Steam, the video game storefront used by over a hundred million gamers every month, requires that developers disclose if their products use AI-generated content.
Someone at Valve, however, apparently forgot to ask Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney if he’d be okay with this policy first.
In a discussion on social media, Sweeney — whose company makes the megahit game Fortnite and is a major rival to Valve with a gaming marketplace of its own — fumed about Steam’s AI content disclosures, and agreed with a post calling for Valve to drop the feature because AI use “doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation,” Sweeney wrote last week. “It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”
Gamers across the site mocked Sweeney’s take, and it clearly got under his skin.
“Why stop at AI use?” he doubled down. “We could have mandatory disclosures for what shampoo brand the developer uses.”
“Customers deserve to know lol,” he added, mocking the idea.
Sweeney’s sounding off shows just how controversial generative AI use remains in the arts and entertainment industry. Huge concerns swirl over the tech’s ability to wipe out jobs, not to mention churn out soulless dreck instead of carefully handcrafted work. Voice actors went on strike against the video games industry for a year to fight for stronger protections, and have been among the most outspoken critics of the tech’s rapid creep into the industry. Like the tech industry at large, game developers themselves have been besieged with brutal layoffs. Meanwhile, behemoths like Google and Microsoft brag that over a quarter of their code is now written with AI. Epic, it’s also worth noting, has rolled out an AI assistant for its widely used Unreal game engine.
Valve has taken a notably cautious stance on AI where others have embraced it or turned a blind eye. In 2023, it reportedly rejected games containing AI-generated assets, telling developers that the “legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear.”
Next year, it officially opened the door to AI content, but with a major catch: going forward, developers would need to disclose if their products contained any assets, including art and music, that were created with the help of AI. For any “live-generated” AI content made while the game is running, the developer would also need to explain what guardrails it was instating to prevent the generation of illegal copyrighted content. Notable titles that have disclosed AI usage this way include the new extraction shooter Arc Raiders, which used AI to generate new lines of dialog using the voices of actors who were hired for the job.
In response to the same post Sweeney was agreeing with which called for Valve to drop the AI disclosures, a Valve employee defended the company’s policy.
“This is like saying food products shouldn’t have their ingredients list,” Ayi Sanchez, an artist who’s worked on titles like Counter-Strike 2, responded. “Consumers should have the information to decide if they want to buy something or not depending on its content. The only ppl afraid of this are the ones that know their product is low effort.”
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