In a Reddit post spotted by games industry veteran Simon Carless, a developer recounted submitting an early version of a game to Steam with a few "fairly obviously AI generated" assets which they said they planned to improve by hand in a later build.

In response, they were told the game could not be approved unless the developer could prove to Valve that they owned all the necessary rights.

"After reviewing, we have identified intellectual property in [Game Name Here] which appears to belongs to one or more third parties," Valve said. "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."

Valve said it was failing the build and would give the developer a single opportunity to remove any content they didn't own the rights to before resubmitting it.

The developer said they then improved the assets in question by hand "so there were no longer any obvious signs of AI," but after resubmitting the game it was again rejected.

"We cannot ship games for which the developer does not have all of the necessary rights. At this time, we are declining to distribute your game since it's unclear if the underlying AI tech used to create the assets has sufficient rights to the training data."