Valve, the PC gaming giant and owner of Steam won’t be approving games with AI content; at least for the time being.

Users who have submitted games containing content generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI) have received noticed denying their application to Steam.

One user on Reddit who submitted a game copied their rejection letter from Valve with details omitted:

Hello,

While we strive to ship most titles submitted to us, we cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights.

After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties. In particular, [Game Name Here] contains art assets generated by artificial intelligence that appears to be relying on copyrighted material owned by third parties. As the legal ownership of such AI-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these AI-generated assets, unless you can affirmatively confirm that you own the rights to all of the IP used in the data set that trained the AI to create the assets in your game.

We are failing your build and will give you one (1) opportunity to remove all content that you do not have the rights to from your build.

If you fail to remove all such content, we will not be able to ship your game on Steam, and this app will be banned.

Although AI art and writing have become the topic of the day in the tech industry, the law hasn’t yet caught up to AI and its potential.

Valve’s reluctance to ship a game with AI assets comes from an abundance of caution rather than an ideological stance. AI models are frequently trained on assets without the permission of their creator.

This has led AI generated art and writing to become a bit of a gray area under the law and the copyright status of such art remains undecided by the law.