This actually looks pretty good. The key takeaway I got was that they know their business is dependent upon Intellectual Property rights, and that Generative AI in final outputs or productive work undermines the foundation of their future success vis a vis discounting or dismissing IP Law and Rights.
That’s likely to be the middle ground going forward for the smarter creative companies, and I’m personally all for it. Sure, use it for a pitch, or a demo, or a test - but once there’s money on the line (copyright in particular), get that shit outta there because we can’t own something we stole from someone else.
Or they can do like Call of duty, that just makes skins "heavily inspired" by other franchises they don't own, the week Borderlands 4 came out they put a few cell shaded skins that heavily resembles the look of that game's characters, there is one that skin that is pretty much like reptile from mortal Kombat called "vibrant serpent", they got a bit of heat in May of this year for releasing a skin that looked too much like one from another game called High On Life, and the list goes on. It reminds me a lot of the disguises they sell on Spirit Halloween during every October.
And yes I know they do legal and agreed partnerships like with the Predator franchise, or the Beavis and Butt-Head franchise (yes they exist in CoD now...), and those only count for a tiny number of the premium skins.
The Call of Duty series makes me so sad. I remember when cod 4 came out it felt like a genuinely groundbreaking and innovative thing and I was so pumped to see what IW did next. And then Activision took all of that talent that was genuinely exploring new ground in game development and stuck them in the yearly rerelease of the same damn game mill until everyone got burnt out and left.
For the record, Arc Raiders (just released) makes me feel like I'm back playing MW2 in the golden days. Just in the sense of playing an awesome game and riding the wave of popularity with everyone else.
Arc Raiders, and their previous game The Finals, uses AI in some capacity for Voice Acting - though they do still hire VA and make it explicit in their contract offer
>Some of the voice lines were created using generative artificial intelligence tools, using an original sample of voice lines from voice actors hired specifically with an AI-use contractual clause, similar to the studio's production process in The Finals.
I've been trying to find time here and there to get the tumbleweeds out of my gaming pc just so I can try that game. Reviews and streams for it remind me a bit of the Dark Zone experience when the first Division game came out.
It is a lot like the Division's DZ. Less toxicity out of the gate, but we'll see how that goes as time passes. They should've taken the "rogue" mechanic from that game.
Arc Raiders is a ton of fun though. Also recommend Helldivers 2 if you just want a PvE shooter. It tends to be buggy as hell but the core game experience is hilariously fun.
I thought they were on biyearly swapping with treyarch?
Cod4 in some ways was the beginning of the end for a lot that we took for granted in gaming up to that point. I remember when it released and a couple of us went to my friends house to play it. Boy were we in for a shock when there was no coop multiplayer like halo 3.
We thought Halo 3 set a sort of standard for gaming on the xbox 360. Where all games would have coop online multiplayer, partying up after the match, everyone using microphones, all talk, custom game lobbies. How wrong we were in hindsight. And how different gaming would have been on consoles if it went this way.
Not me, the mix of parkour with multiplayer shooting with beautiful highly detailed maps it's something I like a lot, nothing even compares in that regard, I know the game is a shameless skin store but I do appreciate the former, although I also hate how small a lot of maps are, glances at Nuketown
Totally, Titanfall 2 is one of my favorite games ever, but by the time I discovered the multiplayer was pretty much dead, no players and no recent updates.
I hate how parkour infested the fps genre. There's this whole meta now that I don't care about at all yet one has to learn if you don't want to go 3 and 12 and its in most games now.
It has been that way for decades, but prior the parkour stuff was exploiting bugs in game engines and only the top 1% or less of players could even pull off the complex inputs needed.
Personally, I was in the top 10% of HL2DM players but because I couldn't master the inputs for skating I wasn't able to compete with the truly elite tier players who would zip around the map at breakneck speeds.
> Generative AI in final outputs or productive work undermines the foundation of their future success vis a vis discounting or dismissing IP Law and Rights
It goes beyond just IP law compliance. Creativity is their core competency and competitive differentiator. If you replace that with AI slop, then your product becomes almost indistinguishable from that of everyone else producing AI slop.
IMO, they're striking exactly the right balance - use AI as a creative aid and productivity booster not something to make the critical aspects of the final product.
It's partly about Netflix getting sued by someone claiming infringement, but also partly (maybe mostly) about Netflix maintaining their right to sue others for infringement.
The scenario looks like this:
* Be Netflix. Own some movie or series where the main elements (plot, characters, setting) were GenAI-created.
* See someone else using your plot/characters/setting in their own for-profit works.
* Try suing that someone else for copyright infringement.
* Get laughed out of court because the US Copyright Office has already said that GenAI is not copyrightable. [1]
In a legal case? You question the authors under oath, subpoena communications records, billing records, etc.
If there's even a hint that you used AI output in the work and you failed to disclose it to the US Copyright Office, they can cancel your registration.
Other than that, just a bit of common sense tells you all you need to know about where the data comes from (datasets never released, outputs of the LLMs suspisciously close to original copyrighted content, AI founders openly saying that paying for copyrighted content is too costly etc. etc. etc.)
Yeah. No. This document says, “our strategy is wait and see.” It’s the most disruptive media technology since the TV. And they’re like, “whatever.” That is not the move of a “smarter” creative company. Lawyers are really, really bad at running companies, even if you have strong opinions about the law.
Disruptive does not mean good, or useful, or important, or valuable. There is no reason to jump onto a thing early just because it is disruptive: Netflix exists in a different creative world than the tech industry, and its audiences are even more hostile to the idea that AI is being used to steal from the things and people they admire than the audiences of typical tech industry disruptions. People who care about art and artists and films and actors tend not to value slop.
Nobody values slop, and not everything is slop, AI or otherwise. Also, stealing is not the same as copyright infringement, unless you subscribe to the RIAA definition of the word.
AI has no intent or creativity, so it can be neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad.
So just as there's no procedural difference between an AI getting something right and an AI "hallucinating", if the word "slop" describes anything AI generates, it describes all of it.
Either everything generative AI creates is slop or nothing is. So everything is.
Also I know stealing is not the same thing as copyright infringement. I'm talking about stealing livelihoods as much as stealing art.
>AI has no intent or creativity, so it can be neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad.
AI is just a wrapper around a tool - it doesn't need intention or creativity because those come from the user in the form of prompts (which are by definition intentional)
It's just a Natural Language Interface for calling CLI tools mostly, just like how GUIs are just graphical interfaces for calling CLI tools, but no one thinks a GUI has no intentionality or creativity even when using stochastic/probabilistic tools
Anything a user can do with an AI they could also do with a GUI, it would just take longer and more practice
>Either everything generative AI creates is slop or nothing is. So everything is.
But then how do you know something is slop before you know if it's made with GenAI? Does all art exist as Schrodinger's Slop until you can prove GenAI was used? (if that's even possible)
> AI has no intent or creativity, so it can be neither right nor wrong, neither good nor bad.
Values aren't required for something to be good or bad. Outcomes are. A giant meteor strike causing a global firestorm & brief ice age causing mass death is bad, but giant meteors have no values.
I am talking about intent and creativity, where values quite obviously are required, because both are meaningless without them. Which is why slop is slop.
But then I vote Giant Meteor/Pestilence 2028. They will deliver what they promise.
That’s likely to be the middle ground going forward for the smarter creative companies, and I’m personally all for it. Sure, use it for a pitch, or a demo, or a test - but once there’s money on the line (copyright in particular), get that shit outta there because we can’t own something we stole from someone else.