Valve is reportedly banning Steam games featuring AI-generated content

Valve is reportedly banning Steam games featuring AI-generated content.

Valve seems to be blocking video games created with AI-generated assets from being published on its online storefront Steam. A Reddit post from earlier this month, first noticed by GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless, includes a message from Valve explaining that it “cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.” On June 29, another Redditor wrote that Steam denied their game for “utilizing AI tech.”

“[Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties,” the message reportedly reads. “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.” Though Steam’s rules for developer submissions don’t explicitly ban AI-made content the way they deny games made on the blockchain (“Applications built on blockchain technology that issue or allow exchange of cryptocurrencies or NFTs” are clearly part of “What you shouldn’t publish on Steam,” that list says), the company does note that “Content you don’t own or have adequate rights to” is not allowed.

As traditional artists have been pointing out since AI art was made widely accessible to the public with generators like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney in 2022, it’s difficult to ascertain copyright for art made by math problems. The machine learning algorithms that supply an AI art generator need to chew up a large dataset of existing images to be able to do their jobs, and while some have argued that being the person who created a machine is enough grounds to be the owner of all its artwork, both the U.S. Copyright Office and visual artists have so far disagreed.

As traditional artists have been pointing out since AI art was made widely accessible to the public with generators like Dall-E 2 and Midjourney in 2022, it’s difficult to ascertain copyright for art made by math problems. The machine learning algorithms that supply an AI art generator need to chew up a large dataset of existing images to be able to do their jobs, and while some have argued that being the person who created a machine is enough grounds to be the owner of all its artwork, both the U.S. Copyright Office and visual artists have so far disagreed.