Valve U-turns on Steam’s AI disclosure policy for new games | Gaming | Entertainment

Valve has updated the disclosure form that developers must fill out when listing games on Steam that changes its approach to declaring AI content.

Currently, all games listed on Steam must declare whether they’ve been created using AI. For example, Black Ops 7 has the following listed underneath it: “Our team uses generative AI tools to help develop some in game assets.”

However, a recent update to the AI disclosure section of the listing process appears to have made things a little more relaxed.

As highlighted by Simon Carless of GameDiscoverCo over on LinkedIn, the disclosure section no longer requires developers to declare if they’ve used ‘AI powered tools’. This includes the likes of code helpers, which are becoming more prevalent in game development as a means of using AI to support development.

However, developers will still need to declare their use of AI if it falls into one of two categories.

The first is if a developer uses ‘AI to generate content for the game’. This can be anything from in-game assets to marketing materials, so the scope is fairly wide.

A text box allows developers to disclose exactly how their use of AI in this department manifests, which can be displayed on the store page for players to read.

Another area that must be declared is if the game itself uses AI to generate content on the fly. Valve lists this as including ‘images, audio, text and other content’.

The changes appear to be met with open arms by other game developers replying to Carless’ LinkedIn post.

Dan Felder, a developer at Sky Castle Studios, labels the changes as ‘good’, saying: “AI generated captions for an internal meeting that helps your hard of hearing or non-native speaking coworkers during development should not be categorized the same way as generating art assets in game.”

However, other developers still have questions about where Valve is drawing the line around AI disclosure. “Where does the line get drawn on the marketing side is my question,” writes Jon Hanson. “Everyone’s use cases on that side goes to creative assets. But what if you use LLM to scrape reviews for sentiment, do competitive analysis, customer segmentation, etc. Does that count?”

These changes arrived shortly after CEO of Larian Studios, Swen Vincke, came under fire last month after admitting that generative AI was being used in the concept stage of development for the upcoming Divinity game.

Vincke has since clarified his stance on AI in a Reddit AMA, saying: “We’ve decided to refrain from using genAI tools during concept-art development. That way, there can be no discussion about the origin of the art.”

However, he does still remain firm that GenAI has a place in video game development moving forward. “Having said that, we continuously try to improve the speed with which we can try things out. The more iterations we can do, the better, in general, the gameplay is,” Vincke writes. 

“We think GenAI can help with this, and so we’re trying things out across departments. Our hope is that it can aid us to refine ideas faster, leading to a more focused development cycle, less waste, and ultimately, a higher-quality game.”

With big hitters like Activision and even the team behind Battlefield 6 suspected of using GenAI for asset creation, it doesn’t look like the technology is going away any time soon. It seems that Valve’s latest stance on AI declaration is at least a step towards clarity from developers so that players can make their own decision on where they stand on its use.