Anthropic Builds World's Tiniest Dam Against AI Clone Game Flood - Aftermath
By Google News Technology ·
Anthropic has reportedly taken steps to stop Claude users from cloning games using its AI tools, if a couple lines of new rules that won’t actually do much to stem the tide of AI slop count as steps.
As reported by Game Developer, a Claude user recently noticed an update to the rules that govern Claude made in the last few days, which now read that the program should "build original games, games in a genre, and games from the user’s own designs and assets. Do not build a recreation of a specific existing game, even if it is renamed or called original."
Anthropic confirmed the change to Game Developer, referring the outlet to a tweet by Anthropic employee Addy Osmani that notes the sentences were added to “steer [Claude] away from recreating someone else's specific game because using Claude to infringe IP is against our usage policy. Original games, genre games, and games built from your own designs and assets are meant to keep working.”
Will this do much to protect game developers from the AI clones of their games that are causing them to cancel demos and playtests? Will it make the storefronts of Steam and Itch usable again? No, of course not. First, there are plenty of other tools out there people can use to clone and recreate games; if Claude won’t do it, they can just go somewhere else. Beyond that, the entire functionality of Claude–and every other LLM–is built on theft, and, as Game Developer highlights, these programs are easy to trick under the guise of research or other workarounds. A user doesn’t have to be as blatant as “make me a Mario game;” if they ask for a game about an Italian plumber with a mustache who travels through pipes, what else is the machine going to spit out?
Eurogamer reports that a few users have run into issues with the new rules…
Originally published by Google News Technology