Epic Games has more and more leaned into AI to accelerate game development, with the gaming giant recently announcing that it was switching to AI-first development and adding a slew of new AI-powered features in Unreal Engine. Now, Epic Games's Tim Sweeney has responded to a Kotaku article about Epic Games issuing a DMCA take-down of an AI-created Fortnite clone, effectively explaining that the studio will soon allow AI training on "outputs of Unreal Engine and MetaHuman."
Sweeney explained in the post on X that, while it currently restricts AI training on outputs from Unreal Engine and MetaHuman, the company is "working to remove this restriction from EULA terms, though each game using these tools is released under terms of the developers' choosing, which can allow or restrict AI training." This has largely been met by backlash from the gaming community, who reject Sweeney's framing it as a copyright issue and describe it as hypocritical for Epic to take down an AI-generated Fortnite clone but also train its AI models on output created by Unreal Engine developers. It's not currently clear if the training data will be kept for Epic's own AI models alone or if it will also be sold to third parties for AI training.