According to a report in PC Gamer, an anonymous developer on Reddit claimed that Valve, which owns the online gaming platform, is "not willing" to accept games from developers who can't prove they own the rights to the original art or text assets used to train the AI algorithms.
In the Reddit post the anonymous developer said they had tried to release a game with “a few assets that were fairly obviously AI-generated."
In response the developer received an alleged response from Valve that read: "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."
The developer said that they were told by Valve that they would not ship the game unless “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.”
Failure to remove the AI assets would result in the app being banned, Valve reportedly said in its response. The developer removed the assets as requested but the app was still declined.
In a statement to PC Gamer, Valve said: "The introduction of AI can sometimes make it harder to show a developer has sufficient rights in using AI to create assets, including images, text, and music. In particular, there is some legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models. It is the developer's responsibility to make sure they have the appropriate rights to ship their game.”