Developer claims Steam is rejecting games with AI-generated artwork
Valve cites unclear legal status, copyrighted training data in rejection message.
For clarification, they are only rejecting games with AI-generated content trained with datasets not owned by the creator. If a game uses AI trained in content owned by its company, it's fair game.
That sounds worse than a complete AI art ban. If you're an amateur dev with an idea, some programming skill and zero budget, you can't use AI art to make your game look a little better than all the crappy asset flips. But if you're a big studio with a portfolio to train the AI on, you can cut 90% of your art team to use mostly AI. Indie devs lose, artists lose and big corps win, as usual
I think you're underestimating how huge a dataset has to be to get a somehow decent AI output.
The effort to create those custom in-house datasets would never be worth the prospect of not needing artists anymore. There is a reason current AI is mostly trained with sources of dubious legitimity. They just need as much data as they can gather.
AI generation is only profitable if you conveniently ignore where your source material comes from.
This feels like the worst of both worlds. The whole ai "pitch" for the masses is that it can help small devs with no, say, art skills. This just ensures the corpos have free reign to do whatever they want.
No, it ensures that artists get paid for their work. If you can't afford an artist, either don't make a game or use free assets.
Makes sense, it’s far too early and we don’t really have any types of regulations regarding this, Valve’s playing it safe and I don’t really blame them.
Good. The Unity "asset flip " games are bad enough.
Already seen a bunch of games like that show up on Steam.
If it's done well, you shouldn't be able to tell anyway. This is just rejecting low quality efforts, which should be the norm anyway.
As an amateur game developer, I see the boost AI generated content can add to a game, but right now none of the tools are ready to become featured assets. The only games using them heavily are likely games that won't bring any value to Valve, so it is an easy call. This will change in the future.
I am excited to see what AI generated content will do though. Already it can be used for bad textures and sprites. Bad music and pointless character blather too.
Seems reasonable given the trade-offs right now. There likely won't be many games featuring a significant amount of AI-generated content, especially non-text content so they won't lose a lot of games that way but as someone redistributing what the game developer distributes to them on a large scale they have a lot to lose if distribution turns out to be illegal after all and they have to pay damages.
Wonder if this was why "Only Up!" was taken off the steam this morning.
I imagine it was using a lot of stolen assets I swear I saw the youtube logo at one point and some other logo's. Pretty sure youtube didn't give rights to that to some random dev.
Boy, this whole AI art stuff is really messy, and it feels like no one even remotely knows how to move forward with it.
