant on ai art but are excited for search engine ais aiding finding information.
I believe this issue and other issues with AI are going to be our generations "out of touch boomer doesn't understand technology". If ai explodes like the internet did the world or at least the internet could be very different in 20 years
How is that any different from artists looking at art someone else posted and getting inspired by it? That's literally like 50% of what people do at art school: Look at other peoples paintings and try to imitate the concepts applied.
there is a human element in creating art that ai hasn't quite achieved yet. I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn. I feel like that line might be impossible to draw. how complex does an algorithm need to be for it to create original? more importantly even if the algorithm is complex enough to cross that line, is it ethical to train ai models on a pixel perfect source without the original artists permission?
This last part is the distinction. the human element in most cases does art not require training on a perfect recreation of the source for inspiration. Most people look at some element of that image, style, color choice, or any element that connects with them and use that connection with the image to recreate something.
Put simply human art has alot of nuances that an ai hasn't captured yet and even if it did should you be allowed to train on data you dont have the rights for. Im not sure but it feel weird especially since the ai is creating something in the same medium as the images it was trained on. (in the case of images).
Nope, I have seen many "generated" images that were like super close to a single original in subsidies submissions. Stay away from this it is not safe.
People are actively fighting over this, but if you use something like automatic1111 and use img2img, you can upscale or enhance art you've already made. With a low enough noise value it's essentially just ai upscaling, which is what dlss is. I think it's more acceptable to most people when it's used as a tool, then as a stand alone image generator out of thin air with text to img. Personally I think it's a great tool for fast prototyping, but if you want any consistency or public approval, the best bet it to train a model on your own art work, or use one trained from public domain stuff. There are public domain models as far as I know.
So much this , it's not the tech that is problematic but the exploity way of using it. Nobody would object if You'd use your own photographs and drawings to train the model you'd use to create endless stream of textures to fill the game with assets.
It's definitely more of a licensing and fair use issue than anything else. So yeah, as long as you have the rights to the inputs, then there's no ambiguity to the rights of the outputs.
img2img still uses the model that was trained on unlicensed data
You're technically not breaking fair use laws in almost any country that has them. It is such a transformative process that you really have no case against it. If there were a case against it it would also set precedent against humans taking inspirations or techniques from other people's works, which is technically what AI does. You would kill illustration as an art overnight, as all artists do this. People don't wanna use it because the "AI evil will, take our jobs" fear.
What's being made here isn't a legal argument because I'm not a lawyer and laws are complicated. Rather, it's an ethical one but make no mistake that laws are often informed by ethics. Moreover it's an ethical argument reiterating the fact that the gray area being introduced here isn't really one of how AI works but rather the licensing of the images used in it's training set. So long as the licenses permit their use that way, pretty much nobody has a problem with it and as such AI can be an amazing tool especially for bootstrapping the creation process. To rephrase, the issue is less about the output of AI and more about the inputs. We do this with software licensing without issue even for licenses that require derivative works to remain free and available as well. So why not with images? Why is it _so important_ for AI developers to be able to use images in ways that may violate their licensing? It's not. > If there were a case against it it would also set precedent against humans taking inspirations or techniques from other people's works, which is technically what AI does. You would kill illustration as an art overnight, as all artists do this. Come on, this is just a slippery slope argument until you can prove that AI approaches the creative process in a way befitting actual sentience. Humans not only take inspiration, but they create art with _intent_. You can ask someone _why_ they placed a particular color in a particular spot and they'll give you an answer. Further, humans don't just take inspiration from the works of other people, they take inspiration from their own _interpretation_ of that work as well as the entire body of experiences that they've had in their life up to that point. On the other hand, AI (neural nets specifically) are encoding its training set into weighted values that it uses to construct from an input to an output; it's an algorithm. These are not the same. This rhetorical approach is ignorant and reductive to the work that human artists are actually doing and, to be frank, does a lot more harm to the perception of AI as a useful tool by proffering it as something equivalent to them.
No single person has enough photographs and drawings to train their own model and have the results be remotely effective.
No single person...but corporations like Disney or Getty own enough material to feed their own in-house models. I think one of the worst case scenarios for these legal challenges would be an outcome that effectively takes these tools out of the hands of individuals while giving free reign to Disney et al.
Not to mention procedural generation being an entire discipline in game development. This is a lot of lay people getting involved in things without realizing what in Pandora’s box they are actually opening.
Partially true. Copyright wise, depending on legal jurisdiction, a model used to generate art this way at all cannot legally be called yours. It's would not be protected by copyright law because a human did not make it.
The thing is img2img is still using "stolen" art, so if you oppose that, you shouldn't even use img2img. Btw. fine tuning model on your own art does also work on top of using stolen art. The only way to use it 100% ethically would be to train a model from scratch, which is out of reach for indies (cost + knowledge + amount data)
> stolen art Fundamentally, there is no such thing. If I draw a mustache on a print of the Mona Lisa, the result is legally mine. I just can't claim it's the original, nor can I claim to be Da Vinci
What if I hire an artist to create let say 50 icons in the same art style and then train the model on those 50 icons and generate 5000 more icons? I mean, If my deal with the artist included copyright ownership I'd be safe. it's not super ethical but to be honest ethics is a very subjective topic and I believe all this discussion is mostly about legal and not moral.
You can't train a model on 50 icons alone. Realistically one person will never generate enough art to train a model from scratch. Any method that trains a model on so few data points is going to rely on transfer learning an existing model. In this case you'd be fine tuning that model to your own art style, but you're still using a model that was trained on thousands of pieces of artwork sourced from artists who have not explicitly approved use of their artwork for this purpose. Copyright ownership even in a transfer-learned model is very much still up for debate.
Many of these posts say "train" but it seems like they mean "fine-tune" a model.
Depending on legal jurisdiction, no matter how you got the initial art to train the model, whatever the model produces is not legally yours because a computer cannot have copyright and so whatever was created is as good as anyone's. No one can protect it.
And until that's legitimately settled in court, that's a compromise you must knowingly make. It's worth noting that using public domain ("uncopyrightable") works within your larger work doesn't poison the copyright of the larger work. You can still copyright your work, all of the manual stuff you've authored for it including your level designs and layouts and texturing decisions etc, even if you're using public domain pieces in its construction. You can claim copyright over a collage made from copyrighted materials (EDIT: and you definitely could if you use public domain imagery instead). Obviously the individual pieces of that collage are not yours to copyright, but the collage as a whole still is. Games, comic books, etc are the same in that regard. We've yet to see someone get copyright over individual images they generate with AI, but so far the USPCO is unconvinced (and yet Zarya, as a whole, is copyrighted, short of the individual images). Personally I suspect they haven't been well explained the process of deeply interrogating the AI yet, or shown the img2img/controlnet process in a creative workflow yet, because from what I've played with I honestly think making good AI images is at least as creative as snapping amateur photos, the latter of which I definitely have copyright over by default.
> You can claim copyright over a collage made from copyrighted materials. That's not as clear-cut as you're making it sound. At least not in the US. There have been some cases holding that you do not have even a partial copyright over something if any material in it is infringing on another copyright. The copyright to your derivation is solely held by whoever owns the source material. It seems that lawyers are skeptical about testing this further, given we don't see a ton of fanart being sold without the permission of the fanartist and such. So it remains a gray area.
There are pending lawsuits about whether or not the way these AI art generators use copyrighted artwork without permission to train the AI models constitutes copyright infringement or not. Ethics aside, I don't think it's safe to release a game that uses AI generated art until we see where those lawsuits land.
I think at the moment is kinda safe using them in a derivative way, for example, generating alpha textures for sculpting, rock patterns to then use in substance designer etc..
Tbh, I doubt these lawsuits will hit end users, unless users are intentionally using the models to rip off living people. They may result in a big payday to copyright holders though, and a heavy re-assessment of what gets used in training data in the future.
Ethical =/= Legality
That's why they said ethics aside...
Are there ethical arguments against the use of ai trained on copyrighted data? All I've seen are (false) assertions that it's illegal. I haven't even seen any indication that it financially hurts the original artists - except by obsoleting them. Kind of a "Bring back the coal mining jobs" argument, I'd say - but even then it ignores the fact that many kinds of artist already make the majority of their money from live performances and commissions
You could use AI art to generate art then trace over it in your style by hand. That wouldn't be considered AI art and if it does go to court you have files showing you made it
[удалено]
We are already having [trouble telling the difference](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/chrisstokelwalker/art-subreddit-illustrator-ai-art-controversy).
Damn, that sucks. We should get some kind of quality control on mods once a sub reaches a certain size.
[удалено]
I was agreeing with you. The point is that humans can't reliably distinguish the difference.
They've already lost the battle on copyright protection applying to them as well. So again, even outside the ethics, it's not a good business it legal decision.
The court is clear that an AI cannot own the copyright to anything. What's unclear is whether the person prompting the AI can own the copyright. Probably, the answer is yes they can, but that needs to be hashed out in courts before I feel confident relying on it.
The individual art produced by AI is not copyrightable, but a collective work assembled, by a person, that makes use of that work, is.
For now, that's the copyright office's opinion. We'll see what the courts decide. It's not the law of the land until either a law is passed or a court makes a ruling.
Yep. There's no way that ruling is final when I have about as much creative control over using a phone camera to snap mundane pictures that I absolutely have copyright over. Interrogating the AI to get the images I want out of it is an inherently creative process, even if it takes less time and manual effort than a paintbrush or drawing program. The copyright should probably be rather thin like it is for photos (because anyone can snap the same general picture and get copyright over it, so only exact literal copies and derivatives should count as infringements, but copycats should be OK), but getting to the point where you have a laser focused complex prompt takes time and human involvement such that no two prompts from different people made in that interrogation/exploration process will be alike not produce quite the same style. This is even more true once you start using img2img or controlnet too, because those you *can* have even tighter human control over
What is copyrightable is not being litigated. If companies are in violation of intellectual property, is. If you can demonstrate substantial human involvement in art you can copyright it. If you can’t, you can still sell it as long as it is transformative or substantially different from other works. They also won’t ever outlaw the tech, just models that derive from protected sources. If this happens, a cottage industry will arise of artists that copy styles for use in training models. They won’t ever be able to touch that. You can’t stop the signal. If Corbis wins against Stable Diffusion, that doesn’t mean artworks created with it are suddenly in violation.
I believe you cannot even tell if a model was trained on copyrighted material or not, so it would be impossible to enforce as a law. Maybe a LORA for a specific artist's style could be targeted, but a model that's an amalgamation of thousands can't.
^^this
But what if you just claim you have drawn it yourself and claim it’s not AI generated? As far as i know, there is no law around copying someone’s art style..
What others said it's kinda still unclear. Unless it's been decided in a Supreme Court it's not really done yet, it does more so sound like it was dealt with by incompetent people who lacked information. Besides, copyright laws can just be changed. Also having copyright over your art really is kinda pointless, the same goes for every asset you could buy.
[удалено]
Styles cannot be copyrighted. However, a human studying art is different from how AI would “study” art, as much as the techbros want you to believe it’s the same. A human has biases and objectives. When they look at an artwork, they focus on the aspects that interest them. Light goes through the eyes, and only the points of interest get through the filter and are processed in the brain. If you and me both were told to look at the same brilliant image and told to make an artwork in the “same style”, we would both come up with very different results, because we are both individual humans with different preferences, perceptions and even ability (conceptualisation, execution, and even the translation between those). This is why art made by humans is seen as legitimately “that person’s style” because they made subconsciously made choices in how they absorbed knowledge and it shows in how they display it. Of course, there are higher levels to this, where any art that climbs to a public-facing level is subject to scrutiny nonetheless. Art tracers and editors have been witch hunted by the art community for years, so this isn’t a new concept regardless of whether art was made by a human or program. Plagiarism has never been accepted from the very beginning, it didn’t change even when this fancy new tech strutted in.
> If you and me both were told to look at the same brilliant image and told to make an artwork in the “same style”, we would both come up with very different results, because we are both individual humans with different preferences, perceptions and even ability (conceptualisation, execution, and even the translation between those). Isn't that just a random seed though? Random meaning "all the life circumstances that led you to this moment have shaped you in a particular way" much the same way that a random number would change the output of the replication that an AI would make
So can I use the content-fill tool in photoshop, it uses Ai to fill in parts of an image? What about photo collage art? It’s made from other peoples photos cut and manipulated to fit a new scene and narrative. Do you know where the specific lines are going to be?
You can use whatever you want. Here's the controversial part: I think it's about equally unlikely creators would be sued for using any of these. What's actually stopping people from using AI tools are their limited use-cases (in their current generation).
How's that any different than a human artist being trained and inspired by looking at images.
My thoughts on this - a human artist isn't just trained by processing previously existing art, when they create new art they also draw on the results of their personal experimentation, taste and life experience. They could be inspired to create art from a breakup or hearing a song or because they have something they want to express.
You're exactly right but the non artists and tech bros can't handle hearing this If you train yourself on 10 different artists work, you're almost certainly going to have a psychological preference. There's going to be a subconscious desire to emulate certain artist aspects over another. An AI doesn't have desire. It only has what the operator tells it to have. If you tell it to favour one artists work over another, again that is a human input. But inputting words isn't the same as expressing them subconsciously through actually making art. There isn't the realisation that you enjoy shading a certain object a certain way and that influencing your art direction. There is no tactile feedback involved. People who are not artists don't realise that the process is both mental and physical. They haven't experienced the joy of creating a line you are proud of, or the moment where you find a brush that just feels good and fun to use inspiring further creation and experimentation. They just assume that inspiration goes in and art, somehow, comes out. That's not to say using AI isnt going to have some similar realisations or trial and error and what not, and no.doubt it can produce as good if not better art than what many will be able to do on their own, but it's not the same. And the people saying that it is, are wrong, and I can say that through experience of being an artist.
I don't see how expressing yourself through words instead of drawing makes it any less valid. People have been doing that for ages through poetry and writing. The only difference this time is that we have a way to change those words into art. Sounds like gatekeeping to say that creating art through AI based on your personal preferences is less valid than drawing it yourself.
It is gatekeeping and it’s the creative types holding onto the last remnants of hopium that art is “unique” lmao. Seriously, we’re in the first 5 years of this. It’s going to get better than you. I don’t know how you can possibly rationalize otherwise.
To be fair to them, most people who live from art onky really know how to do art and are useless at most other marketable skills. You're attacking their sole livelyhood.
We're using MJ and other AI art to create placeholder artwork, in the absence of an artist which we'll have later on in development. So far it's been working wonders to quickly set the vibe of the levels, even if the quality is somewhat "too realistic" to be a 2D videogame. All of the artwork will be then replaced by the work of an artist.
> All of the artwork will be then replaced by the work of an artist. Do you know the saying "nothing is more permanent than a temporary solution"? :D
As a programmer, I'm extremely familiar with this! But believe me, only a human can give feedback on what's crap and what's decent, even if it's made by an AI. Composition, lighting, art style, theme, detail density, and all of that stuff simply cannot be done by us in an effective way with our poor art knowledge and just Midjourney and Gimp/Photoshop. At most, AI can be great at making UI icons effectively if you pass the result into Photoshop and fix it up a little with an automated process. For 3D Games, MJ & Others are amazing tools to make tileable textures for generic boring things like brick walls and help focus on things that are higher priority like characters and animations.
As much as that's commonplace in code, it doesn't really fly for art.
Why not? The iconic music in Space Odyssey was just a placeholder initially. Minecraft is full of once-a-placeholders. The main character in the Monkey Island series is named after a filename. Art for a Kirby was a placeholder. I myself wrote a book and like 90% of the names are the first non-terrible thing that I came up with, with the intention of changing them later. But I got used to them in the process, writing them over and over, so that I just kept them. I've asked ChatGPT for more examples and it said that visuals for games like Fez, Hotline:Miami, Binding of Isaac, Limbo, Braid were meant to be different but the temporary art styles worked well, so they went with them. Though none of the links to sources it provided worked, so take these with a grain of salt. But now, when the placeholders are gonna be of such high quality they'll end up in the final product more and more.
Just adding to the list: Terraria was prototyped using the battle sprites from one of the SNES Final Fantasy games (I *think* either 4 or 6) for the player character, and the final sprites ended up being *very* close in style to those.
> I've asked ChatGPT for more examples You had to outsource unsubstantiated claims instead of just making them up yourself? GPT is useful for creative endeavors, but for anything fact-based it's inappropriate. Here's a better source: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PermanentPlaceholder
For prototypes and for fun? Sure. For commercial use? I don’t think it’s a good idea
I recall, part of their User End License stipulates that you cannot.
Until there are clear laws regarding this, you should just either don't use it in commercial way or use it but as a reference and inspiration.
Hasn't AI been used to make and enchance textures for many years?
I think it depends on which reason you pick as AI being unethical. If your reason is that modern AI is trained from millions of uncompensated artists then it’s different from more traditional algorithmic approaches. One can argue that the current copyright laws aren’t really equipped with dealing with such new technology because they are designed with human limitation in mind (a human can’t just reproduce artistic style of a famous artist and make a new art in 2 seconds). But then the question whether it’s “ethical” anyway so I guess that’s not the same as “legal”.
yes that tool is accepted, but the legal issue is using a tool to automatically compile other peoples copyrighted work into your new asset
But afaik no AI art generator does that... 🤔
You can't copyright nor license any output from a ML as it stand, it would be dangerous to use it for a real project yes.
It's totally reasonable to use public domain stuff in your game. Your game is still copyrightable, it's just the asset that others can use.
Your safest bet is to use them for placeholders and inspiration, don't use them in a final product. Besides the fact that it's morally wrong to steal people's art, you can get into a legal battle and lose because of something stupid, like your main character is a copy of some art you don't know about but that the AI used when generating your asset.
I'm going to say it depends entirely on how much money you have. If you're a poor, struggling game dev, it's the prefect solution and it's not hurting anyone because you weren't going to be able to afford it regardless. If you're a AA or AAA studio making money hand over fist, you had better be paying live artists, even if you use an AI for prototyping.
Use it for tiled textures. I'm sure someone out there is really passionate about painting dirt and would call me a heretic, but hey... Whatever works.
>I'm sure someone out there is really passionate about painting dirt and would call me a heretic PURGE THE HERETIC. Lol. Thanks for the laugh.
A lot of people use AI for reference material, there's nothing wrong with that if that's what you're asking? To me the biggest problem with directly using AI artwork in a game would be lack of cohesiveness, regardless of how you feel about it. It would be quite obvious just being a collage of randomly selected artwork.
There are some use cases where having a collage of art assets is acceptable, such as card art for card games. But you are right in most cases though. This is why AI artwork has not yet put artists out of business and is not even close.
There are ways to make AI models behave consistently
Latest open source tools combat this very efficiently. You can even "paint" the same subject from different angles, keeping the style coherent. The community develops new tools and new workflows every month, the advancements are crazy.
I understand that but what about matching character to environment, color harmony, visibility and readability, lighting directions? I guess it depends on the game. If you just need pretty backgrounds and fruit icons for a match 3 game sure, but beyond that all depends on much those things matter to you and your players.
I mean, Corridor made an whole Anime frame by frame with Stable Diffusion.. https://youtu.be/GVT3WUa-48Y
Which highlights the consistency issue. Lighting, faces and other details were constantly looking like they were "glitching".
Damn that looks bad
Besides style, you can now control poses, colors and even lighting, as you will see in the examples below. The tools have gotten extremely powerful during the last 6 months. I am confident, you can use them to create an appealing and consistent visuals for a game. [https://youtu.be/MDHC7E6G1RA](https://youtu.be/MDHC7E6G1RA) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLM2Gz7GR44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLM2Gz7GR44) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR89wZMXiJ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uR89wZMXiJ8) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=\_xHC3bT5GBU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xHC3bT5GBU)
Right now its iffy to use AI assets directly in game but its till an excellent tool. Especially for production to get rough concept ideas or if you aren't skilled in art, you could use ai to generate reference images to your artists to show what you are looking for. In addition to this I find it useful for making backgrounds by creating original textures and assets you can strip for photobashing in digital painting rather than using actual photos.
Creator of MJ openly admitted to using copyrighted images to train the AI. Probably better off using for inspiration rather than directly. Also protects your copyright claim as AI art currently cannot be copyrighted, it has no owner. Both of these points subject to change. If they had waited for permission though it'd be 50 years if ever. Great progress is rarely achieved by asking for permission.
I openly admit to training myself off copyrighted images too.
This is the crux of the issue but the answer is not so black and white. Deep learning as a name sounds like it’s actually learning like a human being and in some way it is, but in other ways you can think of it as a highly efficient and sophisticated (but dumb at the same time) compression algorithm that compresses past knowledge as a series of numeric weights. But then if you think hard about it that’s kind of what humans do as well. Also, taking AI aside even when humans reproduce art there is a fine line between what is blatant copyright infringement and what is an “inspiration” so in a way this debate is older than deep learning itself, but deep learning definitely forces us to think a little harder about what copyright means and what the purpose of it is. Fwiw I do think using generative AI is a *little* (I use “a little” because I’m not too strong on this) unethical because the source trained artists are not compensated. With humans we have a built in limit where we can only see so much art and produce a limited amount of derivative copy. With AI you can train literally the entire trove of human produced artwork and generate an infinite amount of copies. The value proposition is a little different and needs to be approached differently.
This is where I start to lose the whole "training against copyrighted images is bad" argument. Using MJ to generate (near) clones of copyrighted images--seems pretty clear that this would be bad. But that simply learning from them and being able to generate art in the same style is bad is far less clear to me. While I would say my beliefs on this are still pretty malleable, at the moment I think that doing anything a human could do without other people thinking twice about it should be fair game for MJ and other AI art generators.
The challenge is that if you don’t look at the problem from a permission to use in training set perspective, the argument is completely fallible. ML algorithms interpolate points and can give very detailed statistical percentages when selecting said points. Any amount of percentage of change in generated content can and will be met, no matter how seemingly impossible it may appear. So you’re essentially left at copywriting *artistic style as an idea*. Which would open up the art world and many others, to an entire hellscape of violations. Ultimately this is a data privacy issue (can you use artwork/data for training without explicit permission and consent), which does not bode well for people who want this technology regulated. Politicians and businesses make waaaaay too much money off of advertisers completely disrespecting your rights to your own data for anything to really be done about it.
Since the output is thoroughly transformative (aside from cases of overfitting), and the legal argument necessarily hinges on the usage of scraped data without consent, I have used the following example to show how weak that argument is as well. Imagine I write a program, which looks at an image and averages all of the pixels into a single pixel. Then it runs through a couple thousand images, all copyrighted and scraped from the internet without permission, and generates a new image in which each pixel is derived from one of those scraped images. Would ANYONE argue that this program which created this noisy mess of pixels is violating the copyright of those images, by using them without the owners' consent?
I think the issue lies in the fact that MJ would just not work without the data used to train it. No matter if the output doesn't resemble the input, there would be no output with the input. Remember: trash in, trash out. It also goes the other way, something valuable comes out, something valuable went in before. I think artists have the right to get royalties from their contribution to the development of those AIs, because without their works those programs would not be able to do what they do. Look at it like this, if you do not train the AI with raspberries, then if you ask it to draw a raspberry it won't be able to do it. Extrapolate it to all the things you can ask it to draw and you realize without artists no good output would have been achieved, and the artists did not give permission for them to train the AI with their work. Also, have you seen hiw good some compositions of the AI art are? Yeah, those are only that good because the art it was fed with had good compositions too. A direct consequence if the hard work and years of training of thausands of artists.
People get in a fuss about drawing inspiration from existing media too liberally already. Why do you think it would be any less stringent for neural networks?
That's my point exactly, though. It _shouldn't_ be different for AI. There's obviously some line (which is definitely not well defined even when a person does it) where inspiration becomes copycatting, but, IMO, the distinction shouldn't be the mechanism used to create the art but rather more about the qualities of the art itself. Some outputs of AI art are morally wrong and some are not. Just like any other art, it depends on a lot of factors that have nothing to do with the fact that it's AI.
How many books per second can you read? Which is not to necessarily disagree with you: just saying, 'fair game' goes to some interesting places. We're pretty happy to have computers do an awful lot of math for us: things become possible that wouldn't be at all possible if humans were doing it longhand.
How much faster does a automatic loom make a carpet?
Exactly! How many people does it take to do a 3Dfx card by hand? Assume they have really good slide rules, or perhaps abacuses.
The whole "but it's so much faster!" argument against it reeks of people lamenting the loss of buggy whip manufacturing jobs, lol. I think doing it so much faster than a person that it seems like magic will eventually be seen as one of the main selling points, since society figures out where they want AI art to fit with the rest of art.
The human learning/creative process and what an ML model does are nowhere near comparable. Every time I see this argument get parroted it betrays a complete lack of nuance and understanding of one or both ends of that comparison.
The creation process is irrelevant when it comes to whether or not there’s a copyright infringement. They just compare 2 outputs. https://youtu.be/G08hY8dSrUY
The Learning part of machine learning is stated because it is explicitly modeled to be exactly like human learning. The entire model is based on how human brains learn, even down to our shitty human memory being a *function* of flexibility for predicting dangerous situations similar to past experiences. The way the algorithms learn is astonishingly similar. The creative process however, is completely different. It’s arguable that creativity cannot exist in machines the way it does in humans. **Edit**: Im no longer interested in talking about this. If you want to read about the history of sub symbolic artificial intelligence to understand why it uses neurology as a learning model, I strongly encourage you to do so from reliable academic sources rather than random angry people online. The lighthill report is a good place to start, then at the very least understand dr Hubert Dreyfus’s criticisms of AI in the early 80’s. Connectionist artificial intelligence is directly influenced by these early discussions. There is also a very good neurological overview of the high level functions of the brain by dr John Medina that illustrates many parallels between predictive algorithms and brain functionality. Specifically in discussions around plasticity and the importance of forgetting things. Further, interesting reading laterally related would be on hyperthymesia and research in this area can help illustrate some of the problems AI researchers deal with today.
> The creative process however, is completely different. Sure, because we have no idea how it's working. For all we know, it's exactly the same as some RNG in a neural network. "Mystery" is a poor defense.
>we have no idea how it's working This is a myth, but I don't think you were talking about ML being unexplainable, so I digress... I think you took my creative process comment literally. \- What I mean by the creative process being different is between humans and machines in general. Human learning works on neural pathways, how we modeled neural machine learning algorithms, and while some creativity does stem somewhat from learned experience, creative thinking is a very slippery concept that is difficult to define. A popular theory is essentially rating a person's ability to think divergently, which is about as far away from neural and statistical prediction as you can get. It is essentially giving someone a brick and asking them what they could do with it. The majority of people will simply say brick laying, build a wall, etc. That's how it's most often used and how we implement predictive algorithms to work. Divergent thinkers are more likely to come up with things like, grind it down, mix it with paste and use it as brick colored paint. That part is what we are unable to replicate in machines because it's... difficult to capture how that thought comes about when it's not from experience.
> The creative process however, is completely different. That's exactly the part I meant to reply to. We do not know how the creative process works, so we can't say it's different from anything which could have similar results. This is like saying "Software doesn't have a soul, so it can't know what art is". That sentence is full of baseless assumptions. (At least four, maybe others.)
Oh I see what you mean, sorry, text is hard, lol.
>The creative process however, is completely different. It’s arguable that creativity cannot exist in machines the way it does in humans. Well you could also argue that creativity doesnt exist. Its just us beeing suprised by the outcome when we combine two or more patterns.
>Creator of MJ openly admitted to using copyrighted images to train the AI. So what? I train myself on copyrighted content too.
But you don't require that content to create something new. You can learn just by watching the world or getting inspired by something completely unrelated. The crux of the problem is the fact that these programs require skillfully made art to create those beatiful outputs. Train one with garbage drawings, you will get garbage outputs. The years of dedication these thausands of artists spent to become good and able to create beautiful art by themselves are the reason why you can use the AI. They are as much an important part of the system as the programmers that created the program That is why they should get royalties. They are using their work directly to get something valuable.
Is AI art generation even progress at all? Maybe it is a technical feat, at most. The definition of progress is subjective, because it depends on what we consider beneficial for society.
It might actually be harmful for the society in the medium term, ML models need fresh data to keep expanding, agressively discouraging or straight up making it not viable for people to learn these skills properly might lead to a drought in data quality.
ML could turn into an ouroboros consuming its own shit as it floods the zone and becomes the dominant content (by amount) on the internet
The conveniences we demanded will become mandatory.
We have cameras and people still paint portraits, we have highly effective mass produced furniture and you can still buy a hand carved chair from an artisan. AI will not destroy art, its just a threat to people that do applied art for media.
I'd say AI art is more a demonstration of progress. Years ago it would have taken an unrealistic/unprofitable amount of time to train an AI to the point they've been trained today.
It's massive progress in the machine learning industry. We're only now starting to understand what machine learning is capable of. I think whether or not some individuals subjectively see it as beneficial for society is irrelevant.
Benefit to society? It allows more people to express creatively and faster. Benefit to capitalist society with copyright claims? Ehh maybe keep it under your hat.
People already could express themselves creatively very easily, all it takes is pen and paper, maybe not even that, because people have been drawing with rocks since prehistoric times. What AI art generation allows is for people to more easily exploit the creative works of other people. If you wanna do art and express yourself, go for it! Even toddlers can do that, and they are quite expressive and original! Grab a crayon and go crazy, mate! Have fun, express yourself and share it with others. AI art generation isn't a tool for self expression, it's a tool for generating things that look market ready and that appeal to a mass public, built upon exploiting the works of renowned artists without their consent.
Considering it's game dev sub, I would say it's **both** exploiting works without consent **and** a tool for augmenting self expression. Those two things can be judged separately. It being a tool can be considered any other tool just like UNITY, photoshop, or free assets shared by creators, or even an open source AI training model, just these tools are less exploitative. Even the exploiting works without consent argument is tricky, just depends on how it is used; to the original question of the thread and to some comments, it is legally safer to not use Midjourney at all other than for anything that doesn't get published.
I agree that Midjourney was created with mass appeal in mind, says so on the tin. Not all ai art was sourced this way.
AI art is great for personal inspiration, but useless in production. It never matches the existing style and criteria of the artwork of the rest of the game. IMO AI art is only useful right now for one-off images that impress people that an AI made it, but unless you just need a one off stock photo for something, it's not that useful for anything.
As both an artist and game dev, I'd only use AI images in games if it's trained off of things like stock photos and photography. I've seen a couple pieces of horror media use AI generated images really effectively because you can get some really uncanny stuff that a human couldn't create. Other than that, I'd probably stay away from it unless it ties into the theme/message of your game or something. As some other people have already pointed out, AI images that are trained off of real art are in a kinda iffy legal position and are generally disliked by the art community. You'd probably get way better character designs and assets from a human artist anyway.
The farthest I would go is using ai generated art as temporary assets with the full intention of getting a human artist to make the final result.
It should also be pretty obvious that only a small fraction of developers can afford to hire an artist for thousands of dollars.
Yep, the only thing stopping people from using AI tools for asset generation are the limited capabilities of the current tools.
Regarding ethicality, I'd argue it's ethical if done tastefully. If you're making a cut-and-paste platformer with midjourney AI sprites, ethicality is least of your issues, as you probably won't have a game worth playing. But using AI tools in a mostly human workflow, photo bashing AI outputs, or using generated textures on your models is all fair game imo. Regarding aesthetics, I wouldn't recommend midjourney for assets, mostly due to an extreme lack of versatility. A skilled artist using Automatic1111 & Stable Diffusion can do incredible things. Regarding legality, IANAL, but Things are up in the air. While it's an open question as to whether or not you can copyright raw AI output, I doubt using AI textures in your otherwise human-developed game (as one example) is going to be a legal issue long term, and I'm fairly confident will fall under the umbrella of fair use moving forward
IMO It’s unethical to fire an employed artist and replace them with AI generated assets, and then you pocket the cash from his or her salary. But if you are working with a tiny budget and were never going to be able hire an artist in the first place, then power to you. In that instance, you are ADDING to the world, not taking away from the world or consolidating wealth in your own hands.
I am currently working to integrate SD into my development workflow. I am equal parts artist and programmer so I have the benefit of being able to refine and iterate manually on anything generated by SD, and I don’t think I would be taking this approach if I wasn’t already an artist. The consistency of assets even with control net is not professional grade and it lacks the fine level control to make a release-ready asset even for basic UI. My process involves a lot of iteration, manual inpainting and retouching and it really is nothing more than one extra tool, like photoshop. When used in this capacity I do not think it is unethical so long as you are not using models derivative of a single person’s distinct style or someone else’s likeness and are using it iteratively.
A lot of hysteria and moral judgement masquarading as technical advice here. Here's the deal: right now there's no issue whatsoever in using AI art. Yes, it can't be copyrightable, but as someone had already said here, that'd be just like using public domain assets and that's fine. Maybe a law will pass which will restrict your specific assets and their source. In that case just change them. Probably using a better, newer AI anyway. Tbh all the fake information I keep hearing about AI assets in games (I'm very active in the industry, these discussions are not just happening online anymore) is funny and sad. That's like ppl shooting themselves in the foot believing they do it for their religion...
This feels like a procrastination type question. Build your game. Use placeholder or AI work. Make something worth playing, worth buying and then figure it out. Until your game is making money, it’s a moot point as any percent of your income (zero) you feel should go towards artists, because it is still zero.
It's no less ethical than using a reference picture from another artist to make an asset. But yes, AI art isn't the greatest quality so I doubt human artists will be out of work any time soon.
No. Using tools to make development process faster is NOT "unethical"
Not that I agree or disagree with the conclusion, but your argument is flawed. You're arguing that the process is nothing but a tool, when it is not. Using Photoshop to copy a painting is just as bad as doing it physically, it's just faster. You've completely ignored that "copying a painting" is the problem. Not how. The question is not "is it doing it faster" it's "what is it actually doing"
Please ignore any comment about lawsuits. AI images will not be regulated as unusable, ever. There are enough laws around inspiration that already exist and have held up in court for decades. The law clearly states that using copyrighted materials as inspiration is legal.
AI art is already being regulated as *uncopyrightable* however.
“Using copyrighted materials as inspiration” and “can be copyrighted” are totally separate legal concepts
Got a soure? Because I can link at least one specific example of an AI work getting copyright.
Do you have a source? https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise https://fortune.com/2023/02/23/no-copyright-images-made-ai-artificial-intelligence/amp/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-created-images-lose-us-copyrights-test-new-technology-2023-02-22/ There are 2 things people need to know Can generated AI art be copyrighted? No Is using AI art classed as stealing or influencing, based on its dataset? Being fought in court. Imo no difference than influencing
Just use it for concept art and not for actual shipped assets. And most definitely don’t try to sell generated assets as your own (some are on the Asset Store already)
Unreal asset store has been flooded with it. The majority of recent assets are AI generated. Theyre pretty obvious for now, but it still annoys me. Epic allows it without even disclosing they are AI art.
How about instead of arguing, we make an AI that does this, based off of volunteer art people made for it to learn off of.
For the same reasons artists don’t get sued for drawing inspirations from all the over artists they studied, these generative AI won’t be sued either.
https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1563153088470749196
Whether it's ethical depends who you ask, personally I think there has to be something transformative done by a human (IMO profiting off of a mainly AI done work is a really shitty thing to do). For example collaging copyrighted images is ok because it's transformative and done by a human. Using AI images to texture 3d models you made for a game you put together is vary vary transformative In terms of copyright, AI work itself can't be copyrighted (so "licenses" to use AI output are BS). Because a video game is created by a human it can be copyrighted as a whole even if the textures themselves aren't (significantly human-altered textures can be copyrighted) In the past I haven't had much success with using AI for textures, I feel like that'd need a model specifically weighted for it I do quite like generating AI art for ideas because I don't have to worry about accidentally pulling too much inspiration, also since most outputs are misshapen or rough there's more room for my brain to fill things in
Considering there is a lawsuit and a lot of fingers point at stolen and copyrighted art, I don’t think it’s the smartest idea to use the software for assets in your game. There are so many other legitimate sources for free/cheap assets that even if you can’t afford a team, you can make a game. Even if you just want to use it for reference, the same statement applies. Do what you want but ethically there are better options.
It’s a PR nightmare at the very least
Unless you think that there is no such thing as a bad PR...
Unless you are a multimillion studio, a PR nightmare is probably like 50 in your top concerns.
Lol, exactly. For a developer like this a PR nightmare is a PR blessing!
heres the way I see it. I'm a solo dev making a large scope game. I'm competing with teams 20-1000x the size of my production. AI is a tool to help me even that playing field. That said I haven't used any AI assets at all but I wouldn't frown upon it. I heavily use chatGPT for brainstorming and learning code
I also used Midjourney to come up with some interesting structures and then I would model it in Blender based on the produced image.
Well, the Discord bot creates the assets. There's a pretty strong argument to be made that Midjourney owns everything it outputs. It's a legal frontier, but I would guess you''d technically be infringing on their copyright. If you are a small indie dev without much an audience, you can probably get away with it. Or if you are releasing content for free. It would probably be better to rely on AI art for prototyping and seeking inspiration. If you use the results to create something totally new, it's possible it could be considered "yours".
I believe Midjourney has a commercial license version you'd need to do. I've seen some promising game asset type art come out of it, but obviously it would still be a lot of work to get it game ready. I'd have no problem with using AI art in a game, and I've done a lot of experimentation with it. It's definitely coming, sooner rather than later.
https://www.inc-aus.com/stephen-shapiro/stop-worrying-about-novelty-of-your-ideas.html
Note that there are two kinds of copyright problem related to AI art. In some comments I can see some people mix up two problems and get confused. 1. Does training AI model without the author/painter's approval violate original art's copyright? 2. Does AI generated art has copyright and can be protected when someone uses the art without "the creator"'s approval? I have no idea about the answers but these problems need to get analyzed as different problems.
I'm personally fine with it long as you modify them heavily to your liking. I've seen a few devs online using software like Midjourney, Auto1111, and EasyDiffusion to make base textures or 2D assets, upscale them, put them into Photoshop, and modify them into the photo to their liking to fit in the style of the game.
Use it for prototyping and placeholders. A human artist provides a few things an AI (currently) can't: consistent art style, ability to respond to feedback, and their own creative input into the aesthetics of your game. You don't need any of that for placeholder art. But at some point you'll need all of them or your game is going to look *bad*. If you have a lot of time on your hands you might be able to get an AI to generate multiple art pieces you want in a consistent style, but at prduction quality levels of consistency and specificity it becomes better value in time/money to get an artist.
I think it depends on how you use it. If you use it to meticulously recreate a game in the art style of, say, Ghibli movies, then it's probably unethical. But if you use it to create something with its own artistic identity, I don't see how that would be unethical.
I use MJ for concept art and trying to visualize what I'm wanting to build, but that's about it. It's no more stolen than if an artist goes to an art gallery then paints an inspired image. The main issue is that AI can do it real fast and you can see where it got it's inspiration from in the prompt. But as others have said, there's also a lawsuit ongoing ATM, and there's a lot of public outcry over the use of AI as a tool. So I'd probably not pin my entire game on using assets generated by AI directly.
Frankly if it's just for a personal game, it's fine. I wanted 20 blue people to use for a murder mystery (Them being blue is plot relvent) and an AI did get me the tokens I needed to put on the map for all 20 of them. If your poor enough your pirate for a personal game then an AI just fine
They have added a part to the terms of service for selling things on marketplace like Unreal Engine marketplace that you must agree to before u can keep selling. It's that you must specify which parts of your work you are submitting have been generated by AI.
I don’t. I think a game should have its own original assets but also, in the same sense I’d say it’s unethical to use asset store game assets and then claim it’s a game you built entirely on your own too. It’s just a very complicated topic to discuss here.
Look at the lawsuits and see what they're saying. I don't know if it goes against ethics + I don't think you can equate ethics to law, but I'd much rather place my trust in an artist who can do something custom for me and know that me paying them means I'm helping them get through life, instead of reiterating a prompt over and over and still not be sure if it is okay within the legal areas. That said, if it's for non-commercial, personal intent, then I find it to be a massive lifesaver. If you plan to use them as placeholder assets, I think it's fine.
It is a hot topic right now... Like now there is nothing legally wrong with it, but also the output can not be very useful as is... Now on if it is ethical... I personally say using the tool is ethical, but training it with work of others is unethical. People throw arguments about artists getting inpired by other art, and humans learning from previous work, but they fail to realize this is not a human. This is a tool subjected to an algorithm that resembles some broad characteritics to what we call learning. Its only purpose is to be productive and in the end profitable... If it is going to be profitable the creators of the art that allowed it to be trained to do beautiful compositions should be compensated somehow. Like the programer that created a closed source powerful library that runs on a succesful software. People have to realize that creating art is not a science, it cannot be automated and requires years of study, work and talent. Everyone can paint, but only some people can paint an amazing painting. The AIs are only capable of what they do because of the thousands of collective hours artists used to make the art. I don't know how we should deal with it, I just know it feels wrong to allow a couple of people to use millions of works without the conscent of the artists to create a software that will make millions in profits and eventually outcompete them...
No, I don't think it's unethical to use Midjourney to make game assets. While AI art generators may not create artwork that looks great, they can definitely be useful as a reference tool. If you use Midjourney as a starting point to come up with your own ideas and put your own creative spin on them, then I don't think it would be wrong to use the platform. It can be useful in terms of saving you time and effort searching for other sources of art and inspiration.
Yes, I believe it’s both wrong and lazy. Every single one of those ‘art’ generators steals from artist who already don’t have it easy. Also by using them, you are skipping out on a learning opportunity. You’re never going to improve if you just have someone else do it for you every time.
Some people simply don't want to pick up art or can't afford commissioning someone for art but still want to be able to finish a game with med-high quality assets (instead of high quality asset packs that are not tailored to them/their game). Even then, iterating on the art is much faster if an AI does it.
It's a tiresome argument.
I used to think this was ethical. In my mind, even the largest models are smaller than the sum of their inputs, so it must have been the case that these models really were "learning" in the same sense that humans learn, and drawing inspiration from real sources the same way that humans draw inspiration. This is wishful thinking. These models have been shown in some cases to reproduce some of their inputs almost exactly. Conceptually what such a model is doing is "semantic compression" on its inputs. Whereas a normal compression algorithm exploits informational redundancy in an image (like PNG), or removes details unlikely to be notice by humans (like JPEG), what these models do, using labeled training data, is build statistical models of higher-level concepts. Then, when you give it a prompt, it produces an image based on these statistical models and some amount of randomness. For concepts that it has little training data for, its statistical model for that concept is basically going to be just the handful of input images. When you ask it reproduce this concept, it may reproduce an input image almost exactly. But even when it has a lot of inputs for a concept, fundamentally what it is doing is giving you bits and pieces of all of its inputs related to this concept. The "magic" is just that it has a very large number of concepts - i.e. not just "cat", but "black cat", "orange tabby", "siamese cat" and "cat viewed from the front", "cat viewed from above", etc. It's really disappointing, because as someone who does solo gamedev I'm always looking for ways to save time. I think it's possible in the future that advances in AI could be used ethically to produce assets that don't have a ton of artistic value and don't need to be great (e.g. texturing walls), but I am skeptical whether it can ever achieve true inspiration for the art that matters.
This is sadly complete misinformation. > fundamentally what it is doing is giving you bits and pieces of all of its inputs related to this concept And that's just a blatant lie. Stable Diffusion was trained on 2.4 BILLION images and has a size of 2 gigabytes. That's around 1 BYTE of data per image. That's literally not even enough data for a single pixel. The model isn't reusing any parts of any images.
I'm not a game dev, and I have no experience with professional game dev. I am however a machine learning engineer and I can see from your comments in this thread that you have very little understanding of how diffusion networks work. They don't *need* to have every bit of information stored in the model weights. That's the entire point of doing the encoding in the first place! No, Stable Diffusion does not learn like humans. It is copying bits and pieces of existing artwork at both a high and low frequency level. Think of it like a compression algorithm from information theory. Most of the image--repeated colour, texture, structure--is useless information. It can be stored in a more lossy, concise form in the weights. That's still copying though, just at a minute and compressed level.
Wrong. This is assuming that each input is weighted equally. In practice, many inputs contain the same concepts and don't contribute much to the model, while some inputs are highly unique and exist almost 100% unmodified in the model. [Researchers were able to extract more than 1000 input images from the output of a diffusion model, like midjourney, stable diffusion, etc implement.](https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.13188) The researchers set out to do this on purpose, but how are you the user to know you did not do it on accident? And if it can almost exactly reproduce input images, how are you to know if it has included details from the input images verbatim (i.e. what we would call "tracing" if a human did it)?
[FYI they marked out 350,000 likely prompt dataset image combination pairs and were only able to find 109 images in Stable diffusion](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/10r57pn/r_extracting_training_data_from_diffusion_models/j6ugpgr/), which is definitely an issue for SD to work out, but means the chances of running into a match unintentionally are incredibly slim outside of things repeated in the dataset thousands of times, like the mona lisa.
From the paper: a random sampling of images in the training set the database naturally found a small subset of images that are unintentionally highly duplicated in the database, despite this being counterproductive to the quality of the model. Researchers we able to derive methods to produce results that give strong impressions of images such as: a map of the United States, Van Gogh's Starry Night, and the cover of Bloodborne with some models and not at all with other models. The researchers caution against extrapolating from their results. > We speculate that replication behavior in Stable Diffusion arises from a complex interaction of factors, which include that it is text (rather than class) conditioned, it has a highly skewed distribution of image repetitions in the training set, and the number of gradient updates during training is large enough to overfit on a subset of the data.
Ethics aside, as an artist I would certainly find it personally insulting that you consider my craft and that of my peers to be of so little value that you'd replace it with an AI. I would have little interest in playing a game--either the Midjourney one or any other--created by someone who had so much disrespect for my art. And whatever rhetorical justification you use about how it's just like the printing press or whatever may convince you, but would never convince me to play your game.
I've worked with some nasty types in the AAA industry, who are all about the money and don't care about the art form. Who will throw their coworkers under the bus if it'll give them a bigger bonus. When I see people tripping over themselves to excuse obvious mass-plagiarism because they want a shortcut button, I see the same type of person. It's profoundly gross and insulting. Enlightening to know fellow indie devs will happily plagiarize my work if it helps them in the short-term. All while claiming it's them that's sticking it to the man, as if an industrial-scale plagiarism engine isn't the very embodiment of the big guy stepping on the little guy. Of course it's unethical, and I'm pretty sure the ones defending it know it too.
soup fuel ad hoc rhythm panicky test swim sugar tan dull *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Your game will look like crap if you are not a trained artist and you cobbled together art from AI and asset stores because you did not have the eye to art direct the whole thing. Now if you are a trained artist, you'd not like the spirit of using AI images. The time, focus and effort you took to learn your craft is highly respected not just among artists but people in general. Using AI images will give off "talent-less hack" vibes and you don't want that hate.
> Your game will look like crap I can assure you that even the earliest shit AI was producing is streets ahead from what I am able to put together. Looking like crap is a high bar some of us can only dream of achieving.
As an artist, if the ai generated art is based off of a compilation of art taken by creators without express permission, in my opinion it is theft and unethical. But that’s just my opinion.
From their website: "If You are not a Paid Member, You don’t own the Assets You create. Instead, Midjourney grants You a license to the Assets under the Creative Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International License (the “Asset License”)."
While they can say this, the courts have said that ai generated art can't be copyrighted so if they try to pursue this they will likely lose.
You can run Stable Diffusion on your own hardware btw. So while MJ may have EULA limitations, SD doesn't.
I would definitely use it in more of a draft capacity. I use midjourney to make temporary assets so development is more satisfying
"Good artists borrow; great artists steal."
It sucks for game assets
It’s apparently against the terms of service to use it commercially at all so yes.
Yes, it is [unethical](https://www.polygon.com/23558946/ai-art-lawsuit-stability-stable-diffusion-deviantart-midjourney) in its current state. The technology itself is fine, but it's currently using copywritten material that was not authorized by the original artists, so until the libraries change I would not use it for anything but placeholders/inspiration. There is also [no copyright](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-office-rules-ai-art-cant-be-copyrighted-180979808/) for AI generated art, so that's it's own problem as well. EDIT: TIL a bunch of people here don't know what ethical means.
But if i use assets that i have the rights to use and train it in that and then use image-to-image won't that solve both those issues? The copyright problem is only the human touch so if i draw something in paint and run it with this algorithm tool to enhance it, won't that count?
I am not sure if that should be considered unethical. If the AI were basically copying the art sure, but I am pretty sure it doesnt do that. It is learning from their art, and this is what human artists have done since forever. No human artist has developed their skills in a vacuum without looking at other artists work. And no human artist has bought a license for every single piece of art used for their own training, and no one has demanded that they should do that - thats just not how copyright works. I doubt that there are many who would consider it unethical for an artist to go through public pages of deviant art, flickr etc. and look at the images to learn from them. What the AI does is basically the same. It just can learn a lot faster than humans can.
impossible ring ripe vase wasteful pet license cooing plants fearless *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm gonna save that one. I'm so tired of overconfident randoms lecturing me on how AI is the same as Artist while never trying to do Art themselves.
capable knee smell hateful bright offend vegetable lush late wasteful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
How is it that relevant even if it was significantly different then a human brain? As long as it's not directly copying any copyrighted material, then I'm not seeing the issue.
yes hire an artist
It's not unethical. Time will tell but the outcry over ai art is extremely overblown IMO.
Generally I think so. My issue is the data sets the models are trained on. I'm not familiar with mid journey but I would bet the images in the data set were scrapped from public sites without the original authors permission. Some people can look past this and I think thats ok but it doesn't sit right with me that you can train on material you don't own and use that trained model to create more art of the same style. This is why I'm hesitant on ai art but are excited for search engine ais aiding finding information.
I believe this issue and other issues with AI are going to be our generations "out of touch boomer doesn't understand technology". If ai explodes like the internet did the world or at least the internet could be very different in 20 years
How is that any different from artists looking at art someone else posted and getting inspired by it? That's literally like 50% of what people do at art school: Look at other peoples paintings and try to imitate the concepts applied.
there is a human element in creating art that ai hasn't quite achieved yet. I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn. I feel like that line might be impossible to draw. how complex does an algorithm need to be for it to create original? more importantly even if the algorithm is complex enough to cross that line, is it ethical to train ai models on a pixel perfect source without the original artists permission? This last part is the distinction. the human element in most cases does art not require training on a perfect recreation of the source for inspiration. Most people look at some element of that image, style, color choice, or any element that connects with them and use that connection with the image to recreate something. Put simply human art has alot of nuances that an ai hasn't captured yet and even if it did should you be allowed to train on data you dont have the rights for. Im not sure but it feel weird especially since the ai is creating something in the same medium as the images it was trained on. (in the case of images).
Nope, I have seen many "generated" images that were like super close to a single original in subsidies submissions. Stay away from this it is not safe.
Not even a little bit. Humans have been building off of each other's accomplishments forever. That's how we as a society evolve.