AI has been the bane of, well, everyone’s existence for over three years now. It started as a gag, a gimmick even, a fun thing to try out and see how far neural networks had come. Now? It’s a corporate trend where they try to convince you that, yeah, productivity is the end goal of society, damn all the Luddites and their desire to keep human creativity intact. And one of them is, to no one’s surprise, Tim Sweeney, chief executive of Epic Games, who has a strong AI stake given how much Unreal Engine has become “AI-friendly” in recent months, to the point where the company actively promotes that fact. And he’s so much in it that he’s now critical of Valve for requiring developers to disclose how they used AI technologies in their games, saying it’s an “irresponsible” thing to do that causes pain to lots of developers. In an interview with PC Gamer, Sweeney said that “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,” but that issues arise when you “get this Scarlet Letter of AI attached to your product, and now there is a hater community trying to kill the game.” Steam requires games to disclose if they used AI to produce assets. Image via Steam “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 [or] probably failing due to competition that does,” Sweeney added. He’s quite adamant that Valve should remove the AI disclosure requirement from its store, which, mind you, only affects studios and developers who use AI to generate entire assets, including textures, visuals, music, sound, and so on. Code assistance, the only really sort of acceptable task for LLMs, no longer pushes you toward disclosure, which is, for most people, quite fine. The problem comes when you are using AI to replace human creativity and imagination. Coding, to an extent, is a creative process, but it is also packed with a ton of rote work that simply takes up time without any real depth. AI can help here and do those low-level tasks for you, allowing you to switch focus to something more important. But art is important from start to finish. Ideation, imagination, brainstorming, experimenting and trying different things. This is how we get amazing games, incredible concepts, and blockbuster hits made by even single developers. AI is the “great averaging machine” and only churns out slop that is the middle of all of its inputs. Nothing new, nothing significant. But I’ve already spoken about this on several other occasions. The fact of the matter here is that Epic Games has a major stake in AI through Unreal Engine. They need it to succeed because AI is, unfortunately, a money printer these days, of course, one that comes at the expense of the average Joe, not the suited-up, thousand-dollar-watch-wearing corporate executive. We’re paying for it through more expensive RAM, bigger energy bills, and our countries being polluted to kingdom come by data centers that could go belly up at any point. And policies like Steam’s are there to protect consumers who, rightfully, have reasons to object to and avoid AI like the plague that it is. But not everyone is on that side. Someone “more responsible” makes a good lump of change off it. And it isn’t Valve. 0The post Epic Games’ Tim Sweeney is at it again, says Steam’s AI disclosure requirement is ‘irresponsible’ appeared first on Destructoid.