Valve prohibits games that include any AI-generated content as the legal property "it is not clear"

June 30 (Portaltic/EP) –

Valve is beginning to ban video games that contain content generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) because their legal ownership is “unclear” and they may be based on copyrighted material owned by third parties.

The video game development company seems to have made a decision as to how to deal with video games where it has been implemented content developed with AI, and it is showing it at its discretion when deciding which video games can be published on Steam.

This has been verified by the user called potterharry97 on Redditwhere he has shared that Steam has refused to distribute a game it tried to publish and that included resources generated by AI, since the platform claimed not to be able to distribute games “for which the developer does not have all the necessary rights”.

As the user has explained, he tried to publish a game with some assets that “were obviously AI-generated”, with the intention of submitting a “rudimentary version” of the game to Steam and subsequently improve said AI-generated assets, before to finally launch the game.

However, when sending the video game, Valve replied that, after proceeding with its review, it was identified copyrighted content that “appeared to belong to one or more third parties.” Thus, the company specified that, specifically, it had recognized AI-generated art assets that they could be “based on copyrighted material”

“As the legal ownership of AI-generated art is unclear, we can’t ship your game”, sentenced Valve, claiming that this decision would stand firm unless the user could “affirmatively confirm” that you own of intellectual property rights used in the dataset that trained the AI ​​to “create the game assets”.

In this sense, Valve also indicated that the developer would have one more chance to submit your game with this issue of AI use and copyright resolved. In other words, the company offered an extra opportunity for the developer to remove all content to which you do not have rights. “If you don’t remove all of that content, we won’t be able to submit your game to Steam and this app will be blocked,” Valve said.

The developer has indicated that it improved parts that included obvious signs of AI, however, the app was again rejected.

As detailed by Valve, and shared by the Reddit user, the company ruled not to be able to distribute the video game as it was not clear “whether the underlying AI technology used to create the assets” had sufficient rights to the training data.

The user has also highlighted that the time elapsed until receiving the verdict was “more than a week”, while, normally, it is usually a process that does not take more than one or two days.

In this framework, it seems that Valve is changing its approach to video games that use pieces generated by AI, given that previously, he has published video games on Steam that explicitly mention that use AI.