Media creation with artificial intelligence

Copyright and fair use

To understand the full picture of copyright we have to look into its real world implementations.

Game companies have an interest in not upsetting their fan base, especially the organized structures like gaming communities.

Game communities are like voluntary support structures that provide services the companies would otherwise have to pay money for. Most aspects can be considered direct or indirect sales promotion. These communities usually offer:

• First contact and general help for newbies.
• Providing specific guides, tips and tricks, up to complete playthroughs.
• Communities can help in running competitions and other (promotion) events. This can be any creative activity like fan art creation. The support for cosplaying can create the companies visibility at gaming fairs like the gamescom.
• An additional channel for updates (information and content).
• Bug-reporting and bug-fixing. In rare cases community members might even help out in maintaining the source code.
• Mods improve the replay value and therefore the overall customer satisfaction.
• Communities increase chances that other games and products (merchandise) of the company are bought by fans.
• Companies can more easily recruit trustful fans as betatesters for new games.

Therefore, pretty much all companies have community managers on their payroll. Technically, the companies allow copyrights to be ignored to a limited degree as they profit from it. A strict application of copyright would kill creative activities in game communities, make them ineffective and therefore mean selfdamage to the companies. -- With enough labor own works can simply fall under the fair use rule and therefore overrule copyright.

Modifications (mods) often stay behind of being own games.

• Usually, 2D and 3D content is added.
• Other features like new game mechanics might require game engine modifications and are therefore less likely.

GenAI has the potential to break the company's cost-benefit calculation.

• An endless production of new content based on old content would be not in the interest the company.
• When you consider involved artists and technicans that helped creating the game, things get even more complicated. Mass-produced fan made content that gets created for "free" might endanger the living of before-named people.
• Unlimited new content that stealing attention and motivation from potential consumers is to be avoided.

The conclusion is to aim for symbiotic co-existence.

• Game communities should not create situations of competition.
• In contrast to official expansion packs and DLCs, mods shouldn't be placed behind paywalls.

As for 2026, the conflict potential by mods from GenAI are more hypothetical than realistic, but it will become relevant one day. In the far future co-dev arrangements are thinkable but that is uncharted territory.

Possibilities and limitations

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can ease and accelerate content creation in all forms and sizes. The difficulties to use or create own setups will continue to lower basically with each new release from commercial forerunners.

You can use GenAI via websites, desktop clients or dedicated programs that may feature totally local running logic. For building own programmatic solutions you will either need downloaded AI models or API keys to access cloud services that do the heavy computation remotely. (With enough expertise you can even build agentic AIs (such as Open Claw) that use your other tools and carry out task automatically. But caution: Probabilistic AIs can hallucinate and pose a thread to your system. As mitigation MCPs should be in use. Sandboxes are even better and can limited the agents usefulness and add an extra layer of complexity which then eats up the time you intended to save.)

GenAI work probabilistic. Don't expect same results when repeating prompts with same inputs. Same text prompts may eventually generate similar but not identical content. Therefore, in some scenarios you may want to generate many outputs to chose the best candidate for your intermediate or end goal.

Sounds, voice acting and music

• Voice-cloning of existing or creation of new voices. For natural voices you may want to look for emotional text-to-speech.
• Music generations

Image generation

• Content generation based on:
  • Text prompts
  • Own drafts
  • Merging (main image and references)
• Changing existing content
  • Expanding
  • Inpainting (replacement of subsections)
  • Style transfers

3D content generation

There exists content generators that turn 2D data into 3D data by calculating plausible assumptions for the missing dimension.

Tools

2D images

All big LLM applications such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and Mistral support image generation. Of course there are other tools but you probably already at least one of these. Therefore you have there an account and can instantly use it for image generation. For mass production you probably need a paid subscription or "plan" so that more images can be created in a defined time frame (by that plan).

For image editing you also want a specialized graphics tool such a gimp, krita or Photoshop (which itself has GenAI functions).

Easy Access: ChatGPT (The notes here may work the same for other well known LLMs.)

• Prompt exactly what you want (even if it just "higher quality"). Either it works or not.
• Merging: When possible drop both images at the same time into the prompt. Re-editing an image means a loss of details.
• The the context window gained to much control over the currently expected output, then start a new prompt that includes all the accumulated changes you want to make.
• When you subscription allows it, output multiple final images. As every piece will be different, use have to chose the best one. You can also photoshop (merge) multiple final images to together by using masks.

(Add some examples here.)

Specialized: Canva

Local solutions: AUTOMATIC1111 (aka Stable diffusion), ComfyUI

Videos

Grok (xAI)

Gemini (Google)

Sora (OpenAI)

3D objects

• ...

3D animations

• ...

World generators

• World generator inside Unreal Engine 5
• ...