His work on Vagrant Story was phenomenal. Japanese scripts tend to be really boring and samey. Without the work of a good localizer, you’d hear the same twenty anime one-liners interspersed throughout the entire game.
They’re not giving up though, what they’re doing is getting ahead of it. Assuming their deal is favorable for their members, they’re making it so that anyone who wants SAG-AFTRA synth voices has to go through their contracted company which they have collective bargaining power or strike an equal or better deal. Along with blacklisting companies from SAG-AFTRA work that use non-union synth voices.
This is way better than leaving actors on their own to bargain with companies, which would have definitely happened. Rather than have companies wear individuals down and drive pay down, they get to dictate the terms, together.
The one I kind of remembered (even though only partially) was the Reuters article, which contains this quote I was referring to:
The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do not create copyrightable work.
This was likely in reference to Midjourney, which was the system in question in its ruling. Midjourney, even for its time had very rudimentary user controls way behind the open standards that likely didn’t impress the registrar.
There’s also a spectrum of involvement depending on what tool you’re using. I know with web based interfaces don’t allow for a lot of freedom due to wanting to keep users from generating things outside their terms of use, but with open source models based on Stable Diffusion you can get a lot more involved and get a lot more freedom. We’re in a completely different world from March 2023 as far as generative tools go.
Take a look at the difference between a Midjourney prompt and a Stable Diffusion prompt.
To break down a bit of what’s going on here, I’d like to explain some of the elements found here.
sarasf is the token for the LoRA of the character in this image, and <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7> is the character LoRA for Sarah from Shining Force II. LoRA are like supplementary models you use on top of a base model to capture a style or concept, like a patch. Some LoRA don’t have activation tokens, and some with them can be used without their token to get different results.
The .07 in <lora:sarasf_V2-10:0.7> refers to the strength at which the weights from the LoRA are applied to the output. Lowering the number causes the concept to manifest weaker in the output. You can blend styles this way with just the base model or multiple LoRA at the same time at different strengths. You can even take a monochrome LoRA and take the weight into the negative to get some crazy colors.
The Negative Prompt is where you include things you don’t want in your image. (worst quality, low quality:1.4), here have their attention set to 1.4, attention is sort of like weight, but for tokens. LoRA bring their own weights to add onto the model, whereas attention on tokens works completely inside the weights they’re given. In this negative prompt FastNegativeV2 is an embedding known as a Textual Inversion. It’s sort of like a crystallized collection of tokens that tell the model something precise you want without having to enter the tokens yourself or mess around with the attention manually. Embeddings you put in the negative prompt are known as Negative Embeddings.
In the next part, Steps stands for how many steps you want the model to take to solve the starting noise into an image. More steps take longer.
VAE is the name of the Variational Autoencoder used in this generation. The VAE is responsible for working with the weights to make each image unique. A mismatch of VAE and model can yield blurry and desaturated images, so some models opt to have their VAE baked in,
Size is the dimensions in pixels the image will be generated at.
Seed is the number representation of the starting noise for the image. You need this to be able to reproduce a specific image.
Model is the name of the model used, and Sampler is the name of the algorithm that solves the noise into an image. There are a few different samplers, each with their own trade-offs for speed, quality, and memory usage.
CFG is basically how close you want the model to follow your prompt. Some models can’t handle high CFG values and flip out, giving over-exposed or nonsense output.
Hires steps represents the amount of steps you want to take on the second pass to upscale the output. This is necessary to get higher resolution images without visual artifacts. Hires upscaler is the name of the model that was used during the upscaling step, and again there are a ton of those with their own trade-offs and use cases.
After ADetailer are the parameters for Adetailer, an extension that does a post-process pass to fix things like broken anatomy, faces, and hands. We’ll just leave it at that because I don’t feel like explaining all the different settings found there.
I remember there being a lot of uncertainty about the legality of what and how can('t) be used in training models (especially when used for commercial purposes) - has that been settled in any way? I think there was also a case of not being able to copyright AI generated content due to lack of human authorship (I’d have to look for an article on this one as it’s been a while) - this obviously won’t be a problem if generated assets are used as a base to be worked upon.
In the United States, the Authors Guild v. Google case established that Google’s use of copyrighted material in its books search constituted fair use. Most people agree this will apply to generative models as well since the nature of the use is highly transformative.
I recommend reading this article by Kit Walsh, a senior staff attorney at the EFF from April last year if you haven’t already. The EFF is a digital rights group who recently won a historic case: border guards now need a warrant to search your phone.
Works involving the use of AI are copyrightable, but just like everything else, it depends. It’s also important to remember the Copyright Office guidance isn’t law. Their guidance reflects only the office’s interpretation based on its experience, it isn’t binding in the courts or other parties. Guidance from the office is not a substitute for legal advice, and it does not create any rights or obligations for anyone. They are the lowest rung on the ladder for deciding what law means.
As for illegal content - Valve mentioned it in regards to live-generated stuff. I assume they’re worried about possibility of plagiarism and things going against their ToS, which is why they ask about guardrails used in such systems. On a more general note, there were also cases of AI articles coming up with fake stories with accusations of criminal behavior involving real people - this probably won’t be a problem with AI usage in games (I hope anyway) but it’s another sensitive topic devs using such tools have to keep in mind.
I agree live generated stuff could get developers in trouble. With pre-generated assets you can make sure ahead of time everything is above board, but that’s not really possible when you have users influencing what content appears in your game. If they were going to ban anything, the original ban should have been limited to just this.
AI generated content has a lot of unanswered legal questions around it which can lead to a lot of headache with moderation and possibility of illegal content showing up (remember that not only “well meaning” devs will use these tools). It’s seems reasonable for a company to try minimize the risk.
There were never any unanswered legal questions would prevent you from being able to use generated assets in a game. That’s why Valve’s old stance was so odd. I’m not sure what you mean by the possibility for illegal content, can you elaborate?
Pretty cool. I almost had to start liking Epic Store for not having such a dumb stance. The disclaimer on games using generative content is weird, but it’s a solid step forward.
The rest of the soundtrack is great too, It was my favorite gacha I played, probably because it was the least exploitative gacha I’ve ever played. Sadly, it wasn’t doing too well and shut down in 2020 as development for Final Fantasy VII Remake was ramping up, and they need all hands on deck in Business Division 1.