Major industry survey finds that, surprise surprise, 9/10 game devs think generative AI use should be more fully disclosed on Steam

A major new survey by GamesIndustry.biz has found, among many other things, that almost nine out of ten workers in the games industry (88.4%) believe Valve should force developers to declare any generative AI usage. This comes shortly after Valve updated Steam's AI disclosure policy in January to specify a focus on AI-generated content that is "consumed by players," rather than "efficiency gains" from AI use behind-the-scenes.

The GIBiz survey found that almost half of respondents disagreed with this policy change. The question asked was "Do you agree with Valve's approach of requiring developers to declare AI use only for content 'consumed by players', rather than for efficiency tools?" 48.7% of respondents said "no", 32.1% said "yes", and 19.2% responded "maybe or don't know."

76.8% of respondents said they would self-declare AI usage, even if it was only involved in concept work or used for efficiency purposes, on their game's Steam page. Things get murkier when developers are asked precisely what kind of AI disclosures they would find appropriate: 51.9% believe a checklist approach would work best, with games specifying to players exactly how AI was used, with 13.7% saying a full and detailed disclosure should accompany every game. 28.4% thought a simple yes or no disclosure was fine.

The survey ran for just under two weeks and had 826 respondents. One of the more surprising results is that 66.1% of respondents said there was no use of generative AI tools within their studio, with 30.6% saying they were used to some extent. The survey does skew towards smaller-scale development studios, which is worth bearing in mind: 64.8% of respondents work in studios of up to 49 team members, 15.5% are at places with between 50 and 250 employees, and 19.7% belong to companies of 251 or more employees.

The full survey gets even more granular about exact roles in development, seniority (24.8% are either executive or senior leadership), whether AI had ever been pushed on them (only 3.5% said they'd ever been mandated to use it), whether the company is public or private, and so on.

Most respondents (78.1%) said they never used AI for anything. But among the remainder that do, the most popular uses were brainstorming (9.3%), code generation (9.1%), creating reports (7.9%), code review (7.7%), prototyping (5.8%), translation (5.3%), and a low percentage using it for admin. Very few reported using it for asset generation (3.5%).

The things that tend to attract a lot of attention and concern from players are among the things AI is apparently least-used for: voice generation (2.3%), text generation (1.8%), and generating music and audio (1.3%). This goes hand-in-hand with the majority of respondents, around 85% in each case, saying AI should never be used for such things.

The one exception here is that 82.9% believed it was fine to use AI to generate placeholder audio early in development, with the understanding it will be replaced with real actors later in development. Which seems reasonable enough.

There was room in the survey for developers to add their own comments. One particularly notable example: "The only reason we are declaring the usage is because currently players care. For the time being, we should be specific and clear about its use. In the near future, players will no longer care and then we won't disclose it anymore."

But the take-home message is clear. Developers clearly believe AI use should be disclosed on storefronts, and with stricter guardrails than Steam is currently employing. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that most players would agree: after all, we surely deserve to know what we're paying for.