Valve is reportedly delisting Steam games that are utilizing A.I generated artwork for games being released on Steam. This comes from a VGC (Video Games Chronicle) article that reported on this topic, who included the Reddit form, which was pointed out by Simon Carless on Twitter, who was submitting a game to Steam to be reviewed for release. Carless pointed out that the early version of the game had utilized some A.I generated assets to which would be recreated by hand at a later date.  In the Reddit post, Carless explains, “My plan was to just submit a rougher version of the game, with 2-3 assets/sprites that were admittedly obviously A.I. generated from the hands, and to improve them prior to actually releasing the game.”

PSA: Valve has been quietly banning newly submitted Steam games using AI-created art assets – if submitters can’t prove they have rights for the assets used to train the algorithms: https://t.co/WhWpJpaFjl pic.twitter.com/5KhzJESYxk

— Simon Carless (@simoncarless) June 29, 2023

Afterwards, he expresses that he was not aware that Steam and Valve had an issue with A.I generated work, to which he received a message from Valve stating, “…we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights…In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties.”  Valve expresses that they can not allow a game to be shipped with A.I. generated assets if the developer can prove they own all the rights to the IPs.   After receiving this message, Carless tries again and submits his game again for review, after improving these assets by hand, the game was rejected.  Valve contacted him explaining why it was rejected, which was due to the A.I assets.  Carless further explains at the end of his post saying,

so it seems like Valve doesn’t really have a standard approach to AI generated games yet, and I’ve seen several games up that even explicitly mention the use of AI.

According to the VGC article, they mention the game This Girl Does Not Exist by Cute Pen Games which, “…bills it as “the first game of its kind” due to its complete reliance on AI. “Everything you will see here, including art, story, characters, and even voice-over, was generated by machine learning AI,” reads the product description.”  After looking further into the title, based off the promotional images on Steam, the in-game images are clearly A.I generated. Some of the images have errors relating to A.I. such as mismatched and oddly placed eyes, and hair errors like on the eyebrows.

Currently, using A.I-generated content in any media remains a grey area, with many looking down on it for due to copyright issues as of late.