In recent years, Steam has required developers to publicly disclose whether they use generative AI to create game content, which has triggered a lot of discussion. A few days ago, Tim Sweeney publicly criticized Valve’s AI disclosure policy, believing that these labels are like putting “scarlet letters” on games, which will give players a preconceived negative impression of the work and make it more difficult for developers who use AI tools to succeed. Unexpectedly, not long after he finished speaking, a developer went directly in the opposite direction and launched a browser plug-in to make Steam’s AI logo more conspicuous.
AI games are directly mosaic, and players can skip them at a glance!
This plug-in, called “AI Warning for Steam”, currently supports Chrome and Firefox. After installation, as long as the player opens any Steam store page with an AI disclosure mark, the system will automatically pop up a reminder window to let the player know for the first time that this game has used AI to generate content.
What’s even more cruel is that in the Steam search page, all games with AI disclosure will be directly blurred, and the “AI Generated Content Disclosure found” prompt will be displayed above, which is equivalent to completing the screening for players in advance. Many players believe that this can save the time of checking the store pages one by one, but some people are worried that this may make the already controversial AI games more difficult to see.
The battle for AI labels is getting more intense
Tim Sweeney has always believed that AI itself is just a tool, and almost all game development in the future will use AI assistance. Therefore, Steam’s forced disclosure of AI content is equivalent to putting a negative label on the work, and may even attract anti-AI players to deliberately resist. He also cited research pointing out that games with AI revelations tend to be more likely to be ignored by players.
However, the emergence of this plug-in also reflects the thoughts of another group of players. For many people, since Steam provides AI disclosure information, it means that players have the right to filter according to their own preferences. Some people don’t care about AI, while others just don’t want to buy any games that use generative AI content, and this plug-in just makes the information originally provided by Steam more eye-catching.
Is AI a tool or a deduction?
There is still no standard answer to whether AI should appear in the game development process. But what is certain is that Steam players have begun to create their own tools to decide which games deserve to be seen and which games are simply ignored. It can only be said that Valve only provides an AI tag, and it is the players themselves who really turn it into a “filter”.