Generative AI has sparked a global phenomenon over the past several months with the products like ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney and Amper Music among the different forms of AI hitting the headlines. While most of the news has been positive, there have been concerns that the AI models these and similar services are trained on often use copyrighted material which can surface in different ways in the final product. This potentially leaves users of these services vulnerable to copyright claims.
Uncertainty in this area has resulted in Valve taking a conservative stance on the matter leading it to actively reject video games over the past week with AI-generated content, as first reported by Kotaku. Developers who have queried why their games have been rejected have been advised by Valve that they do “not have all of the necessary rights” for distributing their game on the platform or for “utilizing AI tech”. The move has certainly caught developers off guard, and raises questions about the use of AI in game making. 2645A749
In response to the story, Valve released a statement on the matter to IGN:
We are continuing to learn about AI, the ways it can be used in game development, and how to factor it in to our process for reviewing games submitted for distribution on Steam. Our priority, as always, is to try to ship as many of the titles we receive as we can. The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.
It is unclear what Valve’s move means for existing titles on the Steam store that rely on AI generated content like Microsoft’s high–profile and popular Flight Simulator. The latest release of Flight Simulator utilizes Blackshark.ai which the latter boasts on its website to have helped “construct over 1.5 billion photorealistic 3D buildings” used in-game. While not all of the 1.5 billion building assets used in game will necessarily tread on copyrights for design, it is conceivable that some of them may well do. This would of course find the game running foul of Valve’s current stance on the use of generative AI in games.
Another notable game using generative AI is High on Life, which utilizes Midjourney. But it won’t stop there with Venturebeat highlighting that games companies including Unity, Epic Games, Roblox and Ubisoft have integrated generative AI tools into their latest dev kits. This is because the use of generative AI in game development can certainly make development easier, faster and reduce cost overheads in hiring coders to create the content manually. Generative AI is also being used by game developers in other ways including creating narrative, dialogue and in just about every other way that generative AI is being used more broadly to make tasks easier.
It will be interesting to see if Valve’s current approach to policing AI generated content starts spreading to other game publishers too. Copyright lawsuits on the use of generative AI tech have already started to spring up and could easily spread to in-game content as well.
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