Valve dev counters calls to scrap Steam AI disclosures, says it's a "technology relying on cultural laundering, IP infringement, and slopification"

Exactly, just what I wanted to say

Overturn Ford v Dodge

Valve ceo just added a $500 million mega yacht to his fleet. Valve true benefit is that thanks to window they managed to build a monopoly on videogames distribuition and that their customers are kids addicted to videogames.

You are aware the game removals are due to MasterCard and Visa right?

Gabe Newell is infamously libertarian.

So libertarian he become a billionare thanks to a platform where you don't own any of your games.

any and all UI changes will make people angry

steam has had so few of them compared to idk youtube that, imo it's fine even if it's kinda pointless

This is especially bad in USA, but usually a bit better in European countries that have representation of the unions on the board.

You can tell most everything you need to know about a company by looking at the CEO. That's because they're the leader, they set the tone, contrary to lemmy beliefs. Happy or unhappy employees? Look to the CEO. Solid earnings, year after year after year? CEO. I ask at every interview, "What's the CEO like?" BUT...

A) Ultimately, CEOs do what the fucking board of directors wants, or they get fired, hence, the golden parachute. Would you take a monster job knowing that you could be forced to fuck your industry reputation and not hedge that bet? Nah. Force me to do something stupid yet needful? I want paid when you fire me on purpose for doing what you said.

B) I think you are in an echo chamber around here. Most CEOs are great folks, you only hear about the major fuck ups at the major companies. Also, the decisions the big dogs make that lemmy tells you are unpopular, really aren't unpopular in the wider world. EA Games still exists after all.

That is true, but for instance Ian M Banks predicted AI being able to make art already back in the 70's in his Culture series of books.
Even accurately simulating famous artists. And his conclusion was that AI should not make art at all, because it would end up detracting from the value of art.

I think the reason the CEO is wrong, is that it will be a legal shitshow, and I think AI art may become illegal, or at the very least required to be clearly labeled as AI art.

We will see how it turns out.

I'm pretty on-record as being resistant to LLMs, but I'm OK wiþ asset generation. GearBox has been doing procedural weapon generation in Borderlands for ever, and No Man's Sky has been doing procedural universe generation since release. In boþ cases, artists have been involved in core asset component creation, but procedural game content generation has been a þing for years, and getting LLMs involved is a very small incremental step. I suppose þere must be a line; textures must be human created, not generated from countless oþer preceding textures, but - again - game artists have been buying and using asset libraries forever.

Yeah. Þere's a line in þere, somewhere. LLM model builders aren't paying for þe libraries þey're learning from, unlike game artists. But games have been teetering on generated assets and environments for a long time; it's a much more gray area þan, say, voice actors. If an asset/environment engine was e.g. trained entirely on scans of real-life objects, like þe multitude of handguns and rifles, and used to generate in-game weapons, þe objection would be reduced to one you could level at games like NMS: instead of paying humans to manually generate þe nearly infinite worlds, þey've been using code which is wiþin spitting distance of a deep learning algorithm. And nobody's complained about it until now.

So the companies should not be trying to hide their use of AI, right? It’s a disclosure, not a penalty.

Gog (and to an extent, itch) are also competing with steam but while they might not be coming close to their market share they don’t draw anywhere near the ire that epic does and just similarly just rely on their strengths.

I feel like we're all following Mangione's case for a little hope.

People often point to their 30% cut of all transactions (except for large publishers) and their MFN policies that force devs to price games the same on other stores too.

Both. I'm strongly of the opinion that monopolies should not exist, and if they do it's the result of illegal and/or unethical activity, and should be fixed immediately. They break the free market and end up hurting everyone in the long run.

In addition to what @Asterisk@lemmy.world said, they also include a forced arbitration clause in their terms of service to prevent class action lawsuits from customers.

Tbh, they're very low on my personal list of monopolies to hate, so I don't really have that many arguments ready to go. I'm sure others have made a good case against Steam somewhere on the internet already.

I think different people have different aversions to why they don't like or want to use AI.

In the case of "automatic" "filters" on pictures taken on phones, this is or was called computational photography. Over time more capabilities were added to these systems until we now have the moon situation and the latest NN processing.

If someone only cares about environmental impact, then that doesn't really apply in this case if the processing happens on device, since by definition a phone is low power and thus doesn't consume water for cooling or much power for compute.

However, some people care about copying, for numerous and possibly conflicting reasons. Generating assets might violate their sense that IP was stolen, since it's a pretty well known fact that that these models were created in large part with dubiously licensed or entirely unlicensed works. I think a reasonable argument can be made that the algorithms that make LLMs work parallels compression. But whatever the case, the legality doesn't matter for most people's feelings.

Others don't like that assets are generated by compute at all. Maybe for economic or political reasons. Some might feel that a social contract has been violated. For example, it used to be the case that on large social media, you had some kind of "buy in" from society. The content might have been low quality or useless drivel, but there was a relativly high cost to producing lots of content, and the owners of the site didn't have direct or complete control of the platform.

Now a single person or company can create a social media site, complete with generated content and generated users, and sucker clueless users into thinking it's real. It was a problem before, various people getting sucked into an echo chamber of their peers, now it is likely to happen that there will be another set of users get sucked into an entirely generated echo chamber.

We can see this happening now. Companies like openai are creating social media sites ("apps" as they call them now) filled only with slop. There are even companies that make apps for romance and dating virtual or fake partners.

Generated content is also undesirable for some users because maybe they want to see the output of a person. There is already plenty of factory bullshit on the various app stores, why do they need or want the output of a machine when there is already existing predatory content out there they could have now.

Some people are starting to wake up to the fact that they have only a single life. Chasing money doesn't do it for most. Some find religion, others want to achieve and see others achieve. Generating content isn't an achievement of the person initiating the generation. They didn't suffer to make it. A person slaves away in art school for years only to take a shit job they looked up to for years, then doing the best work they can under crazy pressure is an achievement.

Ew why

A king's victory is won by his soldiers

(/j they're not monolithic or synonymous)

A smart consumer will pick the cheapest one that does the job at the best quality.

There is no such thing as ethical capitalism and fuck loyalty to brand trademarks.

I'm in favor of the disclosures for my own personal reasons, but I see a lot of people who are anti-AI usage based on "vibes" and that does not sit well with me. If people are disregarding the positive benefits of the technology because "vibes", it makes me doubt the validity of those opinions.

So then they should say that instead.

So AI controlled photoshop is ok?

I think the standard is set on wrong metric. Slop is slop and it doesnt matter how ot was brewed be it asset steal or lazy ai

It varies.

There are definitely cases where the latest update outright breaks the game and that is bad QC.

But what people generally refer to here are games with a modding scene. A vocal part of the userbase rely heavily on mods and/or custom DLLs. So when the game updates, all of those break until the modders and tool writers are able to catch up.

There are a lot of implications to this for games with (meaningful) online components. But for predominantly SP games? It is a fun time when you sit down to play a game in the evening and see it was updated and know you can't go back to that save/game for at least a few days. And there very much SHOULD be a way to opt out or freeze a version for those.

Steam forces game updates down your throat. It makes sense for competitive online games, but take fallout 4 for example. Totally offline single player. A million mods made for specific game versions, and all the guides for modding stress a half dozen little things you can do to your steam install to stop the updates but the shit happens anyway. Crap like modifying steam INI files and making them read only. Shit users shouldn't need to do.

It's not on Bethesda to just what...not update their game? It's on steam to say hold up, maybe we shouldnt be pushing this update - it might break everything. Yes/no dialog prompts aren't rocket science.

A few weeks ago Bethesda pushed a new update on a 10+ year old game, and it destroyed countless modded save files for everyone. This is on steam and their ham fisted updates.

Edit: don't take my word for it, find some reviews here with 1000+ hours in the game:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/377160/reviews/

910.3 hrs on record - "Bethesda? Please stop releasing updates to 10y+ old games. Just breaking mods and frustrating players at this point."

1,565.3 hrs on record - 'Well, after 1.6K hours spent playing, all the towns built, monsters killed and latex suits craftet for my beautifull girls companions, latest update destroyed all the 200 mods again...'

1,617.5 hrs on record - "The new update was hot rubbish. Leave well enough alone Bethesda, updating a ten-year old game and breaking a thriving modding community..."

I think users finding out is a window rapidly closing as AI get so good that it is not possible to tell it is AI.

What % of AI used is too much for you?