An insider in the video game industry has shared that it has decided to ban AI art, because of copyright issues.
Our insider is Trent Kaniuga, famous now as an art YouTuber, but also a veteran artist at several game studios. Trent cites Blizzard, Riot Games, Capcom, Epic’s Fortnite, and even Marvel Comics as former clients.
Trent is a freelancer now, and also calls himself a game director, as he is working on a game called Twilight Monk. It does seem that he still works in games in a freelance capacity, as he made the following statement in that capacity.
Trent shared his revelations on Twitter:
“AI art is now BANNED by many major game dev studios due to “possible legal copyright issues”. Many old clients are amending contracts recently to end the use of AI art. This goes in line with what I’d predicted in several of my first videos on the subject.
Many of my clients are sending me addendums to my contracts with them to eliminate the use of AI art in their outsourcing.”
Trent also shared this when he was asked who his sources are:
“Im being sent amendments to my contracts. My source is the companies themselves.”
So we can assume that potentially Blizzard, Riot Games, Capcom, Epic Games, and also possibly Blizzard’s parent company, Activision Blizzard King as a whole, have decided to go ahead with this ban.
While this has remained outside the orbit of video games thus far, AI art has been a hot topic in the artist community. The fear that many artists have that their work will be taken over by AI is very real, and that fear sits even at different types of art. So, this does affect artists in video games too, and that’s whether they use CG or sprites or other kinds of art for those games.
The prospect of copyright infringement seems to be sufficient reason to discourage video game companies to employ AI, or at least at Trent’s place in the industry, to discourage them from commissioning AI art from outside the company.
This does not rule out the possibility that the game companies, or even the game artists themselves, investigate the possibility of using AI to automate some parts of the video game design process.
But as we have seen it play out so far, people have been using Midjourney and GPT-3 to generate art using the open web as reference, which naturally raises copyright issues.
Not that this needed to be pointed out, but individual video game franchises each have their own artistic style and flourishes. That’s true not only for more cartoony video games like Splatoon and Psychonauts, but also even realistic games. The realism in The Last of Us 2 is different from the realism in Bayonetta 3, and that’s also different from the realism in Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty, and so on and so forth.
Could AI copy that individual style that video games have and replicate it to a degree that would satisfy most gamers? Note that even Team Tekken struggled to satisfy Tekken fans when they switched engines to Unreal and had to remake their character likenesses in Tekken 7. But at least at that point, the companies would exclusively supply only their own art to ensure authenticity. In any case, that scenario doesn’t seem likely for the moment.
Here and now, we should probably regard it as unlikely that video game companies, even the big ones, are interested in muddling in AI art. Not while the developers working on the tech haven’t worked out all the issues surrounding its use, at least.
