Halls of Sorcery withdrawn from sale due to AI-generated content

Announcements
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It has come to our attention that the Hosted Game published last week, Halls of Sorcery, used AI-generated art and text in the final draft of the game as submitted for publication. The author misrepresented the IP as his own on submission of the game but confirmed the use of AI when asked directly. This game has now been withdrawn from sale on all platforms.

As a reminder, this is our official policy with respect to AI use in game creation, which can be found on this page:

We can’t publish AI-generated content

Hosted Games will not publish art, code, or prose that was generated via AI, due to ongoing legal uncertainty around the copyright of AI-generated content.

Your submission, including all artwork, must be created by a person or group of people who have the legal rights to publish it, and we have to provide them credit in the Credits.

The forum permits AI-generated artwork in “Work In Progress” games. Before publishing with Hosted Games, all games must undergo beta testing on our forum at forum.choiceofgames.com, in a “work in progress” (WIP) thread. It’s OK to use AI-generated images in in WIP projects, as long as you replace the AI images with human-generated ones before submitting for publication with Hosted Games.

We permit but strongly discourage the use of AI translators (including Google Translate). Automatic translation works OK for short articles, but it rarely works well for longer works. If you do use automatic translation, we strongly recommend that a native English speaker review all the material you submit for publication.

If you have purchased the game on our website or on the Google Play Store, we are in the process of issuing refunds. This has to be done manually and will take some time. If you haven’t received a refund by the end of the week, please contact support@hostedgames.org and provide a receipt for your purchase.

If you have purchased the game through the iOS App Store, we are investigating the possibility of issuing bulk refunds on that platform, but in the meantime, you can request a refund directly from Apple at this link.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused. We always want to give authors the benefit of the doubt, and we are still learning how to balance that value against our responsibility to our readers in the context of emerging technologies.

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Thank you for taking a hard line on this. As someone who’s had to fight through the DMCA process to get AI content generated off my work taken down, I deeply appreciate a principled stance, even if it is just for legal reasons.

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Today, every time I try to access my library of purchased games using the Hosted Games app, it crashes. Is this related to removing this game? I have other purchased games?

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dont get it , if you use AI you have mostly to buy it first before you can use it why he dont has than the ownership on the AI pic content ?
and no i wont start a discuss or somthing right now thats just my opionen to AI pics

or has it to do something with you only rent the ai each month ?

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Update. I had to uninstall the Hosted Games app and reinstall it and restore purchases. Big hassle. Could this be related to you guys pulling Halls of Sorcery from my library?

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Your opinion be what it may, it isn’t the opinion of the US Copyright Office, who control copyright registration for works published in the US.

Al-gen content lacks human authorship, and is thereby intelligible for copyright.

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It has nothing to do with whether you pay for using the AI or not.

Creative works are only copyrighted if they are created by a human.

Which means that the author don’t actually have the rights that they signed over to HG, because some of the text and images used was created by AI.

(If I’ve understood things correctly)

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ah tought so US making a fuss ^^ well thanks for the info did always wonder why most against AI content now i get it^^

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Exactly. Can’t sell license to IP you lack the rights to.

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well that i dont again not, a art who is drawn on a tap or phone is in my eyes not human than to^^ but we wont go to far now ^^ art was always a fuss if it comes to ownership

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That is in no way a requirement. Specific AIs, yes, but generally, you can even make your own (although you’ll need some serious hardware, so you might need to rent some server farm time at some point).

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If you really want to know what all the issues with generated AI content is, then there is a very long discussion thread here on the forum, that goes into a lot of details, and has a lot of different people weighing in on the topic.

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sure would like it , do you have a link or is it easy to find ?

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I was just looking it up for you:

AI thread

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I completely understand and agree with your decision, even though I was looking forward to reading this book.

That being said, if the author takes out the AI-generated content, is there a chance of it being put back on the marketplace?

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Unfortunately, given the misrepresentations on the author’s part, we would not be able to trust that all such content had been removed.

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I’m already getting some questions about Google Play refunds, and to reiterate about those: the only way we can do those is to refund the individual purchases manually, which is going to take some time. If you haven’t received one by the end of the week, feel free to write into support, but please do wait until the end of the week - they aren’t all going to happen immediately.

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Say what you will about AI, the willful misrepresentation of the work by the author is enough to take it down for me. Thanks for your integrity, Staff!

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Shame. Remembered being interested in the premise but didn’t get around to buying it (partly because I was on vacation). AI is a hard no for me, thanks for being transparent about this.

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I was wondering how I felt like I had just played the early demo and then suddenly outta nowhere it was finished and released

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