The controversy around AI-generated content for video games is starting to impact the biggest digital distribution platform on PC: an anonymous developer recently published a post on reddit (first spotted by Simon Carless) about the rejection of their game, saying that “Valve is no longer willing to publish AI-generated content”. In a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve explained that it does not oppose generative tools as a concept, but rather takes the copyright issues surrounding them seriously. .
The developer says he tried to get a game approved on Steam about a month ago “with some assets that were pretty obviously AI-generated” and received the following response:
“While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have full rights.
“After review, we have identified the intellectual property in [Game Name Here] that appears to belong to one or more third parties. Especially, [Game Name Here] contains artificial intelligence generated art assets that appear to be based on copyrighted material owned by third parties. Since the legal ownership of these AI-generated artwork is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all intellectual property used in the dataset that formed the game. The AI to create your game assets.”
The developer says Valve failed the build and offered the option to resubmit with all AI-generated content removed. “I upgraded these parts by hand,” says the developer. “So there were no more obvious signs of AI, but my app was probably already flagged for AI-generated content, so even after I re-submitted it, my app was rejected.”
Valve’s response was another dismissal, saying “we refuse to distribute your game because it is unclear whether the underlying AI technology used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data”. Valve at least offered the developer a refund of their submission fee.
“It seems that Valve doesn’t really have a standard approach for AI-generated games yet,” the developer said, “and I’ve seen several games that even explicitly mention the use of AI. “
In its statement to PC Gamer, Valve said that “the introduction of AI can sometimes make it more difficult to demonstrate that a developer has sufficient rights to use AI to create assets, including images, text and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty regarding the data used to train AI models. It is the responsibility of the developer to ensure that they have the appropriate rights to deliver their game .
We know this is an ever-evolving technology, and our goal is not to discourage its use on Steam; Instead, we seek to integrate it into our already existing review policies. Clearly, our review process is a reflection of current copyright law and policy, not an additional layer of our opinion. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process.”
Valve didn’t directly confirm or deny that the anonymous developer’s story on Reddit was legit, but the content of Valve’s statements and rejection emails are roughly in sync.
The fact that AI models are trained on datasets containing copyrighted material remains a legal gray area, and it doesn’t help that many of the companies involved are unwilling to be upfront about what they use exactly for their datasets. A prompt-generated “sci-fi cityscape” will be created from a mush of thousands of human-drawn sci-fi cityscapes, not analyzed and reinterpreted by a human, but scraped and frankensteined together by pattern recognition software. These artists are often not very happy to see their work used in this way.
Big rightsholders are understandably not happy either, and one test case that could set a precedent will be Getty’s lawsuit against Stability AI, which Getty says used more than 12 million images “without authorisation”. […] or compensation” to train AI software. But where the courts will land, in the US at least, remains a massive (and potentially very costly) unknown.
Why might this be of particular concern to Valve? The scale and size of Steam, and the sheer fact that it’s a distribution platform, means that the potential liabilities in the event of an error are incalculable. There are currently games that incorporate AI on Steam, but these may be early exceptions and the technology will become mainstream and start to face more hurdles and scrutiny.