Valve is scrutinizing games with AI assets on Steam, says avoiding copyright violation 'is the developer's responsibility'
The controversy around AI-generated content for videogames is starting to impact the biggest digital distribution platform on PC: an anonymous developer recently made a post on reddit (first spotted by Simon Carless) about the rejection of their game, claiming that «Valve is not willing to publish AI-generated content anymore.» In a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve elaborated that it is not opposed to generative tools as a concept, but instead takes the copyright concerns around them extremely seriously.
The developer says they tried to get a game approved on Steam about a month ago «with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated» and received the following response:
«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.
»After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belong 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 developer says Valve failed the build and offered an opportunity to re-submit with all AI-generated content removed. «I improved those pieces by hand,» says the dev. «So there were no longer any obvious signs of AI, but my app was probably already flagged for AI generated content, so even after resubmitting it, my
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