Valve has reportedly begun banning Steam games that feature art assets created by AI unless the developer can prove rights to the IP used in the dataset created by training the AI.
Reddit post spotted by a gaming industry veteran Simon CurlessOne developer recalled submitting an early version of the game to Steam with some “obviously AI-generated” assets, and said he plans to improve it manually in later builds.
In response, I was told that the game would not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights.
“As a result of our research, we have identified the following intellectual property. [Game Name Here] It may belong to one or more third parties,” Valve said. “especially, [Game Name Here] Contains art assets that appear to rely on copyrighted material owned by third parties, generated by artificial intelligence.
“Because of the ambiguity of legal ownership of such AI-generated art, I would not recommend using these unless you can clearly confirm that you own the rights to all IP used in the datasets you trained them on. You cannot ship your game with AI-generated assets in it.” AI creates assets in-game. ”
Valve said it will give developers one chance to remove all content they don’t own the rights to before resubmitting a failed build.
The developer has since hand-improved the offending assets “so that there are no obvious signs of AI”, but said it was rejected again after resubmitting the game.
“We cannot ship a game if the developer does not have all the necessary rights,” Valve said. “At this time, we are refusing to distribute the game because it is unclear whether the underlying AI technology used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data.”
Like other creative professionals, more and more developers are using AI to create games. But the rapid proliferation of generative AI tools trained on man-made art scraped from the web has raised copyright issues that didn’t exist before.
It remains a gray area in many parts of the world, with governments, artists and companies debating how best to proceed, but Japan recently said that using datasets to train AI models is copyrighted. Declared not to violate the law. As reported by Decrypt, this decision means that models and his trainers can use publicly available data without securing permission from the data owner.
Steam developers are baffled by Valve’s decision to reject the game, especially considering some titles are available on the PC marketplace that apparently use AI-generated assets said.
One such title is This Girl Does Not Exist (pictured above) released last September by Cute Pen Games. The company touts the game as “the first game of its kind” as it relies entirely on AI. The product description reads, “Everything you see here, including art, story, characters, and even narration, was generated by machine learning AI.”
“So Valve doesn’t seem to have a standard approach to AI-generated games yet. I’ve seen some games published that explicitly mention using AI,” the developer said. Told.
“But at least for now, they appear to be wary and reluctant to publish AI-generated content. prize.”
VGC has reached out to Valve to request more information regarding their policies regarding Steam games featuring AI-generated content.
