Valve has revealed its reasoning for removing games that make use of AI-generated art from Steam, citing potential copyright issues from the art used to train the AI.
Valve has revealed its reasoning for removing games that make use of AI-generated art from Steam, citing potential copyright issues from the art used to train the AI.
With the endless ethical and legal issues around GenAI, I would very much hope that Valve continues being cautious (even if it’s evidently just to cover their own arses). Once we have models and datasets for AI generated game assets that are trained from entirely ethical sources (artist permissions, licences, etc.) and not just the “scrape everything and train our models from that” approach that is currently used, then maybe it could be a good thing for games. Even still, the generated assets will likely have no copyright (as is the case now), so we’ll surely end up at “AI generated content flip games” flooding Steam.
AI/ML is the gold rush/get rich quick scheme of the moment, it seems inevitable that there’s going to be lawyers stalking in its wake seeing what they can shake out as well, and IIRC this is already happening. It’s not without grounds for a company to be cautious about being collateral damage to another company being over-zealous.
The thing I don’t see talked about which is a more general concern of mine is how central Valve is to PC gaming, where developers must release there or they won’t get much trade. On PC there’s no ‘rule’ that steam is the only store, they could publish elsewhere, but it’s the only viable one so unless you’re already on the scale of a big publisher and even then it’s questionable. It’d be real interesting if there was a range of viable markets/stores and Valve didn’t have that degree of control/influence.