No, Tim Sweeney, Valve Isn’t ‘Irresponsible’ For Having An AI Disclosure Tag On Games

from the opacity-as-a-strategy dept

There are bad takes on AI, and then there are bad takes on AI. Some of you think my takes on the use of AI in gaming are bad. Cool, love you, kiss kiss. I think the takes from folks on both extremes, the never-AI-ers and the AI evangelists, are pretty awful most of the time. I’ll accept your love and kisses in return. And I particularly don’t like it when those in gaming journalism act like there is zero place for this technology in the industry nearly as much as I absolutely hate it when those within the industry itself fuel the concerns about it by claiming AI will do all the things most gamers feverishly don’t want it to do. I can assure you it can be very frustrating being me when it comes to this particular topic. And, no, I don’t expect any sympathy over it.

But what Tim Sweeney just said about Steam’s use of AI disclaimers on its platform might well be one of the dumbest fucking things I’ve ever heard someone in the industry say.

In the past few months, video game publishers and developers have been going all in on generative AI with the justification that it speeds up and improves development. In the attempt to help gamers make informed choices about their purchases, Valve has started enforcing AI disclosures on Steam, which Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney believes is irresponsible of the company, as it has a negative impact.

“It’s unfortunate that so many developers now are put into this position. If you want to launch a game, and get it as widely publicized as possible, you’ve got to put it on Steam so people can wish list it, and if you want to play it on Steam, then you have to get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game,” Sweeney said to PC Gamer in a new interview. “I think it’s really irresponsible of Valve. They shouldn’t do it, because it makes it much, much, much harder for a game developer to have a chance of success. You have to choose from either not using tools that can make you way more productive, and probably failing due to competition that does.”

First, to quibble with the article: claiming that “video game publishers and developers” writ large are “going all in” on generative AI is just plain wrong. In fact, there are plenty of developers and publishers out there that have flatly sworn off the use of this technology entirely. And that’s a good thing, to my way of thinking. Every experiment needs a control group, after all.

But the real issue here is just how tone deaf and idiotic it is for Sweeney to chide a rival platform for the severe crime of informing customers about the content of the games they purchase and how they were created, specifically on a hot button issue like the AI in gaming. While I, too, have made it clear that I think pre-judging every game that made any use of AI at all in development is a mistake, the cure for it is certainly not obfuscating that information from the very people that pay for these games.

Customers are supposed to be making informed buying decisions. I didn’t really think that was a matter open for debate. And Steam making that information transparent to the public is quite literally the opposite of “irresponsible”. It’s being very responsible to Steam’s customers. As for calling such disclosures a “scarlett letter”, well, I think the lady doth protest too much, as it were.

Especially when it’s obvious why Sweeney is taking this position.

To be fair, it’s not surprising to see Tim Sweeney staunchly defending the use of AI in game development, as Epic Games’ upcoming Unreal Engine 6 is going all-in with AI integration.

Now, Sweeney went on to talk about how generative AI can be used by developers to reduce the need for game makers to buy pre-made assets off of asset stores, content libraries, and reduce the economic costs for developing a game as a result… and I think those arguments are interesting and worthy of debate.

But pretty blatant attempts to try to inoculate the ecosystem against backlash for games produced by Epic’s engine by purposefully making the consumer less informed is an absolute loser of an argument.

Filed Under: ai, ai in video games, disclosures, information, tim sweeney, video games

Companies: epic, valve