Sure, AI is cool and all, but let’s admit one thing. If you’re an employer, you feel at least uncomfortable paying someone who has used AI tools in order to provide his work to you. Nowadays, AI can do pretty much anything we want: write articles, forecast the weather, write lines of code for entire apps, build games, and so on. But maybe it’s way too early to dive into that “Oh my God, AI will take over all of our jobs!” scenario.
Not to mention that there is still plenty of uncertainty out there that AI tools might use copyrighted material. Therefore, those using AI tools might have to deal with copyright claims.
Valve rejects games with AI-generated content
According to Kotaku, Valve recently started to reject games containing AI-generated content from being published on Steam. The famous company is invoking legal concerns as a motivation for its decision.
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
Here’s what Valve said on the matter to IGN:
We are continuing to learn about AI, the ways it can be used in game development, and how to factor it in to our process for reviewing games submitted for distribution on Steam. Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can. The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer’s responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.
The decision clearly gives a lot of hope to those who are pessimistic enough to believe that AI will make us all unemployed. Anybody can “be” a game developer nowadays due to AI tools, but not any platform is willing to accept such content hosted on its servers. In other words, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.