Valve Bans Games From Using Copyright-Infringing AI Art

Steam
(Image credit: Shutterstock)

After some controversy stemming from Reddit-based reports that it is not accepting games with AI art into the Steam store, Valve has clarified that it only intends to block those submissions where the artwork may infringe copyright. 

"While developers can use these AI technologies in their work... they can not infringe on existing copyrights,” Valve representative Kaci Boyle told the Verge in a statement.

A recent development on Reddit revealed that Valve is willing to ban Steam games that feature questionable, AI-generated images. According to the Reddit post, user potterharry97 was trying to publish a game to Steam with 2 or 3 AI-generated assets that he thought would pass Valve's inspection. 

However, Valve contacted him, saying it could not ship the game due to copyright issues with the AI-generated art in the game, saying the art assets appeared to be "relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties." Valve added, "As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets..."

For the game to pass Valve's inspection, the developer must "own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets..." according to Valve's response to the original poster. Even after the developer went back and modified his artwork by hand, Valve still banned his game due to the same copyright issues.

Valve's stance on AI-generated content will prevent a lot of developers from utilizing AI-generated content in their games (unless they want to jump ship). Based on Valve's response, developers must effectively own the rights to ALL source material used to train the AI. This is a blocker since most AI networks are trained on millions of images/assets across the web to create compelling content.

The right of AI art-generation services like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion to use copyrighted training data without permission is very much in question. Some claim that grabbing any image or text that's available on the open Internet and ingesting it for training is "fair use," while many artists say otherwise and courts have yet to decide.

Getty Images is currently suing Stability AI for using its images as training data without permission. A group of independent artists is also suing over unauthorized use of their images. The problem has caused a group of developers to build Glaze, a tool that's designed to make it harder for image generators to train on pilfered images. 

While we don't know yet how courts will rule on the issue of using copyrighted images as training data, the outcome could be costly not only for the AI-generators themselves but also for anyone who relies on them to create game art. If you build a successful game that uses AI-generated art based on copyrighted images, you could find yourself on the receiving end of a future lawsuit as could a company like Valve which would distribute and profit from the game.

To calm liability fears, Adobe recently promised to indemnify enterprise customers of its Firefly image-generation service against potential copyright claims. However, Adobe's training data comes from tis own collection of images that has already secured permission to use.

Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

  • Math Geek
    interesting. i understand the concern and why they would have such a policy, however...

    my question would be how does Valve know what was used to train the AI ?? seems like it would be impossible to know how the AI was "trained" and on what data set.
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    There are several lawsuits inflight right now against the OpenAI folks due to them using unauthorized data from millions of people to their their AI. The folks making the complex data modeling software were so focused on whether they could that they never stopped to them if they should. They operated in a "better to ask forgiveness then permission" model and the consequences of that are starting to take effect.
    Reply
  • CelicaGT
    Math Geek said:
    interesting. i understand the concern and why they would have such a policy, however...

    my question would be how does Valve know what was used to train the AI ?? seems like it would be impossible to know how the AI was "trained" and on what data set.
    They don't know. This is just Valve rightly staying out of the legal Line of Fire. Until the question of content rights is settled via the lawsuits Palladin refers to expect more of this from large corporations. They all have money shaped targets on their backs.
    Reply
  • jp7189
    palladin9479 said:
    There are several lawsuits inflight right now against the OpenAI folks due to them using unauthorized data from millions of people to their their AI. The folks making the complex data modeling software were so focused on whether they could that they never stopped to them if they should. They operated in a "better to ask forgiveness then permission" model and the consequences of that are starting to take effect.
    From a practical point of view, how would you go about obtaining permission from the millions of data sources in advance?
    Reply
  • palladin9479
    jp7189 said:
    From a practical point of view, how would you go about obtaining permission from the millions of data sources in advance?

    Practically doesn't matter, only lawfully. Could I walk into your house and take pictures by merely saying it wasn't practical to get your permission? "Seriously your honor, the guy wasn't in town and I really needed those pictures for this cool project I'm working on."

    The data sets they used to train ChatGPT was taken from millions of people without their permission. At the absolute minimum it's big time IP theft, at the worst it's some serious invasion of privacy akin to installing cameras into millions of people's homes.

    Everyone is jumping away from OpenAI as fast as possible, nobody wants to be caught up in using stolen goods. Other AI's that weren't trained on data gathered from mass surveillance should be fine.
    Reply
  • lmcnabney
    How is what AI does any different than what the human brain does? Yes, this applies to art too. Most artists have styles that are OBVIOUSLY influenced directly by other artists. AI just has an audit trail for how it constructs art. Heck, entire art 'types' are essentially the entire market imitating one successful artist's unique style. All Impressionist art is essentially other artists stealing from Monet.
    Reply
  • dk382
    Good. AI art is plagiarism, and it needs to be treated as such.
    Reply
  • Dantte
    Our (human) thought is create through experience and interaction with the world around us. To claim these thoughts are not my own because they were derived from information gathered from others and the world around me is complete and utter nonense. This is exactly what AI is, it samples the world around it (training) and creates something completely new and of its own.
    Reply
  • dk382
    "Artificial Intelligence" is a misnomer. It is not an intelligent, thinking entity. It does not take inspiration from anything or have any thoughts of its own. In its current form, it is a tool owned and used by people to transform one thing into another thing, typically using other people's work in the process. When Stable Diffusion generates an image, it is you using SD as a tool to create that image, and that tool was made illegitimately off of millions of stolen images. Valve is right to ban any game which uses art that was created in such a manner.
    Reply
  • tamalero
    lmcnabney said:
    How is what AI does any different than what the human brain does? Yes, this applies to art too. Most artists have styles that are OBVIOUSLY influenced directly by other artists. AI just has an audit trail for how it constructs art. Heck, entire art 'types' are essentially the entire market imitating one successful artist's unique style. All Impressionist art is essentially other artists stealing from Monet.
    Artists take as inspiration to create something new.

    AI just smash the trained data together based on keyboards and brute force something that resembles what those keywords mean.

    You can and already has happened, that AI guys trained to imitate artists with perfect accuracy.
    All because 1) They said the artists were egolatric and deserve to be poor and 2) charged too much for slaving away hours drawing.

    And of course.. companies salivate the prospect of never needing to draw or pay humans for content. Why? Just make the AI copy the art of an artist that the director wants.
    That is the problem.
    Reply