Valve has adopted the stance that any game with even a hint — literally just a whiff — of AI generated content will be instantly rejected from steam with no explanation beyond "it appears your game contains AI generated content." They say nothing beyond that.
If that seems unbelievable, I agree. I didn’t believe it till I drilled down into the details of multiple instances of this happening. It pops up on Reddit with alarming frequency.
Meanwhile Tim Sweeney looks like a visionary, since he says "bring your games over to the Epic Store, we’ll host them." And while I applaud this and cheer him on, as a former gamedev I understand the reality of the situation: neither indie studios nor established studios can take the financial risk of prototyping a new development model spearheaded by AI, only for the resulting game to be thrown out of the primary revenue stream (Steam).
There’s a ray of hope, which is that AI can revolutionize the mobile gaming space. But I’m pessimistic because mobile gaming sucks. It’s not an industry I’d choose to be in, because the financial pressures practically force you to develop something addictive at best and downright predatory at worst.
It’s hard to imagine Portal being developed for iOS, yet it was easy to imagine a lone dev making Portal for desktop PCs using AI. But now no one will try. Hopefully some teenager with nothing to lose will pull it off.
I don’t think Gabe made this decision. It’s too hamfisted. It feels like someone at Valve got a bug up their bonnet about AI and implemented the worst reactionary policy imaginable. Gabe would understand the implications and nuances, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate a system where Valve is abusing their developer trust by rejecting them with no explanation and no recourse. But Sir Newell is old, and it was a matter of time till empire decay set in, so it’s not surprising it ended up this way. Still sad though.
> 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
Additionally, Valve has put out a number of clarifying responses to journalists.
I think we might be talking past each other, or we’ll have to agree to disagree. I stand by my claim that that message has no explanation, no details, and no specific steps for developers to reform their game. They even threaten the developer by saying they have exactly one chance to remove all of the unnamed supposedly-infringing content, or else they’ll never be able to publish their game.
I should sign off now because I was about to write “in what universe does this seem reasonable?” and then I remembered it’s not worth getting dragged down by this nonsense. There are lots of intellectually satisfying problems to work on. Valve may be relevant now, but a decade tends to favor upstarts. The way to deal with this is to make Valve irrelevant, which is a matter of patience and time.
One case I recall was a developer who used AI text to speech for speech synthesis and was rejected for "using AI". If this report (and my recollection) is accurate then Valve do seem to be taking it to ridiculous extreme.
> It feels like someone at Valve got a bug up their bonnet about AI and implemented the worst reactionary policy imaginable
The response by digital artists on Twitter and Reddit against anything AI generated ever even making an appearance in their communities is one of the most intense reactions I’ve seen in response to a new tech. Maybe there’s game devs who have similar extreme feelings rooted in concerns about replacing their own jobs, loss of quality without human involvement at every stage, creativity, etc.
It’s not even just don’t post it, it’s you shouldn’t be engaging with AI tools at all because it accelerates our industry decline.
I of course think that’s silly (at a minimum the idea you can stop progress) but this sort of pearl clutching will likely be a common phenomenon re AI in other industries as it happens
so what you're saying is we should form a software engineer guild, that prohibits members from using AI and then use our collective power to force companies not to use it
Valve is doing an excellent job at keeping ai spam out of steam and should be commended for it. There should be zero tolerance for allowing stolen ip to be resold the way openai and many in the ai underworld dream of reselling.
I can see your viewpoint, but at the same time, if there's nothing of the original training material in the output, what exactly is being stolen and resold?
I guess I'm saying that I can see how you got to that position, but I'm not sure your conclusion makes sense. The production of the model involves widespread use of IP - much of it questionably obtained - but you cannot go back to the original IP from the output.
Why are they so anti AI? It seems inevitable. Fear of IP battles like those w/ authors suing OpenAI? I guess I can understand wanting the dust to settle on some of those issues.
But I think the genie is out of the bottle (and I’m of the opinion that GPT content is transformative enough to warrant fair-use exemptions) so it would seem wiser to find a careful way of embracing the new tech.
that's not true. they only ban ai if you don't clearly have usage rights for the data that the ai was trained on. obviously, this includes basically all of the big and popular available AI APIs at the moment.
that sucks for using AI right now, but it's only a question of time until you get huge models trained on CC0 data imo
This is functionally identical to “This is true, because Valve bans all existing means of generating AI content for games."
As for your dream of CC0 models, it’s a dream because you’d have to be asleep to believe it. I don’t mean to phrase it so harshly, but there are so many reasons that can’t work. The main one is that there isn’t enough non-copyrighted data to train any competitive model. The competitive models have only recently gotten good enough to just barely be usable, and far more than 90% of their training data was sourced from people they certainly didn’t get usage rights from.
I deleted a paragraph ranting about usage rights. Suffice to say, Stallman’s “Right to Read” becomes more prescient with each passing day.
I'd like to point out that it has been shown that text models can be trained on purely synthetic data and perform at or above the level of models trained on human derived data. This works because you can use an LLM judge the quality of a particular generated sample which allows you to automate the process of picking high quality generations. It won't be long before this is done with generative art as well, a multi-modal model could be used to curate the output of some CC0 derived model and build up a much larger training set for a new model. You could also procedurally create data for training by generating images based on 3D scenes with various shaders applied to give them the look of different art styles. You could also use neural style transfer instead of or in addition to a shader to add more styles of images. You could use the multi-modal model to judge these images as well, selecting only the best. With that, you essentially have a fully automated pipeline for producing any size training set you want 100% synthetic except for the base 3D assets, shaders and example style images which you could source CC0 or buy license to.
I more or less agree with you (I'm not convinced that training models on the imagery of the internet isn't fair use), but I wouldn't rule out a CC0 model just yet.
There's Mitsua Diffusion One [0], which doesn't produce incredible results, but it's a start and they're planning on adding more data, including opt-in work from artists.
PIXART-alpha [1] was trained on only 25 million images, and has excellent and competitive results. This could pair well with Fondant AI's 25 million Creative Commons-only dataset [2] (not all CC0, but a sizeable amount).
I don't think it's as far away as you think it is!
> Valve has adopted the stance that any game with even a hint — literally just a whiff — of AI generated content will be instantly rejected from steam with no explanation beyond "it appears your game contains AI generated content." They say nothing beyond that.
Steam is not the world. You can publish on Xbox, Playstation, GPlay, Apple Store, web, anywhere. Steam is not the panacea.
No, but they are more or less a monopoly over PC gaming. Yes, there are alternatives, but they are a tiny percentage of the market, and your ability to sell to the PC market will be severely limited. People don't use the other storefronts unless they really have to, and your indie game using AI-generated assets is unlikely to get people to move over.
I'm having a hard time imagining what role AI (in around its current state) would actually play in creating Portal.
The only professional art assets I'd imagine you could substitute with AI work might be textures, which already tend to be found in libraries rather than handmade. Actual spritework is still quite far off and 3D Models even more so. Not to mention an AI definitely can't do much for art direction or getting your assets to actually look good put together.
Music and Writing seem too far off right now to even consider, let alone design work. So what essential element is Generative AI bringing at the moment? Skipping out on Voice Actors? (I don't believe it's on par with professional work on that front either but it's closest and people aren't as discerning.)
The most I can see besides that is it could speed some parts of art concepting and save you a buck on texture licensing.
Revolutionizing the programming part with copilot or such seems more believable, although since Steam isn't barring use of AI code (How would they even know?) I don't think that's what you mean.
If that seems unbelievable, I agree. I didn’t believe it till I drilled down into the details of multiple instances of this happening. It pops up on Reddit with alarming frequency.
Meanwhile Tim Sweeney looks like a visionary, since he says "bring your games over to the Epic Store, we’ll host them." And while I applaud this and cheer him on, as a former gamedev I understand the reality of the situation: neither indie studios nor established studios can take the financial risk of prototyping a new development model spearheaded by AI, only for the resulting game to be thrown out of the primary revenue stream (Steam).
There’s a ray of hope, which is that AI can revolutionize the mobile gaming space. But I’m pessimistic because mobile gaming sucks. It’s not an industry I’d choose to be in, because the financial pressures practically force you to develop something addictive at best and downright predatory at worst.
It’s hard to imagine Portal being developed for iOS, yet it was easy to imagine a lone dev making Portal for desktop PCs using AI. But now no one will try. Hopefully some teenager with nothing to lose will pull it off.
I don’t think Gabe made this decision. It’s too hamfisted. It feels like someone at Valve got a bug up their bonnet about AI and implemented the worst reactionary policy imaginable. Gabe would understand the implications and nuances, and certainly wouldn’t tolerate a system where Valve is abusing their developer trust by rejecting them with no explanation and no recourse. But Sir Newell is old, and it was a matter of time till empire decay set in, so it’s not surprising it ended up this way. Still sad though.