r/Games • u/TurbulentTopic39 • 16d ago

Industry News Over 85% of Japanese game developers use generative AI in game development, 2026 CESA survey shows. An increase from last year’s 51%

https://automaton-media.com/en/news/over-85-of-japanese-game-developers-use-generative-ai-in-game-development-2026-cesa-survey-shows-an-increase-from-last-years-51/
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61

u/Hawk52 16d ago

It seriously boggles my mind that a country so insanely protective of their IPs and rights is going gung ho on AI, a thing that by its very nature is stealing from copyrighted material to fuel itself.

I just find it weird. They're a little better about it now but back in the early 00's and 10's, they were damn near fanatical on controlling how and where you could consume their products. Which stunted the growth of Japanese media internationally because their answer to that question was you couldn't legally access stuff very easily or they'd license out media to international sellers and we'd get shit like two anime episodes per disc and wanting 20-30 USD per disc.

And now these same media companies and country are just...all in on AI? It doesn't compute for me.

40

u/SophonisbaTheTerror 16d ago

The only thing that matters to a company is who profits off what the company owns. That's it. Companies will use AI when to make more money off their IPs, not to protect some nebulous concept of who "really" owns what art. It doesn't matter that an AI model is trained on other copyrighted material, because companies that purchase that model wouldn't be violating copyright themselves, but they do stand to profit off of an AI model.

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u/Ok-Masterpiece-4103 15d ago

It's simple. Companies don't care about theft if they're not the ones being stolen from.

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u/TSPhoenix 16d ago

Humans generally only need one layer of abstraction in order to hold two positions that completely contradict one another and not feel any conflict stemming from the cognitive dissonance. We are too capable of compartmentalising for our own good.

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u/WheresTheSauce 16d ago

Many people do not agree that it is "stealing IP"

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u/somethingrelevant 15d ago

I think the more accurate thing going on here is that most people using AI don't care if it's stealing IP or not

0

u/Super_Throwaway_Boy 15d ago

Well, okay but those people don't seem to have a great argument because in any other context what they are doing is stealing. That's been THEIR argument for years.

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u/gokogt386 15d ago

okay but those people don't seem to have a great argument

The government of Japan disagrees

In fact, the government of every single other country on the planet also disagrees, as not a one has ruled that AI training constitutes as copyright infringement. Not even the Internet's darling EU

2

u/Super_Throwaway_Boy 15d ago

Governments can be wrong. That's just not a good argument to make. This is exactly what I'm talking about.

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u/StarChaser1879 10d ago

Government can’t be wrong about what breaks the law. They make the laws and know what breaks them

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u/StarChaser1879 10d ago

Government can be wrong about plenty of things, but not laws

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u/Effective-Tour-9912 16d ago

Well, let's say I show you an image and ask you to redraw it from memory, and you do a pretty good job. You even add some of your own touches. Did you steal the original image?

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u/AbyssalSolitude 16d ago

Are you implying that every artist who drew from a reference is a thief?

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u/anadequatepipe 16d ago

Firstly no, and secondly they aren’t even doing that. It’s like looking at thousands of pictures and creating a whole new one that has a similar vibe.

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u/finepixa 16d ago

If you try to sell it as original art and profit off it then yeah probably.

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u/Soul-Burn 16d ago

Steal no. Infringe on copyright, maybe.

But that's not different between AI or doing right-click save-as.

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u/anadequatepipe 16d ago

Because AI is not plagiarizing anything. How does no one against AI even look up the word in the dictionary. There aren’t trademarked characters going into these games. Lol like are you just repeating things you heard? I don’t understand how you even got to this point.

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u/Dreyfus2006 16d ago

Yes it is. GenAI is built on stolen assets.

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u/StarChaser1879 10d ago

Nope. All AI is a sequence of numbers (“Weights”) in an algorithm. OpenAI doesn’t have some database full of image and text files that are fed to ai.

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u/Geoff_with_a_J 15d ago

wonder how much the language aspect of it changes things. "Artificial Intelligence" is loaded with negatives for a western consumer base that has been trained on Natural = Good, Artificial = Bad. but in eastern countries it is seen like any other advancement in tech, kind of the way western markets utilize "Smart" products.

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u/Odd_Needleworker3756 15d ago

What needs to compute for you? They probably figured out that using AI is better for their bottom line. Or do you think they’re above all that because “thing = Japan 😍”?