Valve is stealthily banning AI generated content on Steam

AI-generated content has found its way into video games. Valve is making sure copyright issues don’t crop up by silently banning AI-generated content from its Steam storefront.

The use of AI-generated assets in video games has been a controversial topic within the gaming industry. While it doesn’t have widespread practice at this point, some published games like High on Life use AI for artwork and voice acting.

Outside of gaming, Marvel’s Secret Invasion used AI-generated opening credits and caused quite a stir. Marvel said that the use of AI tied into the theme of the Disney+ series.

Valve has reportedly started banning games on Steam featuring AI-generated assets unless developers prove that they own the rights to images used to train AI that create them. Gaming industry veteran Simon Carless spotted a Reddit post from a developer claiming to have submitted an early version of a title that used a few “fairly obviously AI-generated” assets that were meant as placeholders that they would improve on later.

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

The user shares that Steam told them that the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove that they owned all necessary copyrights to the material used in creating the AI-generated content.

“I tried to release a game about a month ago, with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated,” user aigamedev shared. “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 as I wasn’t aware Steam had any issues with AI generated art.”

In response, Valve sent this message to the game developer.

“While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights,” Valve wrote in its reply.

The digital storefront explains, “After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs 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.”

Valve gave the developer an opportunity to remove all content that had copyright issues. However, after removing all obvious signs of AI-generated assets, the storefront again rejected the game from distribution. The user notes that Valve may have already flagged the title for AI-generated content prior to resubmission.

The use of AI-generated tools to produce artwork and other materials has been very divisive among professionals working in creative fields. Some argue that the process of using datasets to train AI is similar to an artist taking inspiration from other artwork or art students learning techniques in painting from masters in the field.

However, a line should be drawn between what is acceptable and what is just blatant copying. In this case, if a reviewer pointed out that an asset belongs to one or more third parties, then it is not the dataset used but the actual asset that is being questioned.

AI-generated content is fairly new at this point and the guidelines on what is legal and what violates copyright laws are still being ironed out. We cannot fault Valve for protecting itself from potential lawsuits.

Valve has yet to comment about its policies on Steam games that use AI-generated content.