The controversy over AI-generated video game content is starting to affect the biggest digital distribution platforms on the PC. An anonymous developer recently post on reddit (First discovered by Simon Curless) about their game’s rejection, claiming that “Valve will no longer publish AI-generated content.” In a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve detailed that it is not against generation tools as a concept, but instead takes the copyright concerns surrounding them very seriously. said.
The developer says that about a month ago when he tried to get the game approved on Steam “with some assets that were clearly AI generated”, he received the following response: .
“While we strive to ship most titles submitted, we cannot ship games where the developer does not have all the necessary rights.
“As a result of our research, we have identified the following intellectual property: [Game Name Here] Anything believed to belong to one or more third parties. especially, [Game Name Here] Contains art assets that appear to rely on copyrighted material owned by third parties, generated by artificial intelligence. Due to the ambiguity of legal ownership of such AI-generated art, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all IP used in the data sets that trained your game, you may not use this AI You cannot ship your game with generated assets. AI creates in-game assets. ”
According to the developer, Valve failed the build and offered an opportunity to remove all AI-generated content and resubmit. “These parts were improved by hand,” says the developer. “So there were no more obvious signs of AI, but my app was already flagged as possibly AI-generated content, so my app was rejected even after resubmitting.”
Valve’s response was yet another refusal, stating, “We decline the distribution of the game because it is unclear whether the underlying AI technology used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data. “is what they said. Valve has at least offered the developer a refund of the submission fee.
“Valve doesn’t seem to have a standard approach to AI-generated games yet,” said the developer. “I’ve also seen some games published that explicitly mention the use of AI.”
In a statement to PC Gamer, Valve said, “The introduction of AI has made it difficult for developers to demonstrate that they have sufficient rights to create assets such as images, text and music using AI. In particular, there are some legal uncertainties.” It is the developer’s responsibility to ensure that it has the proper rights to ship the game as it relates to the data used to train the AI model.
We know this is an ever-evolving technology and our goal is not to prevent its use on Steam. Instead, we’re looking at ways to integrate it into our existing review policies. To be clear, our review process reflects current copyright laws and policies and does not add to our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our processes. ”
Valve has not directly confirmed or denied the authenticity of the anonymous developer’s story on Reddit, but what Valve told us is pretty much the same as the rejection email.
The fact that AI models are trained on datasets containing copyrighted material remains a legal gray area, with many of the companies involved questioning what exactly they are using in their datasets. Not wanting to speak up doesn’t help either. Instantly generated ‘Sci-Fi Cityscapes’ are created from a slurry of myriad human-drawn sci-fi cityscapes. Instead of being parsed and reinterpreted by humans, they were scraped together by pattern recognition software and combined with Frankenstein. These artists are understandably often not very happy about their work being used in this way.
Big rights holders are understandably frustrated as well, and one test case that could set a precedent is the Stability, which claims Getty has “used without permission” more than 12 million images. It will be a Getty lawsuit against AI. […] But where the courts will land remains a huge (and potentially very expensive) unknown, at least in the United States.
Why would this make Valve particularly concerned? Steam’s size and scale, and the simple fact that it’s a distribution platform, means the potential liability for getting this wrong is immense. Some games incorporate AI But these are early exceptions, and that could happen as the technology becomes more widespread and begins to encounter more barriers and oversight.
