r/gamedev

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Game Rejected for AI generated Assets

I created a small game and used AI generated art for some background images and assets here and there. While there was human generated parts of it, a large portion of the assets have some AI involvement in it's creation. After submitting my build for review, the game was rejected for the following reason.

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.

I was wondering what my options were as AI was heavily involved in my asset creation workflow and as an Indie Dev, i don't really have the resources to hire an artist. Even if i redo everything from scratch, how can i definitively prove if something was or wasn't AI generated. Or alternatively, is there some way to argue that I do own the rights to my generated AI art. I found the following license mentioned in the Stable Diffusion models I used for the art generation:

https://huggingface.co/stabilityai/stable-diffusion-2/blob/main/LICENSE-MODEL

It seems to mention that you own the output of the model, but it doesn't specify many details on the actual training data which is what was mentioned in the rejection. Anyone faced similar rejections due to usage of AI assets before?

comments sorted by Best Top New Controversial Q&A

Chipjack

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The Stable Diffusion license grants you certain rights to the content you've generated with it. The question, though, is whether or not that license is valid, since the content is essentially a remix of artwork created by others, performed by an algorithm, used without the permission of the creators who own the intellectual property rights to that source artwork.

Nobody's got a definitive answer for that question yet; but there are a lot of opinions floating around. Steam is trying to avoid whatever fallout might occur if courts decide that AI models trained on copyrighted materials without permission are violating copyright laws. That would effectively put Steam in the same position as The Pirate Bay, except they'd have a history of actually storing and distributing the violating content, and earning money from it. Valve does not want to give all that money away in a class-action lawsuit.

So, what you're left with is to use different content; buy it, use free assets, make your own, whatever you have to do. Or find some other platform to distribute your game on. Steam's going to follow their legal department's advice on this one.

StickiStickman

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the content is essentially a remix of artwork created by others, performed by an algorithm, used without the permission of the creators who own the intellectual property rights to that source artwork.

By that logic literally every single artist for the past few centuries would fall under that.

Lynchianesque

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actual artists are trained on copyrighted material too. this logic makes no sense

Aver64

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There is no law that regulates the content of the brain, so yes, it does make sense.

NiklasWerth

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That's not true and you know it. No one owns a copyright to human eyesight, nor the landscapes, faces, flowers, trees, rocks, animals, one studies in nature. Besides, human art is a lot more than just bashing together pre-existing pieces. You're being reductionist because it suits your own needs.

bunchobox

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Artists aren't all painting landscapes like Bob Ross, they're influenced heavily by copyrighted materials all the time

NiklasWerth

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Sure, but they're more far more influenced by their actual life. They aren't just exclusively taking other peoples work and running it through a system remix and create an output. But I'm guessing you'll never accept that, because it's inconvenient, to your fantasies about using AI to escape the rat race without ever having to improve yourself or learn a new skill.

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nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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Training a computer is boring like training a person. A person still needs to execute in their own and, as such, they are always creating something new (if not copying up, blah blah blah). Their style will be theirs because they physically are not the original artist.

An AI is trained to trace. The execution is directly copying the visuals and style of the data set. The original data might not be there as originally input but the end result is a program built to copy things. Now, it's copying a lot of things at once, which makes it look unique, but it's copying none the less.

TL;dr AI isn't learning to draw. It's learning how to copy.

monsieurpooh

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It's a meaningless distinction as far as real results are concerned. If you look at an AI-generated painting it is definitely doing more than just copying. There is no source artwork to "copy" for prompts such as astronaut riding a horse or daikon wearing a tutu. "Real understanding" is a requirement for that. But of course "real understanding" keeps being redefined, and every time AI achieves some milestone, people will move the goalposts. History keeps repeating itself, and humans will always say AI doesn't have "real creativity" up until the point we have literal AGI

nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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The conversation isn't about results but ownership and copyright. It is already not possible to have a copyright on AI works and whether or not that AI training is could be a breach of others copyright has yet to be tested. The distinction above is an explanation of that distinction, at least as it stands right now.

Any reasonable contact in this industry includes a clause that third party copyrights cannot be infringed. The use of AI generated content from publicly scraped sources is a risky, unproven mess that would be irresponsible to use in a commercial setting.

bunchobox

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Ever heard of the phrase "good artists borrow, great artists steal."? It is common practice to "copy" other people's work. It's what you add to it as a whole that makes it original.

Just because the AI can copy something, doesn't mean anything it produces is a copy

willcodeforbread

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IKR, I "copy" stuff into my brain's memory all the time, and use it for inspo.

bunchobox

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Except the AI model doesn't store the original training data at all

HazelCheese

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I was thinking about this the other day and it's such an interesting question.

A lot of people think it's just remixing. But it's diffusion. It's generated a vague later and then refining it step by step.

That's exactly how I program. I don't write up uml or plan it all out. I have a vague notion and I program it and as each bit gets more layed out I refine and adjust it.

Maybe not everyone works the same as me, I know some people are planners / spec makers. But AI diffusion is so similar to my thought process when working that I find it hard to see it differently than the way humans look at things and build their own versions.

Maybe though I'm literally just generic enough that I think like an ai 😭.

walachey

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I think it's possible to argue both for and against the morality and implications of it...

But this is essentially a legal question and how to consolidate the application with the existing laws is a question that needs to be answered by judges after long and daunting trials over many, many years...

And Steam is simply very cautious until that is clearer.

BaladiDogGames

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And Steam is simply very cautious until that is clearer.

I made another post asking why a self-admitted AI-generated game "This Girl Does Not Exist" is currently listed on Steam, and the only response I got over there is that Steam is not cautious at all, being extremely inconsistent about what they approve:

https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/13cgqy4/why_is_this_girl_does_not_exist_still_listed_on/

I don't know who to believe! 😂

walachey

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I scrolled through that thread and it doesn't really contradict anything. The person who wrote to you seems to be cautious w.r.t to the copyright issue.

Maybe that reasoning is not consistently applied by all reviewers (yet).

Maybe the other game actually replied and could argue that they are indeed allowed to use the generated artworks. Maybe they used a different model for which the training data situation is clearer (how is it for Midjourney or DALL-E?).

intuitive-arts

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And you go to internet and scrap pieces of code too, right? and an artists also goes to internet and scraps ideas and styles. That's learning.

HazelCheese

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Yeah like for 3d modelling I watch videos to look at how they arrange vertices for eyes and stuff or I download free models and look at those.

Then when I do my own stuff I try to incorporate those styles and it usually does make it look a lot better.

I don't see that as stealing myself so I'm hard pressed to say diffusion stlye AI is stealing by doing the same thing.

nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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Nobody's got a definitive answer for that question yet

https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/ai-generator-art-text-us-copyright-policy-1234661683/

Chipjack

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If I trained an AI model by feeding it large images of every painting ever produced by Boris Vallejo, then asked it to produce an image of a female barbarian with a sword fighting an enormous snake, the US Copyright policy states that I cannot copyright that resulting image. I can use that image as the cover for a novel I write, but I can't sue someone for taking that image and selling posters of it on Etsy.

The Copyright policy does not address whether or not I've infringed on Mr. Vallejo's intellectual property rights by doing any of this, and that's why Steam is right to avoid this mess entirely.

HaskellHystericMonad

Commercial (Other)

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I'm curious how intensely obvious it had to be that you even got caught.

I'm picturing a horribly art-controlled sidescroller that moves from Monet to some janked Tsutomu Nihei around into Van Goh and rounding out at Barlowe (whose style AI always fucks up).

Unless you just outright wrote about using AI generated material in your copy. Which if you did ... why on earth would you do that?

potterharry97

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What I'm thinking it was was the trailer and a couple of menu sprites that were admittedly rushed and submitted right before I had to leave on a vacation. My plan was to get the store page and game build approved, and then actually update them with more human-created versions after I got back. I didn't even realize AI art was not allowed, as I'd heard of it being used, and even seen a few fairly obvious examples myself.

BaladiDogGames

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as I'd heard of it being used, and even seen a few fairly obvious examples myself.

Yes, this game for example wears AI-generation as a badge of honor. Not only the artwork, but the story, characters, etc. are all AI-generated.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2095900/This_Girl_Does_Not_Exist/

The more you describe your situation, the more I'm thinking it was a polish issue, and the Steam reviewer just used AI as an easier way to turn down your submission.

idbrii

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It's also likely that Valve developed different internal policies since that game was approved.

BaladiDogGames

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Yeah. After thinking on it a bit more, I agree. It's likely they've picked up the new policy over the last 6 months while AI popularity has been booming.

monsieurpooh

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No what's perplexing is why they rejected OP's game allegedly for AI-generated content. What you just described is exactly the state AI Roguelite was in when I first released it to Steam in March 2022 and they let it pass. That was even before Stable Diffusion was invented. VQGAN images were HORRIBLE compared to what we're used to today.

triffid_hunter

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It seems to mention that you own the output of the model

They can only confer rights that they themselves have, and whether ML models are sufficiently transformative to gain those rights over their output regardless of the licensing of the training data (highly problematic in most cases) is still an open legal question with a lot of lawsuits brewing.

PS: this sort of thing is why at least some folk have been discouraging using "AI" art/code generators for anything commercial.

StickiStickman

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That Stable Diffsuion is highly transformative really isn't remotely controversial. If you can't point toward an original image, then there's not even a debate about Fair Use not applying.

triffid_hunter

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There's lawsuits about watermarks showing up in SD output

StickiStickman

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Mate, did you actually look at what you linked? Because if you think complete unreadable gibberish that looks like something resembeling a watermark is the same as it copying watermarks, I don't know what to tell you.

You can make lawsuits about anything, good luck to Getty. They also previously had a lawsuit about stealing someones picture and selling it as their own property before, so it's pretty rich.

fisj

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Id love more details. This is potentially a big deal and Im not aware of Valve enforcing anything this far.

Crossposted to r/aigamedev

BaladiDogGames

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Id love more details.

OP mentioned that they don't want to reveal the game or artwork for personal reasons, although they did mention that the AI artwork they used was not very polished, which is why I think the explanation the Steam reviewer gave was more of an excuse to not accept the game, rather than the real reason.

There are already games that are marketed as using AI-generative content listed on Steam, and have been there for a year+ now. If they really had a blanket ban on it, I don't think those games would still be around.

BaladiDogGames

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I've been using AI artwork in my game so far, but I did plan to recreate most of it before release. Maybe I'll be recreating all of it after reading this.

Would you mind sharing your steam page or some examples of the artwork? I'm curious to know how they discovered it was AI generated. I know some images have some pretty obvious tells, but I've also seen some that was pretty convincing. So I'm just wondering where your artwork fell on that.

potterharry97

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Sorry, not super comfortable sharing it, but I will say the trailer and a couple of menu sprites made it obvious as I planned on getting the game store page and build approved while I was on vacation, and I'd come back later and update the specifically obvious AI ones before releasing, but i guess that was a bad call.

airburst_studios

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Can you share your game visual so we can see what Steam saw?

not_food

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Something is fishy about these claims and OP reluctance to share anything but their word. How can they even tell if something was AI made?

FlyingJudgement

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Realy interested too!

intuitive-arts

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Does Steam have a written rule about the use of AI art, or they just apply this to random people without any explicit rule (which by the way seems the usual way)?

BaladiDogGames

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Does Steam have a written rule about the use of AI art, or they just apply this to random people without any explicit rule

Seems to be the latter. OP has admitted that the polish wasnt there on his game, which is my guess as to why it was rejected.

Where you have games like this one, that use AI as their entire premise / marketing strategy:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2095900/This_Girl_Does_Not_Exist/

intuitive-arts

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they rejected his game because of using AI art. It says so and quotes Steam's answer. I am asking if they have this rule written somewhere, or if it depends on their random criteria.

BaladiDogGames

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they rejected his game because of using AI art. It says so and quotes Steam's answer.

Yes, that is what they claimed.

I am asking if they have this rule written somewhere, or if it depends on their random criteria.

And this is what I was answering. AFAIK they do not have any rules written down about AI, so they're either using random criteria(i.e. Quality) to approve/reject, or this is a new rule they've just started enforcing.

intuitive-arts

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Probably it's a rule, or if we ask it will be a rule. I am very used to this in many websites. Now it's AI but other times it's other things. Someone decides overnight to just annoy some and let others do what they want. I am sure the removed game was visually stunning. So it calls the attention of Medusa more, and you're out. And with no rules, except their crotch. As a private business they can have the rules they want, but people need consistency, fairness, and clarity. Too often communities are sold as "all here is your site, your place, your community to stay" and then they kick you out or forbid things that are allowed to others.

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monsieurpooh

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I noticed that game is the one the press chose to focus on. Why is that game still being cited as the poster child of an AI generated game, when "AI Roguelite" came out on Steam over 6 months prior to that game, has more AI integration into actual game mechanics than that game, and has more user reviews than that game?

potterharry97

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Yeah, i couldn't find anything when i looked it up, so it might be sporadically applied.

AlphaState

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I believe the US copyright office has ruled that AI generated art cannot be copyrighted. So, neither you nor anyone else can own the rights to it. There shouldn't be any issue with using these kind of assets any more than there would be with using public domain works.

However, Stable Diffusion has used art for training without artist permission so its legality is debatable. If it generates something too similar to a copyrighted artwork or an artist's style, the original artist could have a case against you.

StickiStickman

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All of this is wrong:

The Copyright Office did NOT rule that, not having copyright doesn't mean it's public domain, no one needs permission to look at pictures that are freely avialable on the internet and art styles don't even fall under copyright to begin with.

nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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Having no copyright and being in public domain are not equivalent at all. Public domain gives the rights to everyone. Not being copyrightable means nobody has rights. When selling you game, that distinction is very important and can get you into legal trouble.

AlphaState

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That's not how the law works. If no-one has copyright then no-one can stop you from copying it. A platform owner can refuse to publish anything they want of course.

MeaningfulChoices

Lead Game Designer

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Valve gets to control their own marketplace, and while other games with AI-generated art have definitely appeared there, if they notice it and don't want it, that's their choice. If you used publicly available online tools then there were assets you don't own used in the training data sets. The only way you can use AI art by those rules is to download the code and train it all yourself on your own art. If you're not an artist and don't have the funds to hire one you probably don't have enough art lying around to train your own model.

In that case your options are to use free assets, purchase assets/hire artists, or replace it all yourself.

nlight

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I think the problem here is that Steam is selectively enforcing unwritten rules. It's a matter of time until a AAA game ships with some AI-generated content if it hasn't already happened. Steam needs to make it clear what is allowed and what not instead of the current black-box review process. As it is, this is another example of pulling the ladder as it hurts smaller developers and entrenches established studios. Even if AI-art is clearly and explicitly banned that still hurts small developers disproportionately as they are the ones who would most benefit from generative art.

MeaningfulChoices

Lead Game Designer

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It seems to be a written rule - you've never been able to release a game with IP you don't own. There are AAA games using some AI tools now that downloaded the code and built their own data sets. Selective enforcement happens on every platform just because they don't catch everyone breaking the rules.

If you don't believe that AI tools trained on content without permission are IP violations then it's more of a black box, but that's a very different discussion and one more for lawyers than developers.

nlight

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The issue is more nuanced than using IP without permission. It has always been an IP violation to sell e.g. a Star Wars game without permission from Disney - regardless if AI was used or not.

If I generate, say, a tree or a park bench using Stable Diffusion it's going to be very hard to convince a reasonable person that this is infringing on any existing copyright.

Ultimately it will be decided in the courts as current copyright law is hopelessly outdated and there are multiple valid interpretations which can swing the result either way.

In Steam's case any policy banning AI will backfire as generative models have proven to be very capable and it's wild to bet against them. This will lead to the "Next Big Thing" being released on Epic Store or whichever other platform allows it instead.

MeaningfulChoices

Lead Game Designer

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I don't think it really is all that nuanced. Don't use art you don't own in your training set and there are no legal issues. Whether you can copyright the output is a different discussion, but I don't think I know any game studios right now that believe that scraping art without consent results in generated output that's completely in the clear. You can say no reasonable person would see Stable Diffusion as an issue but that does not match what we're actually seeing by the people who make the games and the rules. The average person doesn't realize you can't put Sonic and Mario in your fan game either.

Epic has also released statements that AI tools are perfectly fine (machine learning algorithms are used by Quixel for a start) but "hoovering up everyone's art data" would not be allowed, so I'd think they'd be in the same spot. Not that Epic is famous for consistency in position, of course.

This is all also a transition problem. There are enough artists there that will volunteer or be paid for their art and Stable Diffusion is already open source. Someone will create an opted-in model at some point in the near future and big studios that are using these tools will train their proprietary versions on all the art they already own. The output question is much more nuanced issue for the future and I can't weigh in on that at all.

BaladiDogGames

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it seems to be a written rule - you've never been able to release a game with IP you don't own.

This game has been listed for almost a year now as a self-proclaimed AI generated game:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2095900/This_Girl_Does_Not_Exist/

MeaningfulChoices

Lead Game Designer

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It doesn't look like a very well-known game. They might have sent proof they used their own training data. It might have just been missed. That's why I said what I did about selective enforcement.

The Play Store is a very obvious example of this. You can have an app up for years and until they resubmit for an update (or someone reports it) no one notices it's violating this or that. "But you let them do it!" has never been a very convincing argument to platforms in my experience.

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Fly_VC

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Interesting, the Google play store seems to go a different route:

https://www.spiceworks.com/marketing/content-marketing/news/ai-generated-content-not-against-google-policies/amp/

AmputatorBot

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ectoblob

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Just interested - " we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties." - so you didn't specifically tell them that your game contains AI generated content? If so, just wondering did they run some image recognition software and then came to this conclusion based on some scan result, or did they simply think something looks similar to some existing product or IP.

OlgaDrebas

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My man, AI art is easily identifiable. All AI art nowadays is based on stolen content, full stop. That's the end of it, no need to scan.

DeepState_Auditor

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You should only use AI generated images for inspiration or at least heavily transform it in a way that creates ambiguity about to whom it actually belongs too.

alinktothefish

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You could try switching to a more licence-conscious AI generator. Adobe are working on one called Firefly - they aim to make it only scrape permitted material.

In general I think this will become the standard for ai learning models in the next few years, as there are going to keep being legal issues with copyrighted content being used to train these models, but it will of course take some time for the law to catch up.

StickiStickman

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Why should it be illegal to learn from publically avaiable pictures? Saying humans are allowed to look at my pictures that are publically posted on the internet is okay, but an AI isn't allowed to look at them just seems absurd.

alinktothefish

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IANAL, so I can't answer that with any authority. I do know that there has been a lot of discussion about what constitutes fair use in this new context, and the lack of disclosure of the data sets being scraped by these AI. This article is a good summary.

StickiStickman

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Stable Diffusion, the by far most used and open-source diffusion model, literally has it's entire dataset open source as well (LAION). It's all just misinformation stacked on misinformation, and you're not helping.

The fact is that courts have already ruled several times that scraping images is perfectly legal. Especially since in this case it isn't even scraping images, but just viewing them and not a single pixel is being stored.

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StickiStickman

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Ethically you should stop as it is a breach of copyright for the datasets used.

It isn't even remotely unethically to view publically available images. Not a single reasonable person is gonna think that.

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travelsonic

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as it is a breach of copyright for the datasets used.

Isn't that ... something the courts are still woorking on figuring out? Or did I misunderstand your point? (Pardon, if so)

[deleted]

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buttsnifferking

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I hope you didn’t have alot riding on this

buttsnifferking

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That must be crushing hang in there man

East-Imagination-281

•

AI art uses art from other artists. They told you what the problem was in their letter. Your options are to not use AI-generated art.

nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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It doesn't matter what stable diffusion says. It's entirely dependent on copyright laws in the countries you are selling the game in.

In the US you cannot own the copyright on AI art.

If you don't own the IP, you can't sell it. That's just how it goes.

ThoseWhoRule

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Completely incorrect. You don’t own public domain content, but you can include it in your game and sell it.

Not owning the copyright is completely different from using someone else’s copyright work. If Steam is saying you can’t use work that no one has the copyright for, that would be insane.

nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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Sure, this had a lot of hand waiving. There is a big difference between "I made a game with public domain content that nobody can ever home the copyright to" and "I made a game with content that I cannot copyright but somebody could potentially claim ownership of".

No lawyer is ever going to tell you to sell something you aren't 100% sure you own or have a valid license for.

MountTamalpaisGames

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You seem to really not understand what it means to not be able to copyright something. Nobody can copyright AI art because it wasn't made by a human.

nEmoGrinder

Commercial (Indie)

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That doesn't stop somebody whose art was used in the training set without their permission to attempt a copyright claim against it, though. That hasn't happened yet so there is no precedence set for that case and won't be until somebody tries and it goes up to a high enough court. That's how it works and that's my point.

I don't really care what anyone view in set generated by AI trained on public scrapes of the internet. The only thing that really matters is is the platforms want you to guarantee no copyright infringement (which you can't currently with AI art until the laws are tested) and if you/your company are willing to take the risk of a lawsuit in the future.

No reasonable copyright/ip lawyer would ever give advice to move forward with licensing a game with AI art when there is an unknown that large. They legally couldn't as it's are bound to protect the company from lawsuits.

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[deleted]

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[removed]

Game Rejected for AI generated Assets

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