AI assets are a legal risk & need to be banned from the marketplace

Community Marketplace
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It is getting out of hand, the 2D section now consists ENTIRELY of AI generated images.

This does not only drag down the overall quality of the marketplace and ruin it for real 2D artists, it also puts the customers into legal danger AND breaks Epics own guidelines.

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The marketplace guidelines state:

2.2.b Sellers must have legal rights to distribute all content of the products they submit to and distribute through the Marketplace.

AI art sellers are breaking this rule, as they do not own the rights to the AI generated images.

The US law is very clear on this, see section 306 & 313.2 of the US copyright law compendium:

Works That Lack Human Authorship

As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being.

Furthermore, judges have already rejected copyright claims for AI content: AI-generated art cannot receive copyrights, US court says | Reuters

So despite what companies like Midjourney are promising, they can not grant copyrights to the people using their tools.
And even slight edits like adding a frame or changing colors or brightness are not enough to constitute enough human input to be able to receive copyright.
Despite the fact that most AI assets sold on the marketplace are very clearly not edited at all.

So why is Epic allowing AI art on the marketplace, even though it clearly breaks their own guidelines?

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The next problem is Valve banning games using AI generated content, with more and more people now reporting on Reddit their games being rejected by Steam due to AI generated content.

As to Valves stance on this, quote Valve in the TechCrunch article:

“As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game,”

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Again, while we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights. At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it’s unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data.

Valves stance is clear and logical, since no AI generator currently available (to the public) is being trained on datasets that do not contain public, copyrighted material.
Hence why there are multiple lawsuits pending & in preparation against companies like Midjourney.

So by allowing AI generated content to be sold on the marketplace, Epic is not only putting every customer into the danger of their games being rejected or banned from Steam, but also into legal risks as these asset sellers do not own the copyrights to these images.

As a customer, you put your trust into Epic for only allowing assets to be sold that do NOT put said customer into legal danger.
By continuing to allow AI generated assets to be sold, we as customers can not trust the Unreal marketplace any longer. If Epic doesn’t care about copyrights for AI assets, how can I trust it cares about the rights of other assets being sold on the marketplace?

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Therefore, if Epic actually cares about us indie gamedevs who buy things on the marketplace - which I want to believe, it needs to ban AI generated assets from the marketplace.

Either that or put a big warning sign on any AI generated asset AND remove section 2.2.b from the guidelines, or make it clear that the guidelines actually don’t matter for sellers.

Which one is it going to be Epic?

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I agree with this part in particular.

For 99% of the assets, we have to ask the vendors, WHAT ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO WITH IT? :slight_smile:

I mean, you can have a 2D backdrop, I guess. Or some 2D icons. But that’s about it.

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I’m assuming this is chat-gpt…

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What do you mean?

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There was a comment here I was referring to, which has been removed…

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Oh I see, weird that it just disappears and there is no “comment removed” like in Steam. That would be better in my opinion.

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Normally there is, don’t quite get it… :slight_smile:

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They purged it, as it had an evil looking Spam / Malware link. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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It make sense in the matter that you can effectively use everything for non commercial products, maybe that’s a way around the tos limitations. They could add an “ai generated art” flag or filter like ArtStations and such.
The Marketplace it’s alredy filled with packages full of stolen assets, some were removed but many others probably are still under the radar and unobserved.
It’s the bane of user created assets stores.

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Although, I’m not a fan of recent spammy 2D submissions to the Marketplace, I’m not in favor of banning AI Generated Assets either. I personally don’t purchase any 2D assets, and plan to integrate Generative AI Api’s directly into my games.

I’m more in favor of a enhanced filtering and search capabilities within the Marketplace. Hopefully FAB will offer these features as it will consolidate a bizillion assets from UE, Artstation, Sketchup, Quixel, others.

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if they have their own section and can be filtered so that they are not shown, it would be enough. 2d marketplace seccion is a jungle of ■■■■

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There is an AI filter

image

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As far as I know, the “NoAI” filter just indicates that the creator of the pack doesn’t want their pack being used to train an AI. There is also a “Created with AI” tag which indicates that the assets were created with the AI. A lot of AI created assets are marked with both tags meaning “Yes, I did this with the AI, but I don’t allow anyone else to further create AI assets using this pack”.
So far, so good except that in the current Marketplace - at the difference for example of Artstation one - one cannot exclude a tag. One cannot say: “I want to see all assets, except those created with AI” and that’s a problem.
I doubt they will fix this problem now that they are developing Fab, I just hope Fab will have the feature to exclude a tag from the search.

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oooo thanks, I don’t use tags much because the creators themselves make them and sometimes they are very trollish, I just tried and things continue to come out although less.

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We’ve been discussing this to death here: AI Generated Assets on the Marketplace?

What’s the purpose for new thread?

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I could also make an option in the fab to block creators so that they do not appear in the search, not only for A.I creators but for example in my case Low poy, or stylized (which always sounds like a charming 30m²

What you say is just a bunch of people with torches, this is about looking for more practical solutions. :joy:

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I see the same set of people here that were there :stuck_out_tongue: and “practical solution” started with “just ban the whole thing”, which could be categorized as “raising a torch” :smiley:

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Ah, I didn’t know, I didn’t read the first post, it was very long, I scrolled and it seemed to me that I was going to look for solutions

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Also the problem is that Epic has no solution (nobody has really aside from banning the whole thing). We pinged in the other thread Josh a few times and all we got is silence. The most we can know about Epic’s stance on gen AI so far is what Tim is tweeting (which might or might not be official company stance).

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No need to purchase Spam AI Gen Assets when you can use same AI Gen to produce the content yourself. I would anticipate low profit margins for Publishers of such content. However, Publishers of Embeddable AI Gen Subsystems that generate content in-game will befriend me as a Customer.

I predict embedded Generative AI and Procedural Content for all forms of media in games will be commonplace in 2 years, especially 3D. I’m currently developing PCG Subsystems for Entities, Architecture, and Environment in My Current Game. Researching into implementing Generative AI to manage both authoring of 3D Part Mesh/Materials and Assembly for Version 2.0.

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