The publication of Valve’s new policy concerning the use of AI on the Steam platform has shaken up the gaming industry considerably. Frankly speaking, developers started to think that the situation was going to get worse after the initial restrictions on AI disclosures at Valve. At that moment, the developers were required to tick boxes indicating that they had depended on any form of AI tools. What’s the situation now?—In a way, Valve has given a wishy-washy response. The policy basically states: When it is a coding assistant like GitHub Copilot that is the behind-the-scenes pulling the strings of your game’s backend, you do not have to disclose your use of AI, but it is the reverse case if Midjourney is generating all your characters or if the NPCs can have live ChatGPT-type dialogue that…
This marks a huge difference and, honestly, it is very realistic from a practical point of view. Just pause for a sec and analyze the scenario. If we look into the film industry, AI-based tools and even AI filters in Photoshop will be as common as, let’s say, editing. It is pretty much like asking for a disclosure because of a tech support issue caused by the author’s use of the writing tool Grammarly. It can become repetitive quickly. One user gdev_inc aptly summed it up: “steam finally admitting what we all knew – nobody actually cares if you used copilot to write your inventory system. just tell us if the NPCs are gonna say weird shit live.” Is that so? It is indeed the players who want to know.
At the same time, the response was extraordinarily diverse. There are, for instance, fans who treat it like a party and developers supporting the move as user erosYume, who remarked, “good, all future coding will use AI anyway and that will become redundant.” These people view it as Valve arriving at the stage of truth where AI is simply a new tool in the box. There is even a story about Gabe Newell being pro-AI, with user Oyasumi Bastet pondering an old quote. So, maybe this was always the plan to disentangle and then refine it.
On the other hand, a group of people completely rejects the new policy. User DeferredImage was crystal clear: “Zero AI. That’s the only option I will accept.” They are contemplating the idea of only playing games that are completely AI-free and even going to the extent of releasing their own no-AI works. That is a legitimate viewpoint after all! It is about appreciating human craftsmanship. Another user, sigma ligma2000, shared skepticism about coding AI in particular, dismissing tools such as Copilot as a “jumble of mess.” Therefore, the debate is not mainly about art; it is much broader and encompasses the whole game development pipeline.
Did I mention something about drama? Yes, the drama. Some of the comments are in jest, saying that this is a “Get out of Jail Free Card” for the game, Expedition 33, which was heavily criticized for using AI as a placeholder texture. Others have even gone as far as making wild predictions that Chinese developers will go mad with it. And Lincoln Margison shared a very amusing opinion, suggesting that Valve was filling out a Steam page for Half-Life 3 and, exclaiming, “damn, literally every person in the company used AI-powered tools during development.” LOL, but it is possible that it is the case, though.
The heart of the matter and the dilemma that Valve is trying to navigate is the difference between process and product. It is one way to incorporate AI into making a game. Having AI-created assets or live interactions with AI as part of the final product is a completely different story. The latter is slowly being adopted as an industry norm whether we like it or not. The former, however, is tangled up with copyright, quality and that strange, sometimes undesirable “AI jank” that can pull a viewer out of the film’s universe. By limiting the disclosure to the product which is the part players actually interact with, Steam is attempting to equip players with useful information without overburdening developers with paperwork for the use of contemporary tools.
The next question is where this situation puts us, the gamers? It suggests that we will keep on seeing the unauthorized content disclosures powered by AI on the Steam store pages, but their meaning will hopefully go beyond that. They will, for instance, tell us whether the game’s universe has been constructed on the basis of scraped art databases or whether the conversation is likely to go haywire. But it also signals that the line between “AI game” and “game made with AI help” is becoming less and less clear. The responsibility for conducting our own research if we really want to know the methods of development is shifting somewhat onto us. For the vast majority of gamers, though, the change will be, with many playing on platforms like Xbox.
