Steam reportedly bans games with AI-made content

nme.com:

Valve is reportedly blocking games with AI-generated content from being sold on Steam.As the AI debate rages on, Steam has taken a pretty definitive stance – it will no longer approve games that are submitted with AI-generated assets.A reddit post from industry veteran Simon Carless has revealed that a game he submitted which contained AI images was blocked by Steam.“I tried to release a game about a month ago, with a few assets that were fairly obviously AI-generated,” he revealed. “My plan was to just submit a rougher version of the game, with 2-3 assets/sprites that were admittedly obviously AI generated from the hands, and to improve them prior to actually releasing the game as I wasn’t aware Steam had any issues with AI-generated art.”Instead, he received the following e-mail in 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.”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“After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs 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.