The controversy surrounding AI-generated content in video games is beginning to affect the PC's largest digital distribution platform. One anonymous developer recently posted on reddit about their game (first discovered by Simon Carless) being rejected, claiming that "Valve is no longer willing to publish AI-generated content," in a statement to PC Gamer and other publications, Valve elaborated that it is not opposed to generative tools as a concept, but instead takes the copyright concerns surrounding them extremely seriously.

According to the developer, about a month ago he tried to get Steam to approve a game that "clearly has some AI-generated assets" and received the following response:

"While we strive to ship most titles that are submitted, we are not able to ship games where the developer does not have all the necessary rights. We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all the necessary rights.

"Upon review, we have determined that the intellectual property of [game name here] appears to belong to one or more third parties. In particular, [game name here] contains art assets generated by an artificial intelligence that appears to be dependent on works owned by third parties. Because the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship games containing such AI-generated assets unless we can confirm that we own the rights to all IP used in the dataset that trained the AI to create the assets in the game .

According to the developer, Valve has rejected the build and has removed all AI-generated content and offered the opportunity to resubmit. I manually remedied those areas." So the obvious signs of AI were gone, but my app was probably already flagged for AI-generated content, so my app was still rejected when I resubmitted it."

says the developer.

Valve's response was, "We are not sure if the underlying AI technology used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data, so we will decline to distribute your game."

"Valve doesn't seem to have a standard approach to AI-generated games yet," the developer said, noting that he had "seen several games that explicitly mention the use of AI."

In a statement to PC Gamer, Valve said, "The introduction of AI can make it difficult for developers to demonstrate that they have sufficient rights when creating assets such as images, text, and music with AI. In particular, there is legal uncertainty regarding the data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to ensure that they have the proper rights to ship the game.

We know that AI is a constantly evolving technology and our goal is not to prevent its use on Steam. Quite simply, our review process reflects current copyright laws and policies, not our added input. As these laws and policies evolve over time, so will our process."

Valve did not directly confirm or deny the legitimacy of the anonymous developer's story on Reddit, but what Valve told us is largely consistent with the content of the rejection email.

The fact that AI models are trained on datasets containing copyrighted material remains a legal gray area, and it does not help that many of the companies involved are unwilling to be forthright about what they are using in their datasets. The "science fiction cityscapes" generated by the prompts are created from thousands of human-drawn science fiction cityscapes, not analyzed or reinterpreted by humans, but scrapped and Frankensteined by pattern recognition software. Such artists are understandably often not too happy about their work being used in this way.

The major rights holders are understandably not happy, and one test case that could set a precedent would be Getty's lawsuit against Stability AI, which claims that Getty used more than 12 million images "without permission [or] compensation" to train its AI software. This would be Getty's lawsuit against the company. However, it remains to be seen where the court will land, at least in the U.S. [The size and scale of Steam, and the simple fact that it is a distribution platform, means that the potential liability for getting this wrong is immense. Currently, there are games on Steam that incorporate AI, but that is an early exception and may become so as the technology becomes more widely deployed and faces more barriers and scrutiny.