As of today, art generated by artificial intelligence continues to provoke countless discussions about how these models work and the illegitimate use of others’ artwork. As expected, the situation has ended up affecting many areas, including the gaming industry.
Numerous studios have ventured into using tools like Midjourney (including Marvel), and the truth is that this hasn’t been well-received. One major player, Valve, has taken action and has not allowed the release of a game that contained art generated by artificial intelligence.
Simon Carless, a game developer, exposed this situation in an extensive Reddit post. In his post, he explained that Valve responded to the approval process of his game with the following email:
“After review, we have identified that there is intellectual property in [Game Name] that appears to belong to either you or to third parties. Specifically, [Game Name] contains AI-generated art assets that appear to be based on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of this type of AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot release your game while it contains these AI-generated assets unless you can confirm that you have rights to all the intellectual property used in the dataset that trained the AI to create the assets for your game.”
This has come as a surprise to many developers who did not expect this stance from Valve. However, not many were aware that Steam had recently updated its policies. In those updates, it was made clear that they would not publish games whose assets had been created using artificial intelligence.
Currently, the developer still has the option to have their game published, but at the cost of removing the AI-generated content. While many developers find Valve’s stance somewhat controversial, the truth is that it makes a lot of sense.
Artificial intelligence and authorship: who owns the rights?
The rise of artificial intelligence has sparked a true technological revolution. While it streamlines tasks and jobs, it also raises numerous problems and questions: What do these artificial intelligences feed on? Will they eliminate our jobs? Will new ones be created? Who owns the generated content?
It is known for certain that many models use content that has not been authorized to be used in this way by its creators. And we’re not just talking about artists, but also about products owned by large corporations. Technology has outpaced the law, and regulations do not yet fully address how to handle these situations. Currently, in the United States, there are rulings stating that content must be created by a human in order to apply copyright.
From Valve‘s perspective, it is understandable that they want to avoid potential copyright infringement lawsuits by prohibiting the use of AI on their platform.
Some of the links added in the article are part of affiliate campaigns and may represent benefits for Softonic.
