Illustration: Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Mike Coppola/Getty Images for Samsung
Steam, the video game store used by more than 100 million gamers each month, requires developers to disclose whether their products use AI-generated content.
But it seems like someone at Valve forgot to ask Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney first if he was okay with this policy.
In a discussion on social media, Sweeney (whose company makes the mega-hit game Fortnite and is Valve’s main rival with its own gaming market) was furious about Steam’s disclosure of AI content, agreeing with a post calling for Valve to remove the feature because the use of AI “isn’t an issue anymore.”
“AI tags are relevant in art exhibitions for copyright disclosure and in the digital content licensing market where buyers need to understand rights status,” Sweeney wrote last week. “This makes no sense for game stores, where almost all future production will involve AI.”
Gamers across the site mocked Sweeney’s opinion, and it clearly struck a chord with him.
“Why stop at using AI?” he doubled down. “Developers could be forced to disclose the brand of shampoo they use.”
“The customer has a right to know (lol),” he added, mocking the idea.
Sweeney’s opinion shows how controversial the use of generative AI is in the arts and entertainment industry. There is great concern swirling around technology’s ability to wipe out jobs, not to mention mass producing soulless shit in place of carefully handcrafted jobs. Voice actors have been on strike for a year against the video game industry demanding better protections and have been some of the most outspoken critics of technology’s rapid inroads into the industry. Game developers themselves, like the tech industry as a whole, have suffered brutal layoffs. Meanwhile, giants like Google and Microsoft boast that more than a quarter of their code is written with AI. It’s also worth noting that Epic has rolled out an AI assistant for the widely used Unreal game engine.
Valve has been particularly cautious about AI while other companies have embraced it or turned a blind eye. In 2023, it reportedly rejected games containing AI-generated assets, telling developers that “the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear.”
The door to AI content officially opened next year, but there was a big catch. This means developers will now have to disclose whether their products include assets such as art or music created using AI. For “live-generated” AI content created while the game is running, developers must also explain what guardrails they have in place to prevent the generation of illegal copyrighted content. Notable titles that have revealed the use of AI in this way include “Arc Raiders,” a new extraction shooter that uses AI to generate new dialogue using the voices of actors hired for the job.
In response to the same post that Sweeney agreed with and called on Valve to stop disclosing AI, Valve employees defended the company’s policies.
“This is like saying food shouldn’t have ingredient lists,” countered Ai Sanchez, an artist behind titles such as Counter-Strike 2. “Consumers need to have the information to decide whether to buy something based on its content. The only people who are afraid of this are those who know their product is hassle-free.”
Learn more about AI: OpenAI is preparing to stuff ChatGPT with ads, according to the app’s beta code
