Valve, the company behind the popular gaming platform Steam, is reportedly rejecting games that use AI art. According to a report by Forbes, Valve has been sending emails to developers of games that use AI art, informing them that their games will not be accepted onto Steam.
A tweet from Simon Carless that has gone viral recently brought attention to an old reddit post from three weeks ago. The post, which was made on the /aigamedev subreddit, revealed that Valve had rejected the developer's game for using some AI art assets. This is what the Valve message said:
“After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belong to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties.
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. We are failing your build and will give you one (1) opportunity to remove all content that you do not have the rights to from your build.”
PSA: Valve has been quietly banning newly submitted Steam games using AI-created art assets – if submitters can't prove they have rights for the assets used to train the algorithms: https://t.co/WhWpJpaFjl pic.twitter.com/5KhzJESYxk
— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) June 29, 2023
Navigating Content Curation in a Generative AI Time
One of the problems is it is not yet clear if this is a new policy from Valve as the company has not announced such a measure. However, it does seem that the company will take a strict approach to AI art on Steam. The reason for Valve's rejection of AI art games is unclear. However, some have speculated that Valve is concerned about the quality of AI art games. Others have suggested that Valve is worried about the potential for AI art games to be used for copyright infringement.
The rejection of AI art games by Steam has been met with mixed reactions. Some developers have expressed disappointment, while others have said that they understand Valve's decision. It is unclear what the long-term implications of Valve's rejection of AI art games will be. However, it is likely that this decision will have a significant impact on the development of AI art games.
In addition to the concerns about quality and copyright infringement, there are also some other potential issues with AI art games. For example, some people have raised concerns about the potential for AI art games to be used to create deepfakes, which are videos that have been manipulated to make it look like someone is saying or doing something they never said or did.
AI art is any artwork, particularly images and musical compositions, created through the use of artificial intelligence programs, such as text-to-image models and musical generators. One problem with AI art is it sometimes confused with digital art, which is any artwork created or modified using digital technology.
However, it is clear that AI art is here to stay. Tools such as MidJourney and to a lesser extent Bing Image Creator are becoming increasingly powerful. For example, MidJourney 5.1 was recently launched with the most powerful generation art AI capabilities to date. Users of those tools argue that they do help to create the arts by feeding the AI specific prompts.
