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[Matheld]

You misread the case, lol. It went deeper than that. Basically, their conclusion was that the author couldn't claim ownership, for the same reason why artists can't arbitrarily sue the AI companies- specific authorship cannot be reliably determined.

Right so you can't own the stuff you generate, gotcha. Makes sense since as you say, it uses too much stuff from hundreds of different artists.

How do you credit things that are literally collages of possibly millions of sources put together by an algorithm?

Therein lies the problem, you can't.

Scraping's 100% legal, you know.

Scraping is legal sure, but that doesn't mean you can always take and use the stuff you scrape. Microsoft has gotten into trouble for taking data from children, for example. Whilst they were completely allowed to do the data scraping, they were not in fact, allowed to take data from children.
The same would be true here, they can scrape the data. But if said data is protected by CC licenses and copyright laws? Well you try to scrape Disney art data and use that for a generator and see how far that will take you.

The issue there is that, Disney has the money to hound the people trying to circumvent or ignore their copyright. I mean they're so damn bloodthirsty that they go after Preschools who paint their walls with mickey mouse.
A regular artist who is only protected by CC licenses don't have the capital, or often enough, the awareness to fight datascraping that use their protected stuff illegitimately, such as in AI or hell even just a company taking their art and adding it to their game (It happened quite recently with Bungies Destiny). It doesn't matter one way or the other how they got their hands on that information, it is wrong, both morally and legally, to use that data in the way they are.
These companies are just having a bit of breathing space simply for the fact that they scrape so much of it that they don't know where they got majority of it, and it would be difficult for any lawyer or rulesmaker to point out what exactly they've done that is illegal... which is what all this is about. The courts haven't caught up and haven't been able to go through all the legal issues involved to come to a conclusion whether it's legal or not.

Honest to god, legitimate and ethically sourced training data, if it exists. Is all right with me. Adobe Firefly (a program I only heard about today) seemingly does this, meaning I have no issue with it (aside from a personal disdain for AI generators).

It's like saying you can't post a Photoshop-edited image unless always posting the name of every coder who ever worked on the software, as well as citing all of the papers they consulted while constructed their software, and so forth.

Obviously, no, we don't bother IRL, because it's silly. Your argument is reductio ad absurdum. IRL, if we want to make a nod to the unlikely legal perils of work that emerged from sheer chance, fine... "made this with AI" is sufficient.

You're being a bit obtuse and pretentious here, but no. You wouldn't need to credit every coder who worked on it. You would simply credit photoshop itself as a program, "Edited using Adobe Photoshop" and that is about all you'd need to do if it was required in the first place.
And yes if we ever reach a point where it's clear legally where AI stands, we'd probably have to credit the program one used to make it.. as you would with any other kind of crediting.

The idea here is that the Generators wouldn't have dubious "Maybe it's legal?" data once all this is said and done... but right now? It does, most of them do.

I don't know about you, but we got taught the importance of sourcing and crediting in school and how important it is as early as.. I want to say.. 7th grade? Ages 13-14? Highschool? Whatever terminology your nation uses, and yeah sure, maybe modding isn't as big of a deal as that. But it's the common decency to give credit where credit is due, even if you don't get a gold star for it.

ADHD Edit: In either case, I think I am done with this. I don't want to take up anymore space in this thread than I already have.

To put it shortly.. Like the Hegemony, I am Anti AI. But if you (You: Meaning anyone reading this) can prove that it is legally and ethically sound, and are willing to source and credit the people used in it (Be it through the generator itself), then I have no issue with it.

Ciao, this fox lady is starting to overheat from this damn weather.

[xenoargh]

Well, fine then. No kerfuffle needed.

"this image was made with Stable Diffusion".




Ehhhh...

Look, Alex, if you want this stuff banned, fine, I'll comply. I think it's a mistake, and I disagree, and I think that artists who aren't on this train are making the biggest mistake of their careers. But whatever's easiest for you, I'll support.

[crawlers]

I'd like to give my 2 cents as a user.  I think this thread has heard many perspectives of modders, but the majority of the players using mods don't create any mods themselves.

I don't make mods for this game, nor am I going to.  Nonetheless, the whole thing about discouraging mod makers with the fear of ai and/or burdensome regulation concerning ai is sad because it means I will have fewer mods available to me (and potentially with less content individually), and I may need to go search in the wild to find them.  In fact, I already tried after seeing this thread as I felt discouraged at the direction things were going.  It felt more urgent to me than ever to have an alternative mod source as a backup in case the situation deteriorates too much. Maybe having too strong of a push towards other mod hosting sites is itself a concerning potential effect to consider?

Images taking less effort to create is a boon to me.  If the image needed many hours before and now just needs the effort of picking out something suitable from a batch, that is excellent since it means more content along with dev time redirected towards other matters such as balancing and more complicated mechanics.  To matters of "are ai generated images art" and "do they have soul", I answer that these are other people's definitions and semantic arguments.  What I care about is whether or not I like it; whether photoshop or stable diffusion were used doesn't directly matter to me (indirectly speaking, ai generated is a positive due to extra content).

[SafariJohn]

RE tracking where every asset in a mod came from: it's not gonna happen.

I consider this style sufficient for mod credits (and so do others from what I have seen):

Credits:
Created by SafariJohn
Art by Gwyvern
Music by Electric Trojan
Music and Sounds by MesoTroniK
Testing by Avanitia
Code snippets given by Tartiflette, MesoTroniK, and Gwyvern
Alex, David, and co. for making Starsector
And the Starsector community for years of support!

Doing more is not worth my time.


Ignoring the many pages of discussion for a moment, my gut feeling is if I used one of these "AI" generators/collagers/whatever to create images for one of my mods I would say I did the art, just as I do not credit GIMP because it is simply a tool.

Not ignoring the brouhaha, even if I used an AI generator I still don't know if I would bother mentioning it.  :shrug:

[BaBosa]

While I am firmly on the side of allowing AI art. People need to calm down and be reasonable. Alex has been listening to what people say despite him already having an opinion and doesn't need any flak for respectfully disagreeing.

[Wyvern]

...So the new argument is really "Well, morals aside, you can't actually stop us from using unethical art"? I feel it's kindof telling that the advocates for AI art are resorting to this...

I'd like to think that telling people "Don't do this unethical thing" would be good enough, but just from the comments on this thread alone it's clearly not. As for enforcement - if questionably-ethical AI art is disallowed, I'd assume we'd go off an innocent-until-proven-guilty arrangement, where wild accusations of "OMG that's clearly AI count the fingers" would just be ignored.

On the other hand, if questionably-ethical AI art is allowed, I'd want at least enough documentation to say "This publicly available model was used" or "I made my own model based on vanilla starsector ships and art I'd commissioned from X" or whatever. Provide credit to the original artists where possible; point at the company that's making that not possible where it's not possible.

Ignoring the many pages of discussion for a moment, my gut feeling is if I used one of these "AI" generators/collagers/whatever to create images for one of my mods I would say I did the art, just as I do not credit GIMP because it is simply a tool.

Does GIMP work by stealing bits of other people's art? No? Then they're not the same.

[pixel_rice_bowl]

.

[Alex]

I'm not really moved, let alone convinced, by the arguments regarding the ethics, but the problems with enforcing this rule are a very valid concern, and I don't think there's *any* solution that I would be 100% happy with. So, mostly in light of the enforcement issues, the new rule is:


AI-generated content is allowed in mods, provided that:

• The fact that the mod is doing so is stated clearly in the mod's post, including the model(s) used, (broadly) what additional data it was trained on (if any), and the types of assets in the mod that it was used to generate
• The AI-generated content is not otherwise illegal/infringing/etc (e.g. an AI-generated logo of a real world company/trademark/other similar). This is just common sense and shouldn't be necessary to say, but, just in case.

This way, players can make their own decisions about what they want to use. Also, the statement regarding a mod's AI use probably doesn't need to go in the credits; as has been mentioned many times here, the AI is just a tool.

[xenoargh]

Good enough. I'll apply this retroactively to anything in Spiral Arms II to the best of my ability. PM me if it's not what you wanted to see.

[Grievous69]

Thank you Alex. This seems like a good rule that won't introduce a multitude of extra effort to enforce and is avoidable for those that do not support it. Big thumbs up!

[crawlers]

It is a relief to hear this decision.

[Wispborne]

This is just common sense and shouldn't be necessary to say, but, just in case.

In the same vein, is training a model (eg a SD checkpoint) on other modders' work without permission and releasing the output allowed? This has happened a few times already.

I don't envy you the decision made, but selfishly welcome it. Hopefully, in the future, ethically-trained models will be more widely available and better (I tried Firefly and was not particularly impressed with its ability to create vanilla-adjacent images, though perhaps with more practice I could. It also has awful watermarks which I'm unsure about the ethicality of removing).


Below is a generated image that I would have had to remove from the scene. It's used for a single, optional dialog branch. And it's not as good as what an artist would have made, but it's not worse than nothing (imo). (for anyone wondering, this is unreleased, you didn't miss anything)

Spoiler

[close]

[Alex]

In the same vein, is training a model (eg a SD checkpoint) on other modders' work without permission and releasing the output allowed? This has happened a few times already.

That's a good question. I'm tempted to say "no", though that runs into similar issues with how one might enforce this. So, I'm not sure. (I'm also tempted to say "yeah, you asked for this, so have fun!" But I won't, ahem.)

But doing that, and then producing a mod with e.g. ship sprites (or whatever) that mimic that modder's style - unless the modder has given permission for this to be done? If it's visually similar enough for this to be apparent, it would/should likely be treated the same as kitbashing etc, regardless of pixel-to-pixel similarities or lack thereof. I feel like this specifically should be more easily enforceable since the thing being disallowed is fairly specific and requires visual similarity, not trying to decide if some arbitrary image is AI-gen or not.

Going a step further, I think training on the work of a specific actual artist to mimic their work, without their permission, is pretty poor behavior so if that comes up... well, it seems like just about everything with this would need to be on a case-by-case basis. But I could certainly see uninviting someone from the forum based on that alone.

[xenoargh]

In the same vein, is training a model (eg a SD checkpoint) on other modders' work without permission and releasing the output allowed? This has happened a few times already.

So far as I'm aware, this isn't terribly practical or likely to come up, because even building a basic LoRA that might produce "somewhat like" work takes quite a few images to even get within spitting distance. I think most of the people here don't know how hard that actually is. For the record, I've been completely uninterested in trying that; doing Dreambooth training just sounds like work.

But I'm with Alex; if it's done, and it's clearly infringing, they should be gone. I think we're all agreed on this.

[Hiruma Kai]

I guess the next logical progression of that question would be in regards to re-use of AI generated assets?  While it is hard for AI to mimic some particular person's style without feeding it a lot of samples, if AI generated art becomes the norm rather than the exception, it is very trivial for the same AI to generate more art similar to that originally generated if you've got the prompt and seed.  Reuse of similar AI generated images presumably wouldn't be a problem?  Likely not a problem for sprite ships, but it might be an issue for backgrounds and portraits.