Unity, provider of video game engines, today announced the launch of two new machine learning platforms. In one of them, developers and artists in particular ask the company questions that were still unanswered at the time of publication.
Today we’re announcing two new AI products: Unity Muse, a comprehensive platform for AI-powered authoring assistance, and Unity Sentis, which lets you embed neural networks in your builds to enable previously unimaginable real-time experiences.
Muse is essentially just ChatGPT but specific to Unity and aims to allow users to ask questions about coding and resources and get answers instantly. However, Sentis is more concerning because it “allows you to embed an AI model into the Unity runtime for your game or application, enhancing gameplay and other features directly on end-user platforms.”
Because “AI” is a technology that in many cases relies entirely on works stolen from artists without consent or compensationThe announcement of Unity led to a much of questions about Sentis, with a particular focus on the technology’s ability to create things like images, models, and animations. For example, scroll down past the announcement tweet and you’ll see a lot of variations of the same search query:
Just to jump on the bandwagon: which dataset are you all pulling the art from???
Unity needs to be fully transparent about which ML models are implemented, including the data on which they were trained. I see no way that ML can be effective in its current iterations without training on vast amounts of ill-gotten data.
Really as far as image generator stuff goes. Which records?
Hello, what dataset was this trained on? Are artworks by artists used here without their permission? animations? Materials? How was this AI trained?
They understand that assets created by AI cannot be used commercially. So what was the reason for adding this feature?
Which datasets were used during development? Have you negotiated and acquired all relevant licenses directly from the copyright holders?
It’s a very specific question that Unity hasn’t tweeted or answered at the time of publication or on the company forums (I’ve emailed the company with the specific question, and will update if I hear anything.) Those familiar with “AI’s” legal and copyright struggles may find it here outline an answer in this post by Unity contributor TreyK-47when he says that you cannot use the technology as it exists today “for a current commercial or external project”.
Note that while this push poses clear threats to jobs and game quality, these threats remain for the future; for the moment, This looks (and sounds) like dog shit.
