With the AI art boom ongoing, it has begun to bleed into game development. Valve, owners of Steam, have been silently banning game submissions to their store.
Valve, owners of Steam and makers of Counter-Strike, have quietly banned games using AI-generated art in their development. The news comes from a missed thread on the AIGameDev subreddit, wherein a user has been attempting to get their game onto the platform.
The original post mentions that they’d attempted to “release a game about a month ago” that had some art assets that were “AI-generated.” They planned to “improve them before actually releasing the game”.
Valve responded with an email claiming they “cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.”
AI is trained on mass quantities of data, and companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, and Adobe don’t own the materials used. DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion are based on reams of copyrighted information that are often hard to source.
Adobe is currently under fire for using Adobe Stock assets for Firefly without crediting or reimbursing creators who provided images to the store.
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AI art is being used in several different entertainment productions, including Marvel’s latest show, Secret Invasion. In game development, Blizzard has recently patented an art generation tool.
Valve bans AI-generated art to avoid copyright issues
Valve’s apparent main concern about games hitting Steam with AI-generated art is that it could land them in hot water with copyright laws. Due to Valve not being able to determine the source of the art, nor if the developer owns the materials the AI was trained on, so it opted to refuse submission of the game.
Due to the costs associated with game submissions on Steam, Valve issued a refund under an “exception” as the company wrestles with the impact of AI-generated work on its storefront.
One user said: “This can[‘]t possibly be sustainable for Steam[.]”
A Twitter user rebutted this with: “They can’t seriously think they’re that big of a deal.”
The top rated comment there…They can't seriously think they're that big of a deal. pic.twitter.com/ZKRZ6d5irc
— Anna 🏳️⚧️ – RaptorBricks (@RaptorBricks) June 29, 2023