Valve appears to be blocking the release of video games made with AI-generated assets on its online store, Steam. A Reddit Post from earlier this monthfirst noticed by GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carlesscontains a message from Valve stating that it “cannot deliver games for which the developer does not have all necessary rights”. On June 29thAnother Redditor wrote that Steam disowned their game for “using AI technology.”
The first developer to break the news said they initially tried to release their game “with a few assets that were pretty obviously AI-generated.”
“My plan was to just submit a rougher version of the game […] and improving them prior to the game’s actual release, since I wasn’t aware that Steam had issues with AI-generated art,” they wrote.
However, Steam rules apply for developer submissions Don’t explicitly ban AI-created content like they deny about games on the blockchain (“Blockchain technology-based applications that issue or facilitate exchanges in cryptocurrencies or NFTs” clearly belong in “What not to post on Steam,” states this list). However, the company states that “content that you do not own or do not have sufficient rights” is not allowed.
Continue reading: What to expect from Valve (and Steam) in 2023
As traditional artists have been point out With AI art made widely available to the public in 2022 with generators like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney, it’s difficult to establish copyright for art created by mathematical problems. The machine learning algorithms that provide an AI art generator must mince a large data set of existing images in order to do their job, and do it simultaneously some have argued Both the US Copyright Office and visual artists have so far disagreed that being the one who created a machine is enough to own all artworks. Regardless, ownership would fall into the hands of the AI company and not the hands of the developer using the graphics in a game.
Valve reportedly informed the developer that their game “contains art elements generated by artificial intelligence that appear to be based on third-party copyrighted material.” As the legal ownership of such AI-generated artwork is unclear, we are unable to ship your game , as long as it contains those AI generated assets, unless you can confirm that you own the rights to the entire IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game. “
“If you fail to remove all such content,” it continues, “we will not be able to publish your game on Steam and this app will be banned.”
Valve eventually decided that it was too “unclear whether the underlying AI technology used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data,” and has also reportedly contested matches the use AI generated text with essentially the same standard disapproval as the Reddit developer.
However, some suggest These AI game bans are actually a hoax. If the messages are real, however, it’s a relatively new pivot. Currently there is several games on Steam, which clearly state in their descriptions the use of AI-created art and text; In practice, there doesn’t seem to be a big AI “ban” on Steam. my city Contacted Valve for comment.
