Steam Doesn’t Want Games With With AI Art On Its Platform

Valve, the publisher behind the digital PC game retailer Steam, isn’t taking any legal chances when it comes to in-game assets created with artificial intelligence, according to several developers on Reddit.

Steam is reportedly denying developers who’ve used AI-generated content in their games from publishing new games on its platform due to the murky legalities surrounding the use of these now ubiquitous tools.

The bans were first reported on Twitter by Simon Carless, founder of GamesDiscoveryCo.

“I tried to release a game about a month ago, with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated,” one Redditor explained in his post on the r/aigamedev subreddit earlier this month. “My plan was to just submit a rougher version of the game, with 2-3 assets/sprites that were admittedly obviously AI generated from the hands, and to improve them prior to actually releasing the game.”

Another developer in the r/aigamedev subreddit said that they used an AI text-to-image tool in order to allow them to focus on writing for their game and was also given a similar warning by the publisher.

“I was also hesitant but then more and more people used Stable Diffusion in commercial products so I thought it was OK,” the Reddit user explained in their post Thursday.

While the developers say they weren’t aware they were breaking any policy, they were notified by Valve that their use of AI violated Steam’s rules on using content they don’t own or have the adequate rights to. One of the developers claimed Valve took about a week to make this decision.

“As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art 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 of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game,” the publisher allegedly said in a message to the developer.

The complicated rights issues surrounding how these third-party machine learning tools are used in shipped products has dominated the conversation in many creative spaces. While art focused AI has boomed with consumers in the last year thanks to the novelty of popular tools like Dall-E 2, most of these programs generate their art by using and processing vast amounts of copyrighted material without the permission of actual artists. It doesn’t help that both the government and the commercial sector have been slow to address the legal implications of using such training data, if at all. US Copyright Office guidance from March says that AI Art from models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion can't be copyrighted due to a lack of human authorship, but it's less clear whether authors can use these images in other works.

Developers are also reporting that works using AI text are being blocked as well, with Valve giving similar reasoning that developers must first prove that they own the works used to train the models generating such text.

Game developers whose games are flagged for AI content on Steam are supposedly being given a chance to remove the assets completely before submitting the game again for publishing. A failure to remove the assets in their entirety disqualifies these games from a subsequent resubmission, according to one of the Reddit users.

Valve did not immediately respond to The Messenger’s request for comment.

The game industry has yet to reach a unified approach when it comes to the use of artificial intelligence. While some large publishers including Take Two Interactive have outright shut down the potential use of AI in their future games, others such as Activision-Blizzard have fully embraced the tech as a possible tool to aid game development.