Valve is banning games that use AI for art

Valve is banning games that use AI for art
Unsplash - Petar Vukobrat | Midjourney

Written by 

Joseph Kime

Published 

29th Jun 2023 11:00

AI art has taken up a pretty big chunk of the conversation around art at large right now, and frankly, it's getting a little frustrating - even spilling over into the world of video games.

The case against AI systems creating works that are a mere amalgam of other uncredited works has been made formidably, and yet, dorks keep doing it anyway. Even Marvel is getting in on it after the new Secret Invasion series used a collection of AI artworks for the title sequence. 

As the argument rages on and the likes of Activision Blizzard are called out for potential AI practices, some of the big dogs are starting to crack down on the AI movement.

Steam is axing games with AI art

An AI-generated image of a woman with a starry background, developed by Fotor.
Click to enlarge
Fotor

A new report from a creator using AI to help develop their game has revealed that Valve has started to crackdown on users intending to publish games that have AI-generated content in them.

Redditor u/potterharry97, has shared the message that they have received from the Steam team, and it has insisted that they have only one chance to remedy the inclusion of AI works.

"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."

The rejected game has been banned from Steam

Valve is not willing to publish games with AI generated content anymore
by u/potterharry97 in aigamedev

Though the creator went through the game by hand and made an attempt to remedy the situation, their re-application was formally denied a week later.

"App credits are usually non-refundable, but we'd like to make an exception here and offer you a refund," says the response from Steam. "Please confirm and we'll proceed."

It's very clear now that the clampdown on AI works in video games has been kicked off well and truly by Valve, and who knows who will be next to pick it up? Just hire artists. It's not hard, we promise.

Joseph Kime
About the author
Joseph Kime
Joseph Kime is the Senior Trending News Journalist for GGRecon from Devon, UK. Before graduating from MarJon University with a degree in Journalism, he started writing music reviews for his own website before writing for the likes of FANDOM, Zavvi and The Digital Fix. He is host of the Big Screen Book Club podcast, and author of Building A Universe, a book that chronicles the history of superhero movies. His favourite games include DOOM (2016), Celeste and Pokemon Emerald.
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