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Steam Week in Review: AI disclosures enter the discourse again, as Epic CEO calls them 'just as partisan as mandatory political essays'
All the interesting Steam facts for the week ending October 25.
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Valve's mandatory AI disclosures are once again at the centre of the discourse, mostly thanks to Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney, who has long been vocally against them. The debate has been reheated in the same month Epic Games proudly announced it will pivot to "AI first" development on its forthcoming Star Wars and Marvel crossover. Then it announced an AI game jam, before walking back its requirement for AI to be used.
But the true battleground has been on Elon Musk's X, where Sweeney's refocused his reticule on Steam. One of his most repeated notions this time around is that forcing developers to disclose AI use is inherently political.
"Forcing developers to write a political statement to be used against them by the hate mob they're [Valve is] helping organize is abhorrent," he wrote on October 24 in response to some AI loving guy who works at an AI company.
Later, to another user: "These AI statements are just as partisan as mandatory political essays or forcing developers to list their voting history to drive cancel campaigns and public struggle sessions."
And then: "There is a real economic cost to Valve’s foray into forced political disclosures. Besides taking 30%, they’re also taking a potentially even larger fraction of developers’ revenue and livelihood by undermining their business with these AI hate campaigns."
(Later, when a user wrote this is a "big opening for Epic if Valve doesn't figure this out", Sweeney replied "Yep!")
On October 25: "They [Valve] are burning down the businesses of good developers to enforce their politics. A year from now they’ll all be using AI, games will be better and made faster, and they’ll pretend their hate mob posting the death threats wasn’t wrong but merely misunderstood."
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