PC Gaming

I think you have to be clever with the usage of gen AI to get non-boring things, and just use it as one or multiple elements in a larger pipeline/computation graph. This is my intuition and not battle-tested.

Disagree. They can be connected to actual game mechanics. For instance, it's quite easy to ask an LLM to output something in json format:

{
  "name": "The Master of Evil",
   "hitpoints": 205,
   "class": "vampire,"
}

and so on. You might object that it could make mistakes here. Suppose the detectable error rate is 10% (I actually think it's lower from what I've played around with.) Rerunning it in the case of a such an error (e.g. malformed json, invalid class name, hit points exceeds bounds, etc.) reduces to 1%, then 0.1% etc., and in the end there can be a non-AI fallback just for certainty. Admittedly, the errors are not i.i.d., but still it should be pretty low. Many traditional procgen techniques, such as map generation, also use rejection sampling in this way, with even larger rejection rates than 10%.

The ethics based on Intellectual Property? Quality, sure, but ethics?

Full disclosure: I'm a geek from the days of newsgroups and Geocities. I watched the rise and fall of things like Napster. And I watched IP-law get more and more restrictive. But what is "intellectual property" really? You're effectively taking an idea and saying "this is mine, I made this first, therefore I own it".

Around 1996, when I was 12, I thought it'd be really cool to have a small laptop that laid flat and you could hold in your hands. The designs I drew up VERY closely resembled a Blackberry. Blackberry came out a few years later. If I had filed the right paperwork, at 12, should I be able to stop them? I sincerely doubt they were spying on the drawings I made on the back of my homework. Should you get to stifle innovation just because you had the first brainfart? I don't think so.

But okay, let's say you're only thinking about artistic works. Again, you're gonna have repetition. This came out in 1995. This came out in 2008.

So what's the issue with AI; it was trained on "copyrighted" material? K, well so were you. Are folks upset because creators didn't get paid every time an AI reviewed their copyrighted works? Well, are they similarly upset about folks who check a book or movie out of the library? Not so much...because that's normalized (though would NEVER go over in today's hyper-corporate nonsense world). Okay, so are folks upset that generative works can resemble the style or "essence" of the original work? Lol, see the Jill Sobule/Katy Perry comparison above, also consider "Fair Use" and the likely transformative nature involved as well.

This isn't an "ethics" issue...it's an issue of disrupting existing channels for corporate power within a world sliding more and more into a dystopia of corporate fascism.