Yep, you are absolutely right.
If you want to argue that we should fundamentally treat machine- and human-generated works differently, that's fine -- but it's a different argument from "looking at a bunch of art and then synthesising ideas is bad," because that's exactly what many (most?) human artists do.
I honestly can't believe people are still making this dishonest, bad faith argument. It's obviously problematic if you think about it for more than 3 minutes.
Also, a human can take a work, modify it, and create a derivative work. They do not have copyright to the original material, and the degree of derivation is a winding blurry line through the court system to determine if they fully own the new work.
I suspect these to dominate the arguments for the first court cases around generative AI art - that the artist (operator) is the one who has to justify that they provided enough creativity in the process to create an independent work.
i think valve is over reaching with this policy.
It should be that you need to prove the art used in the game itself that does not breach any copyright. The tool used to create said art has no bearing on the final art with regards to copyright.
Otherwise, would valve also have mentioned that the developer should also produce evidence of their photoshop license/subscription (if they used photoshop in the course of making their game)? Do they need to check that the version of windows being used to make the game is a licensed one?
This is still an open question with regards to AI art generation tools. Do you have recent legal precedent to cite that I don't know about, or are you just making things up?
While it is an unanswered question with no legal precedence, i am a believer that what isn't currently illegal is and should be considered legal, until harm has been shown and thus require legal ruling.
But that requires Valve to be transparent to developers, and we know how well they are with that.
There is no new law, there is ambiguity with the lack of current case law. There are certainly people who think generative art based on scraping the internet is infringing under current legal standards. We won't know until people go to court and judges make decisions.
Valve's insistence in the face of their own liability for selling derivative works seems a sound business decision here, at least when selling in markets where it is an open legal issue.