Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Fair point, I should have asked about commercial games in general That said I didn’t mean that the game studio itself would do the AI training and own their models in-house; if they did, I’d expect it to go just as poorly as you would. Rather, I’d expect the model to be created by an organization specialized in that sort of thing. For example, [“Marey”](https://nofilmschool.com/marey-ethically-trained-ai-video-model) is one example I found of a GenAI model that its creators are saying was trained ethically. Another is [Adobe Firefly](https://helpx.adobe.com/firefly/get-set-up/learn-the-basics/adobe-firefly-faq.html), where Adobe says they trained only on licensed and public domain content. It also sounds like Adobe is paying the artists whose content was used for AI training. I believe that Canva is doing something similar. StabilityAI is also doing something similar with [Stable Audio 2.0](https://stability.ai/news/stable-audio-2-0), where they partnered with a music licensing company, AudioSparx, to ensure that artists are compensated, AI opt outs are respected, etc.. I haven’t dug into any of those too deep, but they seem to be heading in the right direction at the surface level, at least. One of the GenAI scenarios that’s the most terrifying to me is the idea of a company like Disney using all the material they have copyright for to train their own, proprietary GenAI image, audio, and video tools… not because I think the outputs would be bad, but because of the impact that would have on creators in that industry. Fortunately, as long as copyright doesn’t apply to purely AI generated outputs, even if trained entirely on your own content, then I don’t think Disney specifically will do this. I mention that as an example because that usage of AI, regardless of how ethically the model was trained, would still be unethical, in my opinion. Likewise in game creation, an ethically trained and operated model could still be used unethically to eliminate many people’s jobs in the interest solely of better profits. I’d be on board with AI use (in game creation or otherwise) if a company were to say, “We’re not changing the budget we have for our human workforce, including for contractors, licensed art, and so on, other than increasing it as inflation and wages increase. We will be using ethical AI models to create more content than we otherwise would have been able to.” But I feel like in a corporate setting, its use is almost always going to result in them cutting jobs.

Are you okay with AAA studios using GenAI that was trained only on licensed works?

Copyright applies to unfinished works, too. There are many reasons it might not protect an unfinished work, but those reasons are still relevant even for finished works. If someone steals your physical drawing, that’s theft. If they take a picture of it, then use the picture - or your picture + modifications - without your permission, particularly in a commercial work, then that’s copyright infringement, but not theft. If they steal your physical drawing and then take a picture and so on, then it’s both theft and copyright infringement. Most likely this wasn’t considered copyright infringement because the allegedly copied art isn’t copyrightable, e.g., game mechanics; or the plaintiff didn’t own the copyrights themselves and thus couldn’t sue (possibly the arts were still copyrighted by the original artists, having never been purchased; possibly they were stock assets that were re-purchased by the defendant). There are any number of reasons. However, “the work wasn’t published” isn’t one of them. On the other hand, it’s quite likely they were able to sue for theft of trade secrets for that very reason. And they might have chosen to do that simply because proving copyright infringement is much more difficult.

> This happened because the developers allegedly used assets from a game called *P3*, which was never released, and therefore not subject to copyright infringement claims. That isn’t how copyright works. Copyright is awarded upon creation of a work, not upon release.