Dragon’s Chronicles developer Takashi Mochibe received a demand for $200 in Steam items within 24 hours to prevent an alleged AI-made SRPG clone from launching first on Steam. He suspected the email was bulk spam; similar demands targeted developers of Iron Pilgrim and Circusar, and no payments were reported.
It seems like it would be easy to play along and set up a sting. Get the info for the mule account, send the items, report the mule account to steam, and steam can nab everyone based on where the mule transfers items to.
To any indie devs hit by this: send me an e-mail (address should be in my profile), maybe I can do something about it.
Are you from steam support or are one of the hitmen they hire to deal with those situations?
When the laws don’t help, when the community guidelines don’t help, you do it yourself.
What an awful time to be alive.
Don’t worry, it’ll get worse before it gets better!
If it gets bad enough, giant asteroid 2028 is technically better I suppose.
It’ll get better?!
Eventually, and maybe not with humans in the picture. That’d kinda be the ideal for the planet.
Only if the AI was retrained, they have traines ans tweaked it for capitalistic reasons.
Well in the last 42 years every single day has been worse than the last one in many ways. So “getting better” is simply a fallacy at this point. Shit hasn’t gotten better since fucking ww2, and that was short lived.
What happened 43 years ago?
I was born.
So this is all your fault?
/jk
Fuck I hope so. This is all just me hating our species with the fury of a thousand suns.
One day, we will all be dead!
Who would have thought that the same, morally bankrupt, unintelligent, Dunning-Kruger addled, narcissistic and sociopathic people who suddenly see a chance to “play with the big boys” just without knowing anything or putting effort into it would resort to something like this?
Their failure is never their own fault, or their lack of work they put into learning things, always -others- holding them and their -amazing- (read: shitty/crap) ideas back.
I hate this timeline with a passion. Social media gave all the trolls and village idiots a platform, and now “AI” -seemingly- allows the eternally inept to feel like a programmer or designer or artist, w/o the effort and the results of course.
Their clueless reactions to the backlash to their slop is evidence enough that the light may be on, but absolutely nobody is home
Their clueless reactions to the backlash to their slop is evidence enough that the light may be on, but absolutely nobody is home
Man, at least there is still a backlash at all.
While people doing this extortion scheme are self-deluded that their AI slop can be on par with the real deal, the real threats are either market saturation, or people will think your game is a ripoff of that AI slop.
I was trying to have a coffee yesterday while two guys next to me were having the most mind numbing conversation about AI.
The worst part is that when they go on about “spinning up agents”, discussing which models are better than others, someone listening in might be tricked into thinking they’re actually intelligent or understand something complicated. It’s already developed a jargon that obfuscates the fact that they’re just typing brain dead prompts into a chatbox and pretending they’re wizards.
Turns out the guy wanted to give Claude full disk access so it can automatically download/upload videos he’s editing from remote storage. I sincerely hope the fucker loses all his data.
When ai came out everyone wanted a way to speak to their computer and have it actually do anything you could do or automate it, it literally can with agents and does it well, I ssh into my pc and use it over terminal all the time for stuff that would be a chore to do unless I was sitting at my pc. (You can use any chat really, telegram, discord, etc.) It literally asks before doing anything, you can have it memorize that it should always make backups or work readonly with duplicates, etc. if you’re scared of losing sht, but I’ve had it recover things for me that I’ve lost myself very often, never has it been the reason I lost anything.
Also solves any issues I have with ram/cpu usage by finding the cause and giving me options to limit them. My lazy ass would never do that before and just restart and uninstall the potential causes of my new performance issues.
I know that you think you’re selling people on this, but believe me when I say that you’re just making yourself look bad.
Also solves any issues I have with ram/cpu usage by finding the cause and giving me options to limit them. My lazy ass would never do that before and just restart and uninstall the potential causes of my new performance issues.
Like have you even tried looking at the process manager?
Before I started having it make personal projects for myself I spent maybe 5$ every 3 months on api costs, if that.
Ive used ai that way with deepseekv4 flash to modify my files for over a year with hermes, work great, enjoy doing sht the tedious mindless way? Made internet archive usable for me, had to rename/reorganize so many loose issues that had different naming structures and file formats.
enjoy doing sht the tedious mindless way?
I know perl.
Such nice, non-judgmental people on Lemmy… Just not here.
I hope you lose your ability to communicate.
morally bankrupt, unintelligent, Dunning-Kruger addled, narcissistic and sociopathic people who suddenly see a chance to “play with the big boys”
I love this definition. Spot on. Here’s a real human-generated em dash — for the real homies, as a thanks.
Incredibly well said.
So, is Valve changing its rules on AI?
What Ai rules are supposed to be changed here? Nothing like that is suggested. Valve isn’t against Ai, they just want it to be disclosed on their shop.
There was no suggestion that the rules are changing, but the subject does invite the question of whether or not they should.
Valve would have to wade into the legal quagmire that is “determining whether a product has been AI generated, and to what degree”. No way in hell they’re touching that.
But not from Valve’s perspective. There is zero reason for Valve to rethink about it.
People just need to start sueing for copyright infringement, only way to deal with this tbh.
Copyrights won’t help you here. It’s not the same code or assets
How will copyright not help here? You don’t have to use the same code or assets for something to be copyright infringement. It’s one thing if you personally don’t believe in copyright, but just claiming that it has nothing to do with copyright because it’s not a 1:1 copy is just not true.
If you made something that “just happens to look like that other thing”, you’ll have a hard time defending that in court (especially if you extort them beforehand). Heck, there have been copyright lawsuits over musicians using similar lyrics or melodies since forever.
That copyright protection is only against using recognisable characters, samples etc and has a high evidentiary requirement. It doesn’t apply to art styles, prose, game mechanics and so on.
Training data is based on copyrighted material that is stolen. Someone should be made to pay somewhere. The theft of human thought cannot be allowed to be exploited.
Copyright violations aren’t stealing. Human thought cannot be “stolen”, only shared.
Human thought shared between humans cannot be stolen. A billionaire’s company feeding a machine all human thought for purposes of replacing said human is absolutely theft.
As for copyright, tell that to all the people fined for piracy.
Copyright violation is punishable by law, yes. But it’s it’s not theft.
A billionaire’s company feeding a machine all human thought for purposes of replacing said human is absolutely theft.
It’s immoral sure, but not theft. We don’t need to equivocate to pass moral judgement.
Fair enough
What kind of shit crap fucking garbage article is this
Is there supposed to be an article? Shit just goes to an RSS feed with nothing but headlines.
No idea what the issue is for you, but I see an article.
Link goes to an article for me
All articles I’ve seen from Tweaktwon are like this. They have 2 or 3 paragraphs and the rest of the page is filled with… all of that. Some defend saying its nice that they get to the point, but there is so much more on the page that this is not a good argument to me.
What a bizarre thing. Why does this even matter?
If someone makes a bad clone of someone else’s game concept will they have succeeded in anything? Shitty games are shitty games.
If someone makes a good clone of someone else’s game concept they have beaten them to the market and that’s how capitalism works.
If you don’t like that, don’t complain about AI. Complain about capitalism!
I honestly can’t imagine anyone demanding $200 in extortion money would ever be able to follow through with that threat.
The problem is that the original game gets buried. There are a million Needle in a Haystack games now and it is difficult to find the original.
That’s pretty meta.
Now that is properly resurrecting an AI-shit smeared word label.
The meta level of this comment is just… Chef’s 👌
Keep up the good work 👍
Sucks for the consumer that need to filter through trash or worse accidentally buys the wrong game
Accidentally buying the wrong game would actually fall under a different area of law: Fraud and possibly trademark infringement. Though, you can’t trademark (or even copyright) gameplay/mechanics…
In 1879(!) Baker v. Selden, the Supreme Court ruled that copyright protects only the expression of ideas (the text, illustrations, and phrasing), not the underlying ideas, systems, methods, or processes. This is important. The same rule applies to patents: They only cover the implementation of ideas, not the ideas themselves. Endless case law reaffirms this.
WHICH IS WHY SOFTWARE PATENTS SHOULD NOT EXIST.
I know it’s unrelated, just wanted to throw it out there 😀
Interesting, is the law similar outside the US?
LMAO! Creepy you don’t own IP and don’t understand how it works.
Epic and Valve on the slop slide. This is an opportunity for GOG and its game preservation efforts.
First of all, regarding the quality of the asset: This banner was a work-in-progress asset that we mistakenly allowed to be displayed on the storefront. This shouldn’t have happened. We failed on at least two levels: Quality-control of the asset that landed on the front page, and then reacting quickly enough when we noticed the error.
Second, I want to confirm that this WIP asset was indeed made with the help of Al tools. We hear your disappointment with the use of this technology, and see that it’s a sensitive topic for many of you.
I also want to be honest about how we chose to explore technology: We don’t have the infinite resources of the industry giants. We’re a dedicated, but small team, working our asses off every day for game preservation. To keep that mission alive, bring more games back to life, and make more games DRM-free, we experiment with tools that can allow us to do more with the limited hands we have.
We’ve been testing different technologies since our beginnings. Some experiments are successful, and some (like this banner) are not. Exploring various tech gives us the reach of a much larger team, so we never have to settle for doing less.
I’m not sure how much you should really be relying on GOG to be anti-AI. They haven’t been caught using AI images since, but “We failed on at least two levels: Quality-control of the asset that landed on the front page” implies that they’re fine with AI so long as you can’t really tell.
And that was pretty soon after another “mistake” where they spammed a bunch of Nazi shit to customers emails. Everybody and everything fucking sucks.
Why is Valve on the slop side?
Valve allows slop on their platform. Their perspective is that gamers won’t buy the slop, or rate it bad/refund it if they do, so it’s not an issue.
I’m glad that Valve isn’t intervening so much and allows the publication as if it was their own website. We don’t want Valve to decide what slop is and what not, it shouldn’t be Valves decision. You don’t want to give Valve this power. Instead, inform the user, and let each of them decide for themselves if they want it or not.
The better choice would be to ignore people who childishly refer to games people create as “slop” because they are upset by how good the tools used are. I think they’ll get there eventually, but right now it’s popular to hate AI. All the cool kids are doing it; especially the bullies.
