Valve responds to claims it has banned AI-generated games from Steam

Last paragraph of the article:

> A video purportedly about his development process exclaims “Get rich quick with AI waifus” and “How I made $1000 Publishing an AI Generated Game on Steam (Gone Sexual?!?!)” — so we ought not to feel the loss too keenly.

I think the difference is that the stolen texture case is pretty cut and dry, right? If someone makes a complaint to valve that a game they're distributing has stolen textures, it's relatively easy for them to deal with it. Since AI generated content is in such a gray legal area now, I imagine it'd be impossible to deal with complaints about it, and they probably don't want to put themselves in a situation where they'd have to be the arbiter of that.

Copying already copyrighted assets is clearly regulated. Valve knows what to do in this situation, and simply pulling down the offending game complies with the copyright regime.

It's unclear what the rules are going to be for AI generated art. There has been no law, or no court case, deciding it. As such, Valve is being a bit more defensive here to limit exposure.

I agree it's not a great trend, but it seems inevitable when this can lead to massive risk (lawsuits including Valve), and the upside is negligible. Valve is not going to lose market share over this, at least not for the foreseeable future.

It’s about legal copyright exposure. The copyright status of AI art is unclear, it has not been legislated or tried before the courts. In a worst case scenario, Steam could allow “AI generated games” on, after which AI art is regulated perhaps requiring permission or royalties from the original art used to train the model. In such a scenario, Valve themselves may get included in the lawsuit.

With this step, Valve massively reduces their legal exposure. Even if some AI are games slip through and the worst case scenario manifests it is still likely Valve will be fine, as they’ve sufficiently isolated themselves from the risk.

As for whether NMS counts, the answer is no. This isn’t about AI per se, it’s about using models trained on other copyrighted works. NMS doesn’t do that in any of its procedural generation.

As for how much AI generated art counts, this is a ship of Theseus problem. Not saying it’s easy, but hardly the first time regulation has come up against it.

I agree, and don't think I have much else to contribute, but I think that I want to make my small opinion known:

Using everything as training data is entirely reasonable. Search engines are basically built on this. Regurgitation in very digested, very opinionated, direct citation form is totally reasonable.

Regurgitation as a "new" asset is worth discussing, heavily. I lived through the days of OC Donut Steel in the history of the web. This feels a lot like that. And that's okay! You don't need original thought to create something personally useful. Sargnarg the hargeharg is valuable to the person who came up with them. What's not okay is the delusion that it's a meaningful contribution.

AI generated blades of grass, rock textures, tree bark - this will all allow for detailed, precise, realistic worlds. The authors of the original stock, the people who collected the dataset, deserve compensation. Under whatever license they used. A CC license allows you to use these assets for your own benefit. If a game ships with a set of CC licensed grass textures, a proprietary deterministic algorithm to remix them, and runs on every consumers machine to generate a set of new unique textures, I think that's clearly within license. If it ships with those textures pregenerated, that's clearly a derivative work. If it ships with the midpoint, the mixture of all of those textures, incredibly lossily? That's worth litigation, and lawmaking.