A couple of weeks after arguing that generative AI shouldn’t be considered in videogame reviews, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney is calling for Steam and digital storefronts generally to stop requiring generative AI disclosures.
Sweeney’s argument is broadly that all videogames will use generative AI tools at some stage, so you and I might as well stop hearing about it. He thinks tagging things as made with generative AI is only necessary when there’s a formal need to prove legal authorship, or help buyers understand whether they have rights to a piece of digital art. There’s no sense letting regular old videogame players learn that stuff. It will only make us upset, and possibly less willing to play videogames with generative AI in them, like Fortnite.
OK, I’m expanding on the material a bit, there. Here’s the actual quote from Sweeney, via James Radar via Percy Gamer via the endless, crocodilian march of progress.
“The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation,” Sweeney wrote on Xitter, responding to a user who called for Steam and other digital storefronts to eliminate the gen AI labelling. “It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”
I’ve already ranted at length on these pages about the relationship between the trillion-dollar generative AI industry and layoffs, creative theft, spiking energy consumption, and general misinformation. Sweeney alludes to a couple of these bugbears in his tweet about rights – many of the bigger budget, better-known generative AIs are created by processing vast quantities of human art and discourse without consent, even if you can argue the toss about whether they’re actually filching somebody’s intellectual property.
I do wonder, though, whether I’m most pissed off simply by the fact of some mogul smugly telling me that a certain state of affairs will inevitably come to pass, especially when he stands to benefit as an AI advocate, and especially when he and his fellow farseers at Epic have screwed up their soothsaying catastrophically in recent history.
As with the previous comments about genAI in videogame reviews, the logic here is patently self-serving. Sweeney is telling you not to ask how the sausage was made, because he’s got a bunch of them on the barbie. Incidentally, it’s estimated that about 99% of livestock in the USA were factory-farmed in 2022, but you shouldn’t have to worry your little head about that when you’re deciding whether to buy a hot dog.
I do agree that Steam’s generative AI policy requires a change, inasmuch as the majority of disclosures are so vague as to be fundamentally useless, revealing neither the exact choice of genAI tools, nor the materials from which they derive their probabilistic outputs, or when, where and how exactly they were used in development.
The Steam disclosure for Arc Raiders, for example, explains that “during the development process, we may use procedural- and AI-based tools to assist with content creation. In all such cases, the final product reflects the creativity and expression of our own development team.” It took a proper interview with developers Embark to learn that the game makes use of text-to-speech tools for voiced barks, and machine learning procedures for arachnid robot animations. You may not be fussed about those applications for generative AI, but you can’t make that call if you don’t know about it.
