Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says Steam should drop its ‘Made with AI’ tags

Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney thinks Steam and other game stores should drop “Made with AI” tags, arguing that they’ll soon be irrelevant as generative AI becomes ubiquitous in production.

“The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation,” Sweeney wrote on X in response to a user calling for Steam and other digital marketplaces to drop tags that mark content made using generative AI. “It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production.”

“Why stop at AI use? We could have mandatory disclosures for what shampoo brand the developer uses,” he wrote in another post. “Customers deserve to know lol.”

After initially taking a cautious approach towards AI-generated code and assets, Steam now permits the majority of games that have been developed using generative AI, so long as that use is disclosed. Sweeney, who also runs the rival Epic Games Store, thinks that sort of disclosure is no longer necessary.

Earlier this month Junghun Lee, CEO of publisher Nexon, said it was “important to assume that every game company is now using AI,” following criticism of the use of AI-generated voice lines in Nexon-published game Arc Raiders. Sweeney weighed in on X then too, arguing that AI “increases human productivity in some areas by integer multiples,” but that this should lead to “building better games rather than employing fewer people.”

Sweeney may be right that AI use is becoming more prevalent, and not just in games, with Microsoft claiming that 91 percent of its engineering teams use GitHub Copilot, and AI becoming increasingly embedded in all sorts of development and creativity tools. But that doesn’t mean every developer would support ditching AI labels, with a growing number of indie game developers using “AI-free” as a sales pitch.