Or, these shitty ai companies could pay creators a small amount to use their content for training. What is the problem with that?

It’s logistically impossible, and economically non viable. The AI companies are a bubble that will soon burst. And then consolidate and monopolize.

But you want to ban all open source / weight AI models that ever possibly trained or learned from public information. You want to monopolize and give the AI companies ultimate power and control over AI, by creating the legal framework to make models never free.

Copyright covers reproduction, not learning. Books, articles, comments are all public information.

It’s about artistic freedom. I know how hard it is to program and make games and can imagine a better way using advanced (future) AI tools.

The problem with game development is not just the amount of work, and the capital required, it is the intersection of complicated technology and artistic outcome. Almost all disciplines in computer sciences are part of video games. It isn’t just hard and more time intensive than a single person can do, there is a higher risk of complete failure. You need high level of “technical intelligence” to even do it, which precludes a large number of potential artists.

We have very few computer games that I consider “art”. This not made to be pretty or profitable or entertainment, but something that shows you something new about the world. They do exist and they are labors of love or accidents, but they are rare. This is very different from other media like books or even movies. And movies are expensive and complicated affairs, but at least they have a linear nature.

The fundamental issue with computer games as a medium is that it is near impossible to invent a truly new game, with new gameplay and a worthy story that is not linear, and then turn it into a viable product (not even talking about commercial success, but something that is approachable to a wide audience. Like art ought to be. See Façade (video game) - Wikipedia for example.

AI has the potential to change all of this. The tools will become drastically more powerful and hardware and models cheaper to use.

Now, in a 100 years you’d surely have the ability to create virtual worlds by descriptive prompt, like ordinary people in Star Trek can do with the holodeck. How do we get from here to there? What technology is needed? Imagine you prompt “make a GTA V clone but underground with dwarves” and you get a complete game generated where you can now play or create or tweak a narrative. That’s what the holodeck can do in star trek, and what I always wished for ever since I was a little kid.

Only then will we have the artistic freedom to create video games as art.

Or think of dialogue that plays with you as you deviate, already examples exist with TTS. Or a game or dungeon master playing with you, throwing challenges in your way. Or a crafting component in the game, where you don’t have to painstakingly paint textures and nudge vertices to create some new style of armor or weapon or a house. You can just describe it in detail.

There are tons of problems with AI and society and the disgusting capitalists who will try to monopolize it. Making it easier or cheaper to create games isn’t one of them.

Copying isn’t stealing, and learning or training on public information certainly isn’t. Your argument based on a vast expansion of what is “intellectual property” is disgusting and moronic and dangerous.

If generative AI can generate useful work, who gets to profit from it? That is the only question since AI is inevitable. But you’re arguing that only capitalists and large companies that can afford to “license” this new form of intellectual property may profit. I’m saying AI should be open source, and the ability to make use of this cheaper generative work should be able to be used by all for free.

There is definitely an overreaction to AI use, when specifically games can make very good use of it. Smaller teams can create better games, and using smaller AI models to run on a GPU during playing could enable some amazing new features for dialogue or dynamic storytelling.

If there is any place where an AI hallucinating and riffing isn’t a problem it’s gaming.