Microsoft and Epic Games Suddenly Agree That AI Is Theft

Posted by tom2026hn 1 day ago

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Comments

Comment by BatFastard 18 hours ago

Sadly the low hanging fruit is cloning other peoples games.

This takes away from all the indies that AI is empowering. I use AI on the game I am creating. It is wonderful in many ways. (I say this as I watch it burn thru 2m tokens with out informing me of the scope of what it was going to do).

Comment by pcdevils 18 hours ago

Roblox of course has been doing this for years while being seemingly untouchable; but now the bar to entry is even lower.

Comment by WorldMaker 17 hours ago

Roblox just as the single entry point in stores (for the most part) and doesn't clutter search engines when people are looking for the real games (for the most part) and has a certain friction between verisimilitude and aesthetic. For the most part the Roblox version of a game looks like Roblox, you aren't going to confuse it for "the real thing". Needing to use Roblox bucks instead of USD is going to be a red flag for some that they aren't getting a "professional" experience (and for others means they have an easier time playing it because their parents won't give them prepaid credit cards but will give them Roblox gift cards).

It's not just that the bar to entry is that much lower than Roblox's already low bar, but that the ceiling for (mass) deception is now much higher.

Comment by CookieCrisp 23 hours ago

I think this is a bit disingenuous. The stance they’re taking seems consistent to me. I’m Interpreting their view as “Using AI to create something new isn’t theft, using it to recreate or access an existing product is copyright infringement” - makes sense to me

Comment by garyfirestorm 22 hours ago

You can’t have the first one without the second one. AI doesn’t create something out of thin air, it is only recreating from training data. Which is infringing portion of the argument.

Comment by archontes 21 hours ago

How, to you, does training an AI violate copyright?

Comment by alerighi 18 hours ago

If the material that you train the AI on is copyright protected you are by definition violating it.

Otherwise AI becomes a glorious copyright-laundering machine, use something that you want to copy to train an AI, then ask that AI to replicate the stuff it was trained on. Of course it will make a perfect copy, but who is the creator of that intellectual work? The AI itself not for sure, but the original author of the stuff that the AI copied.

An no, it doesn't matter if the AI doesn't copy exactly but does a bit of shuffling of stuff, if not you are arguing that it's not cheating if you copy the homework of your classmate but you rearrange some words to make it not identical...

Comment by archontes 17 hours ago

How does that follow from the definition of copyright or the protections it offers? This is law we're talking about. Cite the black and white.

From copyright.gov "Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed"

What rights does copyright provide?

Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords.

Prepare derivative works based upon the work.

Distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership or by rental, lease, or lending.

Perform the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Display the work publicly if it is a literary, musical, dramatic, or choreographic work; a pantomime; or a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work. This right also applies to the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work.

Perform the work publicly by means of a digital audio transmission if the work is a sound recording.

Training an AI isn't on this list. An AI may produce infringing outputs, but training an AI isn't a violation of copyright.

"Copyright laundering" is a nonsense idea. Copyright is not designed to prevent people or machines from producing things in a style or similar things. It protects against exact reproduction or reuse, and that only to the extent that the form is separable from function. If the form is inseparable from function, the expression cannot be copyrighted at all.

Let's assume "shuffling stuff" as you describe it would solidly place a work into the "derivative works" category.

Fine, the AI has produced a derivative work. The original copyright holder has a claim on that work if it were to be distributed, sold, displayed, or performed.

Does the AI hold a copyright? No. Only humans can hold copyrights. Does the prompter hold a copyright? No. A human has to perform the transformative work, not merely arrange for a machine to do it. AI outputs are not copyrightable.

But how you "feel" about it isn't a useful measure. It being like "cheating off someone's homework" isn't useful, either. Hell. Copyright is carefully crafted to allow "cheating off someone's homework" provided that the result doesn't reproduce elements of the original exactly.

Comment by cyanydeez 21 hours ago

Ok, so lets say you "train" and "AI" using the binary source code of windows, then ask the AI to recreate Windows.

Does that violate copyright? What if we us the binary source code of MacOS, Linux and Windows, then ask it to recreate Windows?

Does the fact that we added some other ingrediants violate the idea that the LLLM will create a substantially similar product?

I'm not defending windows, but indicting LLMs as anything but "fair use".

Comment by 16 hours ago

Comment by withinboredom 19 hours ago

I don't think that's how it works. From experience from working on an experimental online learning system... it can't remember verbatim unless it is _really_ in there many many times. It can reconstruct it pretty close though.

source: online learning of codebases in the hundreds of thousands to millions of lines of code

Comment by lirolero 19 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by protimewaster 18 hours ago

I agree. I'm not sure why anyone thought that these companies would be okay with someone releasing an unofficial title in their flagship franchise, AI created or not.

It seems like the news outlet is running this as "suddenly they object to AI" and ignoring the fact that they're objecting to it because it's clearly an infringing product. It would be infringing whether it was made with AI or not.

This is akin to somebody saying we should be allowed to own knives for cooking, and then calling them a hypocrite when they object to knives being used to stab people in the face.

Comment by xyzsparetimexyz 22 hours ago

It's not even that. The main thing is _publishing_ the decompilation. Doing the decompilation is fine. If I own a game I'm pretty sure I am (or should) be able to legally decompile it or recompile it and turn it into something that runs in a browser or on my phone or whatever. But the source code (not relevant here unless there's a leak) and binary are copyrighted and decompilation doesn't count as a transformative work.

Comment by AlotOfReading 22 hours ago

It would be wild to make the argument that decompilation isn't transformative. A classic test is whether the derivative work serves a different purpose than the original. Google thumbnails for example. That seems pretty obviously true for decompilation, since it's the first step in quite a lot of modding, porting, and preservation uses that the original binary doesn't serve.

Comment by avaer 22 hours ago

> If I own a game I'm pretty sure I am (or should) be able to legally decompile it or recompile it

That's a nice theory (and I morally agree with it); not sure the courts would agree; it hasn't been tested. I expect the money would win in this case if we extrapolate from history.

Comment by avaer 22 hours ago

Rules for thee, not for me.

These companies would love to slurp up your game (via AI) but replicating theirs (via AI) is no bueno. Whether you've infringed comes down to whether you can afford the legal fees.

Remains to be seen how it plays out but I always liked Sega's approach to Sonic fan games. They are their own rich genre, which have largely symbiosed with corporate. Though, I suspect most studios won't understand the value of that approach.

Comment by Ohentis 19 hours ago

I don't really think this is the case. The rules feel very consistently applied. Training is fine. Output may still be copyright infringing in some cases (but difficult to prove and none of these tech companies have tried yet). Publishing decomps is not fine and never has been. Piracy is not fine and never has been (and anthropic got in trouble for it). The only case that I know of where an AI company got off free for something an individual would be punished for is the various hacks that they've "accidentally" done.

Comment by 18 hours ago

Comment by 21 hours ago

Comment by epolanski 23 hours ago

Remember when Microsoft was saying, in 2021-2022, that they were going to provide legal assistance to anybody contesting the license of Copilot-generated code?

Comment by avaer 23 hours ago

It's going to be really interesting to see how billion dollar game companies handle this.

It could be a Napster/Torrent moment. Which would be a good thing.

Comment by glouwbug 14 hours ago

I think once the funding dries up the finger pointing of who stole first, or who stole at all, will start. We know, for instance, Meta trained on Libgen

Comment by shostack 13 hours ago

More realistically, I expect the AAA titles to move to streaming only cloud computing services, which is what they wanted to do anyway.

Comment by whshdjsk 11 hours ago

With what GPUs?

Comment by tancop 16 hours ago

I think all developers should release their games code as open source (GPL) and only keep the assets commercial. That lets everyone else learn and remix but doesn't hurt sales.

Comment by glouwbug 15 hours ago

Server side asset decryption? Once it’s in memory I don’t know what’s stopping anyone from running with the assets too

Comment by pipes 17 hours ago

I gave up reading the article due to silly phrasing and editorialising: "punishment", "AI tools many publishers have brazenly admitted to using are a double-edged sword." And so on.

The nonsense about "hypocrisy", companies act in the best interest of their shareholders.

It isn't hypocrisy to use AI tooling and also attempt to protect their IP. Not wanting to be stabbed and using a knife to cut my steak dinner up doesn't make me a hypocrite.

Comment by Micrococonut 15 hours ago

Well unfortunately your steak dinner in this analogy is a human steak. That someone else was stabbed for to be served up to you. You don’t have a problem eating it, but you don't think you should be on the menu.

Comment by pipes 15 hours ago

So all AI use is harmful?

Comment by alcomatt 18 hours ago

I for one would love for someone create a clone of ms office with a good exchange implementation and decent outlook client plus self-hostable private cloud counterparts. Free Azure anyone?

Comment by dude250711 23 hours ago

I have to begrudgingly support them, because that would decrease the amount of vibe-slop at least somewhat.

That being said, Valve should increase their Steam fee to at least $1k now.

Comment by 999900000999 20 hours ago

1k is more than reasonable.

Sorta sucks if your in a middle income country, but there's always itch.

Comment by yndoendo 15 hours ago

Big businesses also push out slop for profit. Look at Atari and the _E.T._ game. Warner Brothers forced them to push it out for Christmas instead of waiting for a quality product.

1983 was the year the gaming industry crashed because all these production companies cared about profit and pushed out slop. [0] Slop is not new, it has always been there.

This is why Nintendo brought gaming back. They rejected slop on their platforms and only wanted quality products to be bound to their name. They also limited the number of games a 3rd party could publish per year on their platform.

There are AI slop houses that pump out content to make a profit out of trash.

There are indie developers that use LLM for assistance and know wealth is the by product of a good game.

Wealth is a by product of a good product / solution / service. That concept is lost on majority of MBA and those that seeking to maximize their wealth. Private equity continues do this by reject this concept and moving to push out slop with brands that original built quality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

Comment by thejazzman 22 hours ago

You’re saying we should support the billionaire overlords because some indies trying to use new tools will produce results that people parrot on the internet as slop?

I’ll take the slop.

Comment by xyzsparetimexyz 21 hours ago

Steam is in a weird position as a marketplace. It has to serve mainstream developers, indie but relatively large developers or at least polished games (the kind of thing that would've past steam greenlight fairly quickly back when that was around) and tiny, single indivial indies who may or may not put out something nobody else will (occasionally slop clones) (the kind of thing that've taken a while to pass greenlight). I'm not sure if and how they can create a system that works for everyone. A $1k ceiling is maybe the worst idea. It hurts poor indies but not ai slop studios as much. It's possible that the return of some greenlight-esque curattioj could work, but it'd be devastating if your game got rejected as a false positive for ai slop or anything.

Comment by oliwarner 17 hours ago

Epic are gleefully slopping out a new client. Is that theft, Tim?

Weird how this stuff only applies when it's not you doing it.