[acoard]

It’s about legal copyright exposure. The copyright status of AI art is unclear, it has not been legislated or tried before the courts. In a worst case scenario, Steam could allow “AI generated games” on, after which AI art is regulated perhaps requiring permission or royalties from the original art used to train the model. In such a scenario, Valve themselves may get included in the lawsuit.

With this step, Valve massively reduces their legal exposure. Even if some AI are games slip through and the worst case scenario manifests it is still likely Valve will be fine, as they’ve sufficiently isolated themselves from the risk.

As for whether NMS counts, the answer is no. This isn’t about AI per se, it’s about using models trained on other copyrighted works. NMS doesn’t do that in any of its procedural generation.

As for how much AI generated art counts, this is a ship of Theseus problem. Not saying it’s easy, but hardly the first time regulation has come up against it.