Steam's Copyright Stand: Prohibiting AI-Generated Game Assets

0:00What can 160 years of experience teach you about the future? When it comes to protecting what matters, Pacific Life provides life insurance, retirement income, and employee benefits for people and businesses building a more confident tomorrow. Strategies rooted in strength and backed by experience. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you today. Pacific Life Insurance Company, Omaha, Nebraska, and in New York. Pacific Life and Annuity, Phoenix, Arizona. There is a controversial case going on right now in AI and video games that has caused a lot of people to be upset. And so today on the podcast, we're going to talk about it and talk about what has recently happened, which recently Valve has actually responded to claims that it has banned AI-generated games from Steam.

0:49So this is actually a fairly rare statement. um a bunch of claims were made that valve was rejecting games with ai generated assets from its steam game store um and to be fair or to be honest valve is like notoriously silent on i don't know just the whole like developer side of things they really don't make a lot of public statements so i think this is kind of a big deal that they have um made this um but essentially they are the gatekeeper of pc gaming distribution um because steam is such a massive distributor of pc games um but they said that it's their policy was evolving and this wasn't a stand against ai though they did um essentially say that they did ban some uh ai games and i think a lot of this whole issue kind of came out when a indie game developer he said that he published a game to um he published a game to, you know, to Valve's kind of Steam store or whatever, and it got denied.

1:49He has tons of games that he's published in the past, this got denied, and he said that when he was creating this game, he had a number of assets on the game that were fairly obviously AI generated, and, you know, his plan was, you know, just kind of throw up a rough draft of the game with some, you know, more obviously AI generated things, and then kind of go and refine them based off of, you know the adoption of the game and i've seen a lot of other kind of indie entrepreneurs in a lot of different spaces take similar strategies where essentially they'll create a bunch of different content or um you know games or a bunch of software other things that are kind of like they put out like a beta or like a test version first to see what the adoption the interest level is on it and based off of that whichever ones are the most popular they go and they spend all of their time and resources to make those ones a lot better this is i mean i know everyone has different entrepreneurial styles.

2:37This is one that has worked fairly well for me in the past because it's really hard in today's day and age with so many different algorithms and different platforms for distribution to know when you create a piece of content, how it will be distributed and received if you're going to get picked up in an algorithm. And so I think this is probably his kind of his idea with this. But when he created it, he very quickly received a letter from Steam saying that his game was, you know, not because it had AI tools in or AI assets in there, it was not going to be approved. And essentially, I think the idea or the issue here is that Steam is worried that they don't know who owns the copyright to AI generated assets.

3:20And so they don't, you know, there's a bunch of currently ongoing lawsuits. And so they're currently blocking that, which is really, really interesting. So Steam essentially has a review and approval process, which is a lot like any other app platforms, and its rules on content aren't always clear. And this is also something, to be fair, that a lot of people have accused Google or even Apple. I hear a lot of criticism about Apple in the review process and being someone that owns and, you know, has a bunch of different apps on the App Store. I have seen this before. So this one indie developer that I was referencing, he actually posted this whole thing in a subreddit, and he said that they're no longer essentially willing to publish games with AI generated content.

4:03So I think what is interesting is that the game that he submitted had quote unquote, a few assets that were fairly obviously AI generated. And so I'm curious to see like at what level they actually comb through a game and they, you know, look at it and how they determine what is AI generated. But, you know, according to him, it was fairly obvious. So I'd be curious to see kind of what their level of review is how they, you know, do they actually run elements or components through AI generating, you know, detectors and whatnot. So I think this is kind of interesting. But this is the quote that they gave him.

4:37They said, 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 so here is another interesting thing about a week after that they they gave him another update and they said because i think he tried to resubmit the game and they said we reviewed your game and took our time to better understand the ai tech used to create it again we will strive to ship most titles submitted to us we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights 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 set.

5:23Now, I'm assuming what they're referring to is mid-journey. Some of these assets may be created by mid-journey, and that might be one of their issues. Now, you know, while this is a big issue that a lot of people are talking about today, I think what is interesting is this problem has like sort of been solved, right? So recently we had news from Adobe that said any content created on adobe's new ai image generator they would actually pay for any lawsuits against any copyright infringements that people may find on it and the reason that adobe is so confident in it is because their entire database and platform um that their model was trained off of was images that were on that were exclusively owned by them or they exclusively paid for and so uh they essentially have a stock image place a stock image site and they used that which they have the rights to uh to train their entire model unlike mid journey or even you know open ai's dolly 2 which uses more you know more broadly um assets from the internet which they don't have the rights to so i think this is really interesting i think the the solution here is to use adobe's uh solutions and when you're generating some of these assets but i know this is not this is easier said than done because mid journey is by and large by like by a long shot the best uh text image generator And there's a lot of these other tools that are very good at what they do that are very specific.

6:46And so I think it's going to be it's going to be a tricky situation and we'll have to see how a lot of the lawsuits play out. But I have also, you know, while we're talking about video games, I have also seen a lot of really impressive AI tech that allows you to essentially generate characters within video games, 3D characters with text prompts. And those are all trained off of data sets that the company explicitly had the rights to use. And so I think at the end of the day, it's going to matter a lot more where you get your assets generated. And you'll probably have there'll be probably different ways that you prove, you know, what AI engines you're using to generate your assets.

7:25And I think that will resolve a lot of these issues. But at the moment, it definitely is an issue that people are talking about. So I think as the use of AI as a game development tool is like this isn't actually a controversial topic. just using AI. A lot of major developers like Ubisoft have very, you know, loud, very vocally said that they believe AI assistance is helpful and they might actually be necessary to build at scale at the rate that they want to, especially when they're talking about metaverses and a lot of things that require just an insane amount of assets. But AI that helps create really realistic mountains or switch up, you know, quest structures is one thing.

8:01And generative AI powered by unpaid artists is you know what they would say is another so I think it's not exactly clear what liability if any different creators or distributors of this AI art are going to have we're still waiting for a lot of the the lawsuits to kind of settle but if these creators can't realistically claim copyrights on their own work I think that Valve has essentially just said that this is a risk and publishing their games is too high of a risk. So Valve responded to Eurogamer and said that basically their policy is more, you know, what's legally required than any other stance on AI.

8:40I don't think they have a problem with AI in general. It's not like they're just banning AI because they dislike it. They said, we know it is a constantly evolving tech and our goal is not to discourage the use of it on Steam. Instead, we're working through how to integrate it into our already existing review policies stated plainly our review process is a reflection of current copyright laws and policies not an added layer of our opinion as these laws and policies evolve over time so are our process so i think in the meantime uh valve says that it's going to refund the normally non-refundable app submission fee uh for for you know this specific developer or in any other cases where this is a problem but i think at the time it's you know not really clear that ai being used meaningfully outside of a bit of experimentation so it's going to be interesting to see what actual impact this has on the industry as a whole and how we see this evolving in the future