Absurdity of Steam's AI Policies
Tim Sweeney took the internet-brave stance of pointing out the obvious absurdity of Steam's AI policies. Steam's AI rules are sweeping: "if your game used AI services during development or incorporates AI services as part of the product, you must describe that implementation in detail." The result is a visible "AI Generated Content Disclosure" block on store pages. A minority of very online agitators claim the nutrition analogy: consumers should know the ingredient list of their games to make informed choices. However, that analogy collapses under scrutiny. Tim Sweeney joked that if we are going to mandate AI disclosures, why not go all the way to shampoo-brand labels for devs.
Nutrition labels work because calories and grams are chemistry; AI is not. The boundary between "AI-generated" and "AI-assisted" is a thicket of judgment calls. If an artist uses an AI upscaler, does that count? If an engineer accepts a Copilot autocomplete, which is already universal across software teams? What if game designers used AI to think through designs? Under Valve's logic, the answer is yes: any use triggers disclosure. This tells us only that modern tools exist.
A better analogy is not nutrition; it is fair-trade labels. They are voluntary, definition-fuzzy, and mostly marketing. If consumers truly craved "AI-free" games, publishers should race to advertise them the same way they trumpet "no loot boxes" or "no DRM." The reason the suggestion gets rejected is revealing. Information is not the goal. Punishment is.
Notably, none of this internet energy is aimed at AI code. No one is lobbying for "built with AI coding tools," despite the fact that half the industry already is. The outrage concentrates on art because this debate is not about consumer transparency; it is about guild politics. It is an attempt to cordon off certain tools by stigmatizing the people who use them.
Economically, this is fighting gravity. Since the invention of the pulley, human progress has been a story of labor-saving tools. Photoshop compressed months of manual work into hours, just as the pulley, plow, and combustion-engine innovations did for farming. The absurd idea of 3000 BC Mesopotamian "plow" disclosures on grain harvest should tell us something.
In the United States, farming went from employing nearly half the population to under 2% while output exploded (source). Productivity rose, prices fell, and living standards increased. For small teams, AI is the most literal labor-enhancing technology games have had... ever. It expands what a five-person studio can build and shrinks the cost of ambition.
This is why the panic will not last. Steam's label system will drift toward universal tagging as AI seeps into every corner of production, at which point the disclosure becomes white noise. Meanwhile, the teams that embrace AI will ship more inventive games with fewer people, and the rest will still be arguing over the fine print on a label that no longer means anything at all.