A Valve artist has defended AI disclosures on storefronts like Steam, saying they only scare those with “low effort” products.
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But I thought ai users love ai why wouldn’t they want people to know? (:
Because AI is a grift for the most part. While you can obviously find the occasional person actually wanting the tech to be more expressive and controllable, most just want to flood the market with slop for their little sidehustle, they saw in a tutorial video.
I look at it the same way I look at game engines. It’s a tool, which if used in the production of the game should be disclosed and let people decide if they want to buy that product or not.
I’d much rather buy a game made with Godot than Unity. So yeah, list the ingredients
Or UE5, since it’s an unoptimized mess
Yes, we should celebrate transparency. Even if every game includes Ai in development in some shape or form, its good to know what exactly was done. In some cases its even a little less harmless or even acceptable (like generating meaningless terrain) than in other cases.
Check out demos, read reviews. If it’s good it’s good, if it’s bad it’s bad. What does it matter how it was made?
Which demos? Those are long dead on Steam. Demos are now basically paid early access releases…
It’s one of the quality indicators. Just like the game engine. E.g. I know Bethesda games will have shit performance and be bug ridden because they use Creation Engine.
Actually I’ve found the opposite, it feels like industry moved away from demos for quite awhile. But steam has been recently showcasing games with demos and encouraging them? (Probably not true of AAA)
I guess the situation is a bit better since their 2024 overhaul, but it’s mostly limited to indie devs not like before demos were used by every single studio and publisher as a marketing tool to allow people actually playtest the game not only to see if the game is interesting but also it’s performance on your machine.
itch.io still beats Steam into ground in this area.
Ok. I admit I’m not really into the scene and so I’m talking generically. But I see my daughter watch hours of YouTube of other people playing new games and commenting (rather moronically) on them. Seems like a pretty it should be pretty easy to see if the game is worth your money before you buy.
And the disclosure wouldn’t change anything for those that do research for their purchaces outside the store page, but it would have an impact on people that don’t.
But why should it matter at all? They don’t list whether the game was written in c++ or c# because it makes no difference. What matters is the game play. If it’s good, it’s good.
They don’t list whether the game was written in c++ or c# because it makes no difference.
Sure they do. That’s what game engine disclosure does.
Do they really? And do you care? I mean I understand if they tell you it’s based on Unity or what other framework systems, because that would dictate a certain look and feel area, but the programming language?
Many of those Youtubers get paid to play those games, and the ones catering to younger audiences are particularly bad at providing those disclaimers
Because AI-gened voices and graphics are terrible in their own right. They’re super unnatural and casually wander into Uncanny Valley.
Also I’m not paying for a product that wasn’t human-made. I don’t want to support those who waste their time talking to a chatbot like a moron.
They are terrible now, but they will get better and better. The code will be at least AI-assist generated regardless.
I don’t think LLMs will survive for so long
No. AI cannot “get better,” that’s what techbros say so they don’t light a trillion dollars on fire. LLMs cannot avoid hallucinations and even now are being trained on their own excrement, human centipede style. They hope you tell yourself this lie so you don’t notice when they move on to the next hyped up pile of shit.
I use ai tools for embedded code generation regularly. They are getting noticeably better by the month. The tools that wrap the ai direct it better and the reasoning systems really work out pretty complicated systems quite well now. One still needs to know how to architect stuff, and be aware to redirect it when it goes off the rails, but there’s absolutely no doubt that it speeds up coding and can do a good job.
Nobody who wants to hide information from you has your best interests at heart. Sweeney is a creep.
Stop it, Valve! I can only get so erect!
Good shit, I hope we keep seeing headlines like this nonstop, because you know for sure those AI assholes have bots spamming inboxes with the opposite message.
good response from Valve
Tim sure is an odd dog. I just don’t get where this unearned confidence to shit talk comes from.
Money. Money is where it comes from.
“I am rich, therefore my opinion is valid and you should listen to me”
EXTREMELY LOUD ‘INCORRECT’ BUZZER
Yes but
pays the buzzer guy to play the “correct” sound effect
old-timey bicycle horn
Is there an asset flip disclosure?
Nearly all games use assets, would be pointless.
Asset flips refers to low quality project that use all store-bought assets without providing any uniqueness whatsoever on gameplay.
Problem is there are legitimately good games that do this, usually ones that focus exclusively on writing but still. At that point it’s better to let the reviews handle it.
I said “low quality project”, that means games with “focus exclusively on writing” are not belongs to this category.
Huge chunk of RPG Maker games are using generic reusable assets provided by RPG Maker yet still cool af, as they focus on writings.
Sure but the problem is that distinguishing between a shitty asset flip and a proper game that is just using generic assets is moreso a matter of effort. There is basically no way to distinguish the two short of actually playing it, which is different from tracking say AI which is pretty objective in it’s separation. The only tag that could work is a “strong usage of generic asset” but that doesn’t really distinguish between say a shitty asset flip and a game that is a generic asset flip in everything but it’s writing.
Like what?
Early access version of ATOM RPG was pretty damned close. I’m talking way back when it was the first world map or so when going to death tunnel would crash my game if I entered and exited it enough because of an infinitely respawning rat.
Mind you that was pretty early in it’s development but it very well could’ve stayed in polished form of that and still been good.
I haven’t played it (despite possibly owning it from a giveaway, I think), but didn’t know its quality had deteriorated since. That sucks.
yes, but how do we define an asset flip? whatever definition is used will be something avoided by scummy developers or will apply to all games on steam.
Okay, so, complex projects having a small part you didn’t make doesn’t matter?
it’s not that it doesn’t matter at all but what problem does it solve if nearly every game on steam has it? It wouldn’t even help identify actual asset flips.
Okay, so, every game on Steam having some generated asset wouldn’t matter?
No. It’s a lot easier to define that and restrict it.
That was not the question.
“No.” Was the answer, the part after was an explanation of why.
So pretty much every shop/job simulator?
Wonder how the developers who think it’s ok to use ai to copy music/ art, would feel about using ai to reverse engineer a game mechanic they worked on…?
Bold to assume that developers who use ai come up with any sort of original game mechanics.
Yes, and they’re the only ones who’s work can easily be replicated by said ai.
BrikoX, this is unsponsored opinions, change the title.
It’s not seen often that Valve reacts to public comments.
Valve hasn’t reacted.
It’s a Valve employee.
“Opinions are my own” - his Twitter bio. Which shouldn’t need to be said, but here we are.
So we should ignore that he works at Valve?
in the sense that valve has nothing to do with this… yes
I can’t imagine the other artists and eccentrics that work at Valve would disagree with this guy tho.
I do not agree. While it was not an official statement, he still works at Valve. So his opinion is connected to Valve. We should not ignore that. He is not ANY developer. The only thing is, I should have made that more clear in my initial reply, but I think its not really needed because we know the context he is a developer on his own private account. But I would not ignore that.
I’m a one man team making a game.
It’s a management game and indirectly you control characters, which you don’t see as in-game models because instead you control the ships they’re in or you order them to work in specific positions in the space station.
I would like to actually have distinct recognizable characters with their own voices so that players can identify with them, like them and not want to lose them.
So I would like to have character cards with portraits and as much as possible unique character voices, and given that the game’s visuals are toward the realistic side, the portraits would be in a realistic style.
This means around 100+ realistic portraits and distinct voices.
As a one man team I can’t actually do this without AI - not enough funds for hiring 100 voice actors, not enough skill to do that kind of design or funds to hire somebody who will do 100 realistic distinct portraits.
So either I seriously trim down that feature (say, their speech is text only, and they have no portraits at all) or I use AI image generation and voice generation.
It’s simply not possible to do certain features at a certain level if you’re a small indie - unlike a big games company, I neither have the skill to do it myself (or in the case of the multiple voices, physically can’t), the employees to do it for me or the funds to pay for freelancers to do it, given how much work that involves.
I’ll probably try multiple options and see which works best. Maybe I’ll use AI for it, maybe I’ll cut down that feature to the point that all you have is an name and written text (essentially making the whole idea of players liking some characters nonviable), maybe I’ll find some middle way that avoids AI.
That said, I support disclosing that AI was used in making the game, ideally if it lets me list where an how it was used.
As a customer, I feel I should be able to make an informed decision when buying something, so it’s only fair that the same applies to my potential customers. As I see it, it should be up to gamers to decide if and how much they care about AI having been used in making a game.
You can’t? It’s impossible? I can think of three ways, off the dome, you could do this without AI.
1- stock photo images and vocaloid voices, using an audio overlay so it sounds like it’s just a weird interference.
2- literally use friends, family, and their friends and family for the project. Random people from the Internet who would have fun with it. Anyone who needs to pad their portfolio for acting, headshots, and voicework. Network your solution.
3- do a patrion or go fund me or whatever and one of the tiers, or the lowest tier, is that you get to be in the game.
Hell, for bonus ideas that are things you thought of already, just draw em and do so the voices and it’ll be crappy but that’s fun, actually bite the bullet and pay people, or like you said, do without.
Using AI is giving up. All those games where part of the appeal was the effort they put into it would be nothingburgers if they used AI. Cuphead took off because it was all hand animated, and if they used regular computer animation people wouldn’t have cared half as much, and now it’s got it’s own cartoon and people are still buying merch for it.
So yeah, if you wanna cut corners and use AI, go right ahead, but people will know you decided to waste a huge amount of energy and water to make a lower end product.
Or… you could always figure something else out and let people see the effort you put into this project you care about, and let that effort be part of the selling point. We want games people put effort into, so please don’t water down your grand idea with slop.
vocaloid voices
“Dont use an LLM, instead use machine generated voices!” ???
Vocaloid typically is developed with the consent of the person who provided the reference voice, just like old school TTS systems.
So? It’s still a machine doing the work. A real person loses a job because of that.
Yeah, they are functionally different.
deleted by creator
Yes, that’s what I’m considering and that’s my point of view.
As I wrote at the end of my post, I totally agree with full disclosure as I think buyers are entitled to make an informed decision and many people feel that the use of AI in making a game is something that makes a difference in their purchasing decision.
I’m not so sure it’s devs wanting to hide that they’re using AI. I think is more of a mix of AI use having become an ideological subject for some people (for understandable reasons given the veritable shitshow of speculative investment, fraud and deceit around it, not to mention that many AI models - especially the corporate ones - are trained on other people’s work against the will of those people) and some are absolutist about it to the point of irrationality (that part is less understandable), and many if not most of those making and selling games not wanting to lose a single sale not matter what.
Whilst I hold the principle that buyers should know what they’re getting before they buy it (and I try to be fair on it rather than wanting it for myself alone, so that means that principle also applies to my potential customers and I’m willing to lose sales for that), mine is a one-person Indie, so the company is me and follows my principles. Some in the industry do not hold such principles or just work in or lead companies which they do not own, so instead they push for the option that maximizes profit, and that’s getting the upsides on both sides - one one side using AI to reduce manpower costs AND on the other not losing the sales of customers who are against AI use like that, which would happen if they were informed about it, so they don’t want mandatory disclosure.
If it’s ideological, wouldn’t it be worse if someone buys the game only to later find out that you used generative ai to make it?
I have the impression that most, if not all, of AAA companies don’t care about gamers getting disappointed after they bought the game.
That’s why the “If it is ideological” prefix to the sentence is important ;)
People who don’t want AI slop and who buy AAA games don’t overlap that much
all you have is an name and written text (essentially making the whole idea of players liking some characters nonviable)
People have favourite characters in books and text-only games all the time - don’t sell yourself short on your ability to write compelling characters before you’ve tried and failed
That’s not the point. People fall in love with poorly drawn characters, bad voice acting, and even some times poorly written stories. It’s all about how creative you are. You only rob yourself of the ability to improve or tell an honest story.
Stop the lies. People would not fall in love with every character having the same voice.
Did your parents never read you bed time stories?
Unlike you I have more refined tastes than a 2 year old child.
Tons of people listen to audio books too. There’s usually only one voice (actor), but they’re pretty good at giving each character their own distinct voice and personality.
Good actors know how to do many roles and convince you they’re a different person.
And yet movies don’t do that, do they? Imagine how much money they would save.
Bro, why you being so hostile.
People can enjoy multiple, different mediums with different ways of communicating artistic vision.
While having unlimited actors can be great, it doesn’t mean the opposite situation is automatically bad and unenjoyable. Nor does having a great cast and budget guarantee a good movie. There are so many instances of fans saying “I liked the book better” than the movie/TV adaptation.
You gotta let your own assumptions be challenged a bit.
There are plenty of movies where the same actor either plays or voices multiple characters. Austin Powers is a good example.
Despite all the “OK idea guy”, “you just want to exploit artists”, and “you’ll get so much more creative control if you do it all alone” being thrown at anyone looking for a team, it’s much easier to find people willing to cooperate with you than you think.
And that’s fair. No one is saying you can’t use it just that it should be listed.
Also, if I read something like your post on the description of a game, I wouldn’t hold it against it. LLMs as a tool to make working class people’s lives easier is great. I’m against it when greedy fucks use it to exclude workers from the process.
I’m sure there are stock images of actual people you could get access to, for a fee. That plus some image editing to get the style you want might be a way to avoid using AI for the portraits. I totally understand wanting to use AI for the voices though, that seems fair.
I don’t think there are that many futuristic portrait photos in a consistent visual style available as stock images, unless we’re talking about existing IPs (say, people in Star Wars outfits), which is something I obviously cannot use.
Photo editing exists brochacho
Maybe not futuristic, but I’m sure there’s a pack of portraits in a consistent style and lighting that you could edit to look more futuristic. Most good photo editing programs have ways to apply edits to a big batch of photos, so I bet you could do a bulk of the work in one go, then touch things up from there.
You could write the base game without AI, then add the extended AI resources as a DLC pack
That’s actually a very interesting way to tackle the whole thing and opens up an even broader scope than it seems at first sight.
The base game has simple text-only character “speech” with no portraits.
AI generated character portraits with AI-generated voices is a free DLC released alongside the game.
For my specific case there would be no gameplay differences in having or not the DLC installed, only a simpler or fancier version of character interaction.
Also given that some of that stuff is going to be a lot of voice recordings, it makes the base game much smaller.
Its give gamers a choice, which is as it should be IMHO, and it also gives me feedback on how many people would rather have a less fancy version without AI generated elements over having a fancier version with AI generated elements.
This is definitely a good way to go; not only does it decouple the AI generated assets from the game, but in doing so lets you get a picture of how important they are to your players. It might be that everyone grabs the DLC despite it being AI generated, or it might be that a large chunk avoid it because of that. That would be useful information for your next game.
From there, it probably wouldn’t be too difficult to make it moddable, so people could even create their own voice packs and portraits if they wanted
I’m gonna be that guy and say don’t use it then. The AI imigies are purely based on stolen art; you’d be profiting off stolen art. I don’t care how legal it is, it’s someone’s hard work being undermined just so your life can be easier. It’s just another way giant mega corps take power from the people. Instead of commissioning some artist or voice actor, you’re giving money to some giant mega corp that can lobby the government to place data centers that poison people’s water supply and increase people’s energy bills.
That said, I support disclosing that AI was used in making the game
Which was the whole point of the original post.
You don’t need 100 voice actors. A decent voice actor can do multiples voices. But it would still be expensive.
Do you really need 100 differents voices? Even AAA games with large budget probably have less voices, focusing on the most important characters.
Games often use tricks, showing text/subtiles instead of actual voices, and inserting random “hum” / “clear throat” / whistle sounds to make the interaction more lively, avoid complete silence.
I guess you’re not making a typical game and voice synthesis might make sense for your game. Hopefully you can specify somewhere you’re using AI for voice only, not for storyline nor other artwork, to reassure players.
I’m sad people seem to be giving flak for this. Regardless of your opinion on current AI tools, they definitely lower some barriers, which can result in more things getting made because of lower risk.
A good game will be good regardless of where an art asset came from, and some people really care about not buying AI utilizing games. Labeling only scares people peddling low effort crap.
If you’re looking for a way to not use ai for portrait art, one thing you can do is leverage combinations in your favor. Draw 10 noses, 10 mouths, 10 shirt collars, 10 hairstyles and so on. When you need a new character, paste together your pre-fab pieces at random , pallet swap the colors randomly and then touch up the details.
Look at town to city, their characters are like four voxels wide and have plenty of character. You can go the AI route but I think the art would always end up just looking like it’s AI, always just a little bit off. It all depends on the style of your game.
If you’re going the photo realistic route you can still do it without AI, just use something like metahumans or one of the many equivalents.
lemmy perfectly proving the point of why devs don’t want people to know what tools they use.
First of all, they’re not intelligent enough to come to any sort of rational conclusion on the matter, so there’s that
I would bet that the steam client has at least 1 line of ai generated code in it.
Where’s their disclosure?
Why would you disclose one line of AI code. It’s unidentifiable and meaningless. Like saying you don’t want code where auto complete was used and every character must be written by a human finger.
Kind of like using AI to place one single pixel in an image.
Because they’re forcing their clients to disclose any use of AI for any kind of content including, art, sound and code.
That would include 1 line.
Let’s not kid ourselves that that’s the limit that must not be crossed. Art, sound and code is more than one line for anyone that has written even a hello world program on any popular game engine. This is a bad faith argument with no purpose other than to muddy the waters.
The point is, I guarantee you valve has ai generate code in their platform. It’s widely used. And unless you’ve gone and like vibe coded the whole thing it’s pointless to require declaring it.
Where do you draw the line? A function? A class? An optimized algorithm? A feature? A test suite?
Steams policy on this (edit: on code) is bad.
You only need do disclose what could ever potentially be identified as AI. Otherwise it’s unenforceable. Even saying it’s used for code is debatable. You can’t tell once it’s compiled and can’t tell the difference between one developer breaking the companies policy or a policy that short snippets or auto complete are fine
Sounds like they should just remove it then. Having an unenforceble policy is a bad policy.
You want them to declare that the NPCs use an LLM to interact with you sure, that’s different, but this code part of the policy is bad.
Maybe you should write to Valve about it, rather than giving slippery-slope arguments to people who have nothing whatsoever to do with it.
You’ve said your piece. Arguing about it further is not helping anyone. It’s fermenting hostility for no benefit.
I did yes. But I figure either could work!
You’ve got slippery slope backwards lol.
Slippery slope is I can’t let you do ABC because if you do you’ll do XYZ.
This is you can’t do ABC, XYZ, 123, QWERTY, but if you do XYZ, 123, QWERTY you shouldn’t tell us because it’s actually okay and we didn’t really mean all those other things.
Valves policy if anything is the bad policy because it’s the strict policy you put in place because you’re implementing it due being worried about slippery slope.
Edit: And were literally in a thread where someone from VALVE is defending this bad policy, so this is the exact place to say my piece on it.
edit: Just to note, Valve will let you do it, they just stick you with a declaration that has a negative connotation to much of the community, such as the developer replying here, which is harmful to the game developer, while those who lie and did the exact same thing benefit from a shiny decal declaring their false purity
Why would it? The client has been around for ages and hasn’t changed in all that time. So your getting mad about a hypothetical. Your weird.
The client is constantly getting updates. Maybe the visual store layout hasn’t changed to you, but hasn’t updated in years is comical. The client beta has one from Nov 25th.
So you’re angry that it is theoretically possible that the client contains AI code and therefore in your mind it there definitely does.
I’m angry that they are punishing devs for things I guarantee you they use.
It’s not a possibility.
Valve is not anti AI even if this one dev doesn’t like it and Gabe supports it’s use in general.
Here’s an example of valve using AI, whether he copied any lines of code i don’t know, but Valve IS using AI.
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/valve-chatgpt-deadlock-algorithm/
I expect devs to disclose when they use photoshop, IDEs with autocomplete, and store-bought assets as well. Starting to sound silly? That’s because it is
Because store bought assets are still quality assets and are human made. The only reason it sounds silly is because you went out of your way to make it silly.
Inb4 asset stores become >90% AI generated
Hence the need for the AI tag.
Silly? No I would love that, imagine if all games listed all the tools used in its creation, it would be so informative!
