Epic Games founder and CEO, Tim Sweeney, has revealed that games featuring generative AI will be allowed on the Epic Games Store.
Sweeney revealed this information at X. If you are interested in the AI controversy, you can check out our other articles here.
Tim Sweeney: Epic Games Store Open to AI Games
In response to an X user accusing Valve of implementing “ridiculous” anti-AI policies on Steam, Tim Sweeney suggested taking the game to the Epic Games Store as they don’t “ban games for using new technology”.
In July 2023, Valve said that “legal uncertainty” regarding how some generative AI models had been trained was the reason why the company was cautious about approving games that used the technology.
Contrast this with Sweeney, who says that while the copyright issue of AI makes sense, games that contain “a lot of man-made content plus some AI content can be protected overall, even if some specific assets are not protected”.
The idea that art created from generative AI whose training set of billions of images includes a particular source artwork is a derivative work of that source art is a huge leap beyond existing legal precedents. No court has ever issued such a decision.
If this is so, it is hard to see how it would not lead to the same conclusion that every work done by a human artist is a derivative work of everything the artist has ever seen, by contributing to the wiring of the neurons in their brain.
Tim Sweeney, Founder and CEO of Epic Games
Sweeney also revealed that Epic Games does not train generative AI on any customer content in its services or marketplaces.
“These are just my thoughts on why we shouldn’t assume all generative AI is bad or infringing,” Sweeney added.
