It was recently reported that Valve has been banning any Steam games if its’ programs detect AI generated art, unless those submitting the title can prove ownership of the intellectual property. This information comes from Twitter user, @simoncarless, who posted an excerpt from a Steam denial template. The post says the following:
“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 Al-generated art is unclear, we cannot ship your game while it contains these Al-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 Al 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.”
I’m a very old school computer graphic guy, 1980 onward. I can tell you that the same was said about computer graphics in general. It was considered even ‘less’ artistic than photography. But then, food for thought, one of the primary goals of computer graphics was to create ‘photorealistic’ images. Just like painting in the 60s and 70s. So everyone was imitating everyone.
A sculpture professor once dismissed some of my students’ art as being ‘as simple as pressing a button’.
It’s all art. None of it is lazy. Even lazy art is sometimes intentionally so.