A new month, a new story, in this case on Steam, of massive and unjustified bans on content created by generative artificial intelligence algorithms. Anyone would say that, if it continues at this rate, in a couple of years or so, its use for any purpose other than mere personal recreation will end up being totally prohibited. Of course, for said future to be fulfilled, an important condition is that all these prohibitions are real and that, therefore, the use of artificial intelligence is being vetoed simply because… well, I don’t really know, the truth.
It is true that it is necessary to establish some regulations that prevent the proliferation of AI from being translated into the massive job destructionbut regulators on both sides of the Atlantic are already working on it and, in the case of the European Union, they intend to do it at record speed for their standards, with a rule applied before the end of 2023 (although we hope it will be applied adaptation period for affected companies).
In the absence of such public regulations, more and more entities are establishing their own standards in this regard. For example, a couple of weeks ago we learned that AI creations are not eligible for the Grammy Awards, although there is no problem for compositions that have used said technology to do so at some point. Something that seems logical, after knowing that even “dinosaurs” (understand that I say this in the best of senses) like Paul McCartney have signed up to use AI, in this case to record what, except for surprise, it will be the last song of The Beatles.
So, with an industry that accepts the moderate use of AI, this week news began to circulate that Steam would not approve games that had content created with artificial intelligence. Yes, the usual, another juicy headline. As much as the one from the beginning of May, which claimed that Steam was removing songs created with artificial intelligence. And you, dear reader, surely you already know what both news have in common.
Indeed, as we can read in The Verge, which has asked Valve for clarifications, Steam is not banning content generated by artificial intelligence. Or, to be more precise, you’re not banning AI-generated content for AI origin, you’re actually preventing the posting of copyright-protected content. Something that, on the other hand, he has been doing for years, regardless of whether it was created by humans, by AI or by monkeys with typewriters and crossbows.
One of the problems with generative artificial intelligences is that they have the bad habit of reproducing the content ingested during their learning, which is especially problematic if such training data is protected. Thus, the only thing that Valve is doing is preventing this type of content from reaching Steam, due to the enormous problem that this can pose. But of course, we go back to business as usual, that headline sells much less.
