What Are the Risks of Using AI-Generated Assets in Commercial Games?

Legal and Ownership Risks

One of the most significant risks facing studios that use AI-generated assets is uncertainty around copyright protection. Under current U.S. Copyright Office guidance, works produced with little or no meaningful human creative input generally cannot be copyrighted, since copyright law requires human authorship. For a commercial game, this could mean that purely AI-generated art, music, or other assets included in a release aren’t fully protected against being copied or reused by others, unlike traditionally created assets a studio has full ownership rights over.

There’s also a related infringement risk running the other direction: because generative AI models are trained on large datasets that may include copyrighted material, there’s some possibility that generated output could closely resemble existing copyrighted work, potentially exposing a studio to infringement claims from the original rights holder, even if the resemblance wasn’t intentional.

Platform Policy and Reputational Risks

Beyond legal exposure, studios face practical requirements from the platforms they distribute through. Some major digital game storefronts have introduced policies requiring developers to disclose when a submitted game includes AI-generated content, reflecting broader industry movement toward transparency about how games are made. Failing to comply with these disclosure requirements can create friction with platform holders during the submission or review process.

Separately, and often more immediately consequential commercially, is community and player reaction. Game audiences have shown they can react strongly and negatively when they discover undisclosed AI-generated content in a commercial release, particularly art assets or marketing material, viewing it as a sign of reduced craftsmanship or a lack of transparency. This kind of backlash can affect a game’s reception and sales independent of any actual legal issue with the content itself.

How Studios Commonly Mitigate These Risks

A common risk-mitigation approach is treating AI-generated output as a starting point rather than a finished asset — using it for early concept exploration or as a base layer that human artists then substantially modify, redraw, or rebuild. This can strengthen a studio’s copyright position, since the meaningful human creative contribution added on top may be independently protectable, while also reducing the chance that final assets closely resemble any specific existing copyrighted work the AI model may have been trained on. Being proactive and transparent about how and where AI tools were used in a game’s development has also helped some studios avoid the sharpest community backlash compared to being caught using undisclosed AI content.

Bottom Line

Commercial games using AI-generated assets face real risks around uncertain copyright protection, potential infringement, platform disclosure requirements, and player backlash — risks studios commonly manage by treating AI output as a modified starting point rather than a final, unedited commercial asset.

Go deeper

• Can You Copyright a Product Design That Was Substantially AI-Generated?
• Can You Copyright Something an AI Helped You Write?
• Who Owns the Output of an AI Image Generator?