Valve rumoured to be working on 'SteamGPT' AI bot for support and anti-cheat functions

Is there nothing sacred? Are all things destined to be consumed by AI slop? Apparently so, for now even Valve is turning to the artificial side with reports of references to "SteamGPT" appearing in the company's source code. The end, verily, is nigh, no doubt courtesy of life imitating Valve's murderously passive-aggressive Portal game art.

In all seriousness, fair to say Valve has hitherto been one of the least AI-adjacent tech outfits since the whole LLM-transformer-chatbot-video-generation-agentic-overlord thing really took off in the last few years. So, this would be at least something of a pivot.

First up, X poster @gabefollower spotted references to SteamGPT in various Steam-related code. There are multiple entries that appear to be related to a wide range of tasks, from task queues and code testing, to account management and security.

There are also references relating to Valve’s Trust systems including, reportedly, trust scores, account age, account buckets, related accounts, confidence values, and inference results. In short, there's an anti-cheat angle here, too.

However, it's worth noting that there does not appear to be much in all this that unambiguously indicates Valve plans to unleash a chatbot on unsuspecting Steam users. Instead, this is all seems to tilt toward some kind of internal tool for use at Valve.

That said, some outlets are interpreting this a move by Valve to lean on AI as a tool for customer support. The idea is that Valve receives thousands of support queries daily and SteamGPT could be used to lighten that load, especially during the likes of major sales events when staff can become overwhelmed.

The anti-cheat aspect will trouble some observers, too. To filter increasingly sophisticated cheating vectors, one presumes that any AI tool would need pretty comprehensive monitoring access to player profiles, activity, gameplay and more, perhaps even at local system level. Some, for sure, won't like the idea of that.

Taking a sober view of it all, there's probably no need to panic. Indeed, there's likely also no need to take a purist view about all this. Thus far, from an external perspective at least, Valve has hardly been an enthusiastic passenger on the AI bandwagon.

Equally, however, there are bound to worthwhile use cases at Valve for AI tools and using AI as a tool for specific fairly narrow tasks as opposed to some kind of omnipotent being is certainly how Valve seems to be approaching things, if the snippets of code referring to SteamGPT are anything to go by.

Indeed, Valve's mooted Frame Estimator tool that predicts gaming frame rates based on given hardware configurations could be another example of AI used narrowly for a specific task. Moreover, if any gaming company can use AI to its advantage to make gaming more intriguing, immersive and—in just the right way—foreboding, it's surely the one that sired GLaDOS.