Valve Reportedly Banning Games Featuring AI Generated Content (videogameschronicle.com) 42
Valve has reportedly started banning Steam games featuring AI-created art assets, unless developers can prove they have rights to the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create them. From a report: In a Reddit post spotted by games industry veteran Simon Carless, a developer recounted submitting an early version of a game to Steam with a few "fairly obviously AI generated" assets which they said they planned to improve by hand in a later build. In response, they were told the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights.
"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "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."
Valve said it was failing the build and would give the developer a single opportunity to remove all content they didn't own the rights to before resubmitting it. The developer said they then improved the assets in question by hand "so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI," but after resubmitting the game it was again rejected. "We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights," Valve said. "At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."
"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "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."
Valve said it was failing the build and would give the developer a single opportunity to remove all content they didn't own the rights to before resubmitting it. The developer said they then improved the assets in question by hand "so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI," but after resubmitting the game it was again rejected. "We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights," Valve said. "At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."
Copy paste (Score:3)
If they can identify the source it seems like this "AI-generated" art is just advanced copy-paste.
Re:Copy paste (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly this. It shouldn't matter if the work is generated by AI or not, if it clearly violates someone's copyright, that's all that should matter.
Banning AI generated assets is the wrong solution.
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Re:Copy paste (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, it matters a great deal. The problem here is generated art that violates someone else's copyright.
That generated art can't be protected by copyright is completely irrelevant.
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Citation?
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From the summary:
"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties,"
There are two ways this can potentially happen. The first is that a generated image is similar enough to a copyrighted work that it constitutes infringement. This is no different than an infringing work created by a human. This is what the parent and I are talking about.
The second way is still up for debate. That is the idea that an AI generated work necessarily infringes on any protected work included in the model's training data. This is what valve appears to be worried about. Person
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the ownership and copyright of AI generated content is not clear.
That's been decided. AI generated artwork isn't protected. This isn't about ownership, this is about infringement. Does AI generated art infringe on works simply because they were included in the training data?
I personally don't think there's a case to be made there. Taken to its absurd conclusion, this would mean that even a tiny 32x32 icon, if generated by an AI, would infringe on million (billions?) of individual works!
On a technical level, the average amount of information included in the model fro
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This means that you can still use AI-generated artwork, but only if the system you used to create that a
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> they're saying that the training data contains copyrighted images that the game publisher doesn't own the rights to, and so the generated image may be generally similar (e.g. in style) to existing copyrighted artwork.
Which, as several others here have already noted, is garbage in terms of a logical justification for banning the resulting work.
If I had some talent and painted in the style of a currently famous artist, I might be called a lot of things, but none of those names would result in my work bei
This is a bit arbitrary. (Score:4, Insightful)
This seems a bit (legally) arbitrary, doesn't it? The law surrounding derivative works has been pretty clear for a long time. AI generation of derivatives is no different.
Re: This is a bit arbitrary. (Score:2)
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AI is a statistical model, no different than using a Photoshop plugin or filter to enhance, composite, or manipulate an image.
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It still can be their editorial decision to accept or refuse an item based on the way the art was generated; it's their (arbitrary) artistic criteria for the art they distribute in their game catalogue.
Re:This is a bit arbitrary. (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve is just taking the default safe position. There's no real downside for them in being conservative here. And I think you're somewhat optimistic if you think that all legal issues surrounding AI-generated works have been resolved.
Just FYI, AAA game devs I know (and certainly in my own company) are not touching AI-generated *anything* with a 10-foot pole, because there's really no way to attribute the source of that content. It's easier and safer for now just to pay coders and artists to create what you want, with zero question about legality. Like Valve, my company (and probably most others) are just taking the safe position until these issues get hashed out.
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...devs I know (and certainly in my own company) are not touching AI-generated *anything* with a 10-foot pole, because there's really no way to attribute the source of that content. It's easier and safer for now just to pay coders and artists to create what you want, with zero question about legality.
Eventually you should be able to run your own LLM AI internally that references only your own data, at which point you're paying artists to create definitive original work that can be modified at will by your AI tools.
So at what point can we download and run our own mini-LLM on our PCs and point it at our personal data store to create our own personalised content?
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lol I don't think valve has anything to worry about regarding their level of conservation. They are full nazi magats that probably spend all their time sieg hailing each other while they get almost nothing done at work each day.
Re: This is a bit arbitrary. (Score:2)
Because US copyright is so bad (Score:4, Insightful)
This goes to show how bad the US copyright system is. A person can reproduce an image with subtle differences and it's called an "inspiration". But Valve won't let a computer do it. You can't even infer legality from common and similar practices. They want it to be legislated because they know how screwed up the system is and it could bite them in the butt.
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I see two problems:
1. No AI-generated work will ever be an exact copy of any other work, Generative AI doesn't work that way... models are not some giant store of graphics, it's just a collection of attributes and weights. The best an AI can hope to achieve is something like the worlds largest lossy archive.
2. Several authoritative agencies have already stated that AI work itself is not "copyrightable"
I can see forcing devs to do more than simply copy in the binaries they generate from Midjourney, but it se
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Or much more recently, Goldsmith v Warhol
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18... [npr.org]
Avoiding the atari video game crash (Score:4, Interesting)
Valve is making the smart move.
One, to avoid potential lawsuits, it makes sense that you need permission to train your AI on material you're allowed to, not someone's masterpiece work and then freely generate similar quality items, making their work completely moot.
The second issue is, do we really want a flood of low quality games just to try to generate a quick buck spewed out by AI and AI assets with just little tweaks so it's complete garbage on there? That happens a lot already with common presold items, but at least people can identify games that are similar to many other basic games are using standard model packs that everyone can buy.
AI generated content used to make assets derived from common works would just be a nightmare of potential legal issues, and just flood the market with even more derpy crap games.
This is what led to the great game crash back in the 70s-80s, was a bunch of people making low quality knock off cheap, buggy games and flooding the market with them, so that people were like forget it, I'm not going to buy the system or the games, as they're all dumpy and cheap cash grabs.
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Protecting someone's work from becoming "completely moot" is not at all what copyright law is about.
Oh, that horse hasn't left the gates yet? *checks notes* oh, Apple App store has 200,000,000 low quality knock-off games just to generate a quick buck. AI is different, how?
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A flood of low quality games you say? Have you seen all the asset flips on Steam?
Cause fake games have been a thing for years already.
All the AI generated assets is going to do is make it less obvious when it's an asset flip.
Now as to the issue itself, I'm less interested in a game that "relies" on AI material that has been pre-generated.
It would be far more interesting to play a game that the AI "director" is on the fly, and as yet, no desktop computer has the computational power to pull this off. To add v
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Did you not read what I said so you could say the same thing or something?
Procedural generated content and mechanic controls are already a thing, and improving on them is great. Just generating the models by AI is a different story, and we're not talking about some high quality unique works here at this point, and we're back to legal issues.
In short: We already have "AI directors" for games, like left 4 dead, and it's a great concept. Can you call it AI? Probably not but they called it that, and improvement
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do we really want a flood of low quality games just to try to generate a quick buck spewed out by AI and AI assets with just little tweaks
That's not what they're blocking, though. They're blocking games that used Midjourney to create concept art they modeled a room or vehicle off. They're banning the AI-assistive tools that are directly integrating into Unity/Unreal/Blender/etc and "AI generate" geometry based on a prompt. They're banning scripts which are written by GPT, regardless of how detailed and unique your prompt is.
It's a universally bad move. If they had specified games that were entirely AI-created or something that would work,
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That's not what they're blocking, though.
That is what they're blocking though. Will other things get caught that were just trying to use some AI assisted work? Sure, but the rule has to be followed and can't be decided on a case by case bases or all the people making the crappy games will scream discrimination to try and get their content published.
If you allow it, some people will use AI to help do some models and possibly release a good worth while game that took effort to make, but they also need the legal backing that their AI model was traine
What's next? (Score:2)
Valve banning procedurally generated landscapes because they may by chance resemble someone else's copyrighted works? Judge the product not the methodology.
How can they tell? (Score:1)
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The great news is that this approach allows Valve to remain the sole judge of arbitrary decisions it makes on its platform.
Re: How can they tell? (Score:2)
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Dumb. (Score:2)
Humans are fucking stupid. (Score:2)
Yet Valve ignores asset flips. (Score:2)
It's ironic to me that Valve, the company most notorious for rubber-stamping awful asset flips, is now pretending to have some kind of standards when it comes to copyright/provenance of assets and quality.
For those who haven't noticed, Valve has for years been allowing "developers" to fling thousands of "games" onto Steam, which are little more than compiled tech demos or game engine samples. Many of these games contain zero, or next to zero custom code, and provide a would-be customer about 30 seconds of e
OH for fuck's sake (Score:3)
You're using a completely unique and independent asset generated by "inspiration" or general visual patterns of other objects - usually real-life photos of real things - and that doesn't violate IP or copyright and shouldn't be fucking banned. If your AI "generation" is copying things directly then your AI model is garbage and that's what should be shut down.