Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
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Comments417https://insider-gaming.com/indie-game-awards-disqualifies-clair-obscur-expedition-33-gen-ai/Open linkView original on pawb.social
Seems excessive.
There’s AI slop games, the new breed of lazy asset flips. There’s replacing employees with slop machines.
And then there’s “a few of our textures were computer generated.” In a game that is clearly passionately crafted art.
I get it’s about principle, but still.
For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I'm less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even think having an artist make the "core" texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn't a problem for me.
Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.
And little tools like that give studios like this an edge over AAAs. It’s the start of negating their massive manpower advantage.
In other words, the anti-corpo angle seems well worth the “cost” of a few generations. That’s the whole point of AI protest, right? It really against the corps enshittifying stuff.
And little niche extensions in workflows is how machine learning is supposed to be used, like it was well before it got all the hype.
Most AAA studios at this point have in-house AIs and training, I'm not sure it's the equalizing factor people think it is.
An OpenAI subscription does not count.
Otherwise, yeah… but it helps them less, proportionally. AAAs still have the fundamental Issue of targeting huge audiences with bland games. Making them even more gigantic isn’t going to help much.
AAs and below can get closer to that “AAA” feel with their more focused project.
100% agree. I'm glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art.
That’s precisely not what happened with E33.
The implication here is that you can gain manpower without hiring more men, no?
More that an existing smaller studio doesn’t have to sell their soul to a publisher (or get lucky) to survive. They can more safely make a “big” game without going AAA.
My observation is that there’s a “sweet spot” for developers somewhere around the Satisfactory (Coffee Stain) size, with E33 at the upper end of that, but that limits their audience and scope. If they can cut expensive mocap rigs, a bunch of outsourced bulk art, stuff like that with specific automation, so long as they don’t tether themselves to Big Tech AI, that takes away the advantage AAAs have over them.
A few computer generated textures is the first tiny step in that direction.
So no. AI is shit at replacing artists. Especially in E33 tier games. But it’s not a bad tool to add to their bucket, so they can do more.
Right, so the barrier was that they had to pay for this "outsourced bulk art", and now with AI they don't have to. It looks like we are in agreement when I say "I’m glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art"?
One builder only uses hand tools, other uses power tools.
That’s the difference, nobody is hiring less people because the tools are better.
Except, right now, they absolutely are. The tools are largely as you describe - though thinking about it, I think I'd describe it more as an airbrush vs a paint brush - but that's not the way that upper management sees it for the most part, and not how the average supporter of GenAI sees it even if they don't recognize that that's their view. Both of these groups see it as a way to cut costs by reducing manpower, even if the GenAI folk don't recognize that that's what their stance is (or refuse to accept it). It's the same as in the programming side of the conversation: vibe coders and prompt generators being hired instead of skilled professionals who can actually use the tools where they're truly useful. Why pay an artist or programmer to do the work when I can just ask an LLM trained on stolen work to do it for me instead.
I read a great post probably a year ago now from somebody who works for a movie studio on why the company has banned hiring prompters. The short of it is, they hired on a number of prompters to replace some jobs that would normally be filled by artists as a test to see if they could reduce their staff while maintaining the same levels of production. What they found was that prompters could produce a massive volume of work very quickly. You ask the team for pictures of a forest scene and the artists would come back in a week with a dozen concepts each while the prompters had 50 the next day. But, if you asked them to take one of their concept pieces and do something like remove the house in it or add people in the foreground, they'd come back the next day with 50 new concept pieces but not the original. They couldn't grasp the concept of editing and refining an image, only using GenAI to generate more with a new set of prompt parameters, and therefore were incapable of doing the work needed that an artist could do.
A feel-good story for artists showing what AI is actually capable of and what it isn't, except for one thing: the company still replaced artists with AI before they learned their lesson, and that's the phase most of the world is in right now and will probably continue to be in until the bubble bursts. And as Alanah Pierce so eloquently put it when talking about the record setting year over year layoffs in the gaming industry (each year has been worse than during the 2008 financial crash): "Most of those people will never work in games again. There's just too many people out of work and not enough jobs to go around." These companies currently in the fuck around phase will find out eventually, but by then it won't matter for many people. They'll never find a job in their field in time and be forced into other work. Art is already one of the lowest paying jobs for the amount of effort and experience required. Many artists who work on commissions do so for less than minimum wage, and starting wages in the game industry for artists haven't increased since I was looking at jobs in the field 15 years ago.
A can many using hand tools is producing less, and would require more people to have the same output as a company using power tools ...
Oh fuck off with that sentiment. You're very well aware that that's not what happened here, nor is it what's happening in a majority of genAI usage cases. In fact in most cases it IS artists using genAI to speed up the design process.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn't afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn't exist they simply wouldn't have been hired.
Yes, there IS a currently ongoing shift. Just like there was e.g. with the mechanic loom. Did that kill off handmade clothing? No - even today we still have artists making handmade clothing and in fact making tons more off of it, while the masses got access to cheap clothing. The initial sudden rush to the new tech is annoying and yes it exposes some people to hardships (which is why we should switch from capitalism, and start providing UBI), but it WILL balance out. Remember, the luddites were wrong at the end.
Language 😠.
Yes, I know I'm kinda strict on that, but there are no reason here to come to insults.
You got a good point here, and the message you answered to got downvoted to oblivion.
If you disagre, downvote away, don't feed the possible troll with your anger.
That excuse can be used by big publishers as well, no?
Oh, yes. Big publisher will try it on a huge scale. They cant help themselves.
And they’re going to get sloppy results back. If they wanna footgun themselves, it’s their foot to shoot.
Some mid sized devs may catch this “Tech Bro Syndrome” too, unfortunately.
For reference, see the latest McDonalds Christmas advert scandal. Or was it Coca Cola?
Like with any new tech, companies will try to exploit it to reduce expenses on people, then quickly realise that just because you replaced a hammer with a hydraulic smithing press, you haven't suddenly become a blacksmith yourself and still need the blacksmith to make shit happen - but now one blacksmith can do ten times more.
Yes, like we went over before, it's literally OK to use AI if the studios that I support use it to generate things that I like.
I think the Luddites weren't just wrong, but actively harmed the masses. They should have been trying to take control of the machines to help themselves, not destroying them, so that they can set more ethical working conditions and pay. The wealthy will always build and use the machines, it is a question whether there are good people running their own businesses who can compete against the feckless elite.
That is why I am opposed to anti-AI people, because they are doing the work of ensuring the 1% get sole agency over the usage of AI. Knowingly or not, Luddites are serving the worst of humanity.
If 1 guy I know gets sole agency over allll the cocaine in my neighborhood, I don't really care that much. I don't think we should live in a cocaine-based society, haha.
I’ve been programming as a hobby since I was 9. It’s also my job so I rarely finish the hobby projects anymore, but still.
On my first computer (Apple II) I was able to make a complete game as a kid that I felt was comparable to some of the commercial ones we had.
In the 1990ies I was just a teenager busy with school but I could make software that was competitive with paid products. Published some things via magazines.
In the late 90ies I made web sites with a few friends from school. Made a lot of money in teenager terms. Huge head start for university.
In the 2000s for the first time I felt that I couldn’t get anywhere close to commercial games anymore. I’m good at programming but pretty much only at that. My art skills are still on the same level as when I was a kid. Last time I used my own hand drawn art professionally was in 2007.
Games continued becoming more and more complex. They now often have incredibly detailed 3D worlds or at least an insane amount of pixel art. Big games have huge custom sound tracks. I can’t do any of that. My graphics tablets and my piano are collecting dust.
In 2025 AI would theoretically give me options again. It can cover some of my weak areas. But people hate it, so there’s no point. Indy developers now require large teams to count as indy (according to this award); for a single person it’s difficult especially with limited time.
It’d be nice if the ethical issues could be fixed though. There are image models trained on proprietary data only, music models will get there too because of some recent legal settlements, but it’s not enough yet.
It's been proven time and time again that a game doesnt need to compare to AA and AAA shit to be successful. You dont need a big game with a big world. There's an endless list of simple indie games that had a captivating charm that are crazy successful, all without a single bit of AI used.
I fully agree with the ethical parts, but not with the bit of people hating it.
Reality is that people on platforms like Reddit or Lemmy (or the tech side of the Fediverse in general) can be incredibly fervent about their AI hate, but they don't represent the average people, whose work has become ever so slightly more convenient thanks to AI - let that be due to meeting summarisation, or writing tools making complex emails easier, or maybe they're software engineers whose workload has been reduced by AI too... I am a software engineer and I use our own Claude instance extensively because it's really good at writing tests, KDoc, it's super helpful at code discovery (our codebase is huge, and I mostly work on a very small subsegment on it, going outside of my domain I can either spend an hour doing manual discovery, or tell Claude to collate all the info I need and go for a coffee while it does so), or to write work item summaries, commit messages, and so on. It doesn't even have to generate (production) code for it to be incredibly useful. And general sentiment within my co-workers is that it's a great tool that means we can achieve targets quicker, and luckily our management realises that we do need the manpower to do things manually still, so it's not like they're reducing teams by expanding on AI. They'd rather take the improved performance, thus the improved revenue, than keep revenue stagnant-ish and reduce expenses.
So yeah the sentiment isn't all negative.
According to research, the overwhelming majority of gamers across all ages and genders do hate genAI though:
Gamers Are Overwhelmingly Negative About Gen AI in Video Games, but Attitudes Vary by Gender, Age, and Gaming Motivations. - Quantic Foundry
Who made the textures or took the photos that them AI generated ones were derived from, do they get a cut? That justification is even more bizarre now, considering the tools we have to photoscan.
Also what about AI code tools? Like if they use cursor to help write some code does that disqualify them?
If you do that and proceed to say "No we didn't use any AI tools". Then yes, that should be a disqualification.
"When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33."
It's highly likely that EVERY video game dev team has at least one person who is using cursor, whether it violates their AI policy or not. It's massively popular, looks just like VSCode, and can be hard to detect.
You don't even need to use cursor. All the major IDEs are including LLMs nowadays to help with code completion and code generation. There's zero chance no gen ai code is in any project that has more than a few people nowadays.
The question is, if having better for-loop completion the same as "create this feature".
Doesn't matter, the rules ban all AI. The rules are stupid.
Edit: I mean the rules are so stupid it probably covers you googling an exception and reading the answer Google provides at the top which is gen ai as if the answer was used to help make the game even if you used nothing from the answer.
Edit: or Sentry even has AI insights into crashes in their default service.
^ The olympic steroids user telling me I can't prove they used steroids.
You can't reliably detect all steroids. The Olympics has a long history of under detecting novel steroids. A lot of sporting competitions below the Olympics level have a tendency to undertest as well and underdetect. You could have a long and successful career as an athlete from doping.
And more to the point, AI usage can be a factor of 100 harder to detect than steroids to a trained eye.
That’s fair.
But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.
Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.
…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.
You have to draw the line somewhere, saying any game cant use AI is much simpler than an arbitrary definition of what slop is. Also means we reward real artistry everytime.
Then you’re going to get almost no games.
Or just get devs lying about using cursor or whatever when they code.
If that’s the culture of the Game Awards, if they have to lie just to get on, that… doesn’t seem healthy.
How have we all forgotten that games were made perfectly fine for decades without AI? Better games even.
I'd rather give an award to a "worse" game that didnt use AI, than to a game that did.
Devs can lie, but the truth always comes out eventually.
"the truth" being that a few generated placeholder textures were accidentally left in and promptly replaced? crazy
Then most just won't go on the Game Awards, and devs will go on using Cursor or whatever they feel comfortable with in their IDE setup.
I’m all against AI slop, but you’re setting an unreasonably absolute standard. It’s like saying “I will never use any game that was developed in proximity to any closed source software.” That is possible, technically, but most people aren’t gonna do that. It’s basically impossible on a larger team. Give them some slack with the requirement; it’s okay to develop on Windows or on Steam, just open the game’s source.
Similarly, let devs use basic tools. Ban slop from the end product.
Games were made by a single person not sleeping for a week.
But people expect more now and one person can’t do it fueled just by passion. The other people want to get paid now, not when the game is released.
Limiting the tools people can use to make games is ableist, elitist and just stupid.
Awards like these are inherently subjective. You don't have to draw an objective line anywhere.
By this logic you could also ban Photoshop, tablets and any other software or hardware tool that has improved accessibility and workflow over the years.
AI is a tool, flat out banning it won't and can't work. It's too fucking useful.
People said that anyone who used Photoshop wasn't a real artist, people said computer graphics weren't real art.
At some point you DO have to draw an arbitrary line. Because that's all. Art is arbitrary all of it since the dawn of mankind making art. It's all arbitrary. If you only make hard lines that completely block tools, all you're doing is harming artists.
The entire point of drawing arbitrary lines is to allow for artists to keep making art. Why dissuading people from abusing others.
So do you want no one to be able to do anything or do you want things to actually have artistic expression which is arbitrary.
Ai has plenty of great usage in game development, generating LOD textures, random dirt or rock textures, creating automated systems of pallet replacements. There's plenty of tools that can cut down huge amounts of repetitive workload, so small teams can actually spend their limited resources on actual art that has direct major impact on their vision without wasting huge chunks of time and money on low end. Small parts that realistically wouldn't have had any artists hired or any actual real impact on the experience of those who consume the work, but would have huge negative impacts on those making it.
Just because companies abuse a tool does not make a tool bad. Every artistic tool throughout all of human history has been abused by someone to hurt others. Photography, movies, Photoshop, paints. You name it. It's been used and abused to hurt artists and every time artists adapt bring the new tool on to create new forms of expression. Even if that expression is too rebel against the tool.
You cannot ban a tool no matter what. You only cause more problems becoming worse than those who abuse the tools.
No, that's not the same thing in the slightest.
My arbitrary line is that AI is cringe.
I'd have no problem with the show that seems to want the awards be taken seriously remove all or most bigger projects.
Yeah.
A lot of devs may do it personally, even if it’s not a company imperative (which it shouldn’t be).
Yes. Shit's buggy enough as it is, infect it with this crap and it's outright malware.
Let them have their award with their own rules.
Although I wouldn't talk about integrity when someone still claims Clair Obscur is an indie.
People have made it excessive due to turning AI into a modern witch hunt. Maybe if people had a more nuanced take than "all AI bad" companies could be more open about how they use AI.
I can guarantee that if E33 came out with the AI disclaimer it would've been far more controversial and probably less successful. And technically they should have an AI label because they did use Gen AI in the development process even if none of it was supposed to end up in the final game.
But we can't have companies being honest because people can't be normal.
How do I put this.
AI isn't exactly the cause of the rise in the price of hardware. Only 1/6th of the purchased Nvidia cards are actually in data centers. Same for the memory.
We're not using it.
What's really drumming up all the prices is that the billionaires are convinced that AI is going to replace tons and tons of people. It's not. It's the insane corporate hype that's doing all the damage.
It will replace some, sure. The same way the electric drill replaced carpenters. One electric drill does not replace one carpenter. That's not how that works. Instead the carpenters can work a bit faster and their job is a bit easier. It's worth buying and it's worth using, but it doesn't really replace a person. Accountants didn't disappear as a profession when spreadsheets were invented.
There were books written in the 1980s about how household appliances raised the standard of cleanliness. Turns out people change clothes more when cleaning clothes doesn't involve a washing board. And I don't think Roombas replaced that many jobs either.
In particular, I think this is a thing that will happen for software development. I don't think it'll reduce the number of developers we need. I think the standards for development will just be higher. All the front end stuff in particular is going to get easier, and you won't need as many frameworks. We'll especially need just as many devs, if not more, in the short term. Someone's going to have to fix the mess all these companies are going to make after they've fired half their devs and tried to just vibe code everything.
that’s a lot if text to basically say it’s cause AI
Yeah, nuance exists. Weird, I know.
I agree the current state of affairs makes people even more against AI and I think people have a good reason to be against AI, but don't you find it a bit contradictory how people are less antagonistic towards E33 AI use now that it has been revealed?
People are far more antagonistic towards games when the first thing they see is the AI label, to the point where they dismiss the entire game as AI slop, but it seems people are willing to be more lenient on AI usage when they first get to experience the game for what it is. This unreasonable reaction to the first impression is why companies would rather hide their AI usage rather than inform the customer.
It's almost as if AI as a tool isn't the problem. Instead it's just a bunch of misinformation idiots not understanding the actual problems and misdirected anger.
AI as a tool is fine. It's no f****** different than Photoshop.
The problem is companies breaking copyright law and stealing information and data to train the models in the first place.
A model trained off non-solen artwork used with intent is perfectly fine.
It's not like we go around demanding everyone say that they use Photoshop whenever they do because oh they could be tricking us and it's not hand drawn. No, we just expect digital art to be made with digital tools.
Ai's problem is one of legal issues, not artistic ones and people need to get out of their own asses about it at this point. It's a f****** tool. Any tool used wrong is bad. A tool used correctly with purpose and intent is fine.
So if I train a model from scratch using only my own art is it still bad?
Okay but first, will you admit that if my cancer curing Unicorn only dispenses 100 doses of its miracle medicine from its butt when I kill a homeless man, you’d agree killing the homeless is a moral good, right?
Or, you know, we could throw away silly fantasy scenarios.
It’s not a fantasy 😆 It’s an actual product everyone can use.
Really? Can you share your fully realized and operational generative AI that exists, and only created its model from artwork you personally made or retain full legal reproduction rights to?
Answers Yes, or Sorry, I Lied.
This one here: https://www.scenario.com/
Also at least Rovio has had an “AI” art asset pipeline for years now, even before ChatGPT. Their ML unit is well over a decade old. And it’s specifically tuned for their own style: https://youtu.be/ZDrqhVSY9Mc
I’m not talking out of my ass, I work with this shit daily.
Yes. You have forgotten the joy of talking to your neighbors.
No no see. That's not nuanced what that guy is saying is nuanced being a Hardline a****** is the nuance takes so you're clearly in the wrong here. Sorry man it just is what it is.
It's like people have completely f****** forgotten what Photoshop was like when it first hit the scene. The same anti-ai b******* we're seeing now was leveled completely against Photoshop and basically all digital art.
Go back and look in the history books and read old diaries and things and you'll find that photography had all the same anti-ai sentiment that we're seeing now labeled against it.
Artists have always adopted just because people are abusing. A new tool does not make the tool bad. It just makes those who are abusing it assholes. Given time artists will adapt in new forms of art. Well come forth from those tools.
Cuz no matter what you say about AI, if you create and model yourself trained it entirely on your own art and then used it to create deconstructions or modern takes using computers of your own artwork. That's still f****** hard. It doesn't matter that it was processed through an AI slot machine. They're still artistic intent behind the process.
The only problem with AI right now is that big companies are breaking copyright laws with it. Hell you can make a solid argument that the problem isn't even AI. It's just the law breaking around it and the lack of actual intent to use the tools for artistic purposes instead of just cost saving.
Cuz as much as we all can make fun of quote" prompt engineers. Someone's sitting down tuning the model putting in specialized data for its training to generate their exact intent is still effort. It's still in intent. There are people who are making the equivalent of modern art using generative AI.
People always s*** on new art forms for not being art because it uses some new tool that isn't traditional and therefore isn't art. This stuff has been around for a handful of years. Give it enough time and their well-being actual proper art forms that will be built up around these tools. It has happened for hundreds if not thousands of years in human history with every new tool that we have made.
We just need to direct the anger to the correct place. S***** companies breaking the law, not the tools.
I have the same feeling about Kojima's and Vincke's latest comments on AI. Am I supposed to get mad at every single person who said they used/plan to use AI for something? I'd be as outraged as the average Fox News viewer, and it would be impossible to be taken seriously. I still won't be using AI myself (fuck surveillance state AI) and I'd be making every effort to encourage others not to use it, but there's no point in burning bridges and falling for rage bait.
They're creative people who care about the craft and care about the teams in their employ, which gives their statements weight, where some Sony/Microsoft/EA executive making an identical statement has none.
I understand the principle. Even if E33 is not slop, people should fear a road that leads to dependence on “surveillance state AI” like OpenAI. That’s unacceptable.
That being said, I think a lot of people don’t realize how commoditized it’s getting. “AI” is not a monoculture, it’s not transcending to replace people, and it’s not limited to corporate APIs. This stuff is racing to the bottom to become a set of dumb tools, and dirt cheap. TBH that’s something that makes a lot of sense for a game studio lead to want.
And E33 is clearly not part of the “Tech Bro Evangalism” camp. They made a few textures, with a tool.
When I give myself the leeway to think of a less hardliner stance on AI, I come back to Joel Haver's video on his use of ebsynth:
Now my blood boils like everyone else's when it comes to being forced to use AI at work, or when I hear the AI Voice on Youtube, or the forced AI updates to Windows and VS Code, but it doesn't boil for Joel. He clearly has developed an iconic style for his comedy skits, and puts effort into those skits long before he puts it through an AI rotoscope filter. He chose his tool and he uses it sparingly. The same was apparently true for E33, and I have no reason not give Kojima and Larian the same benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, Joel probably has no idea what I'm talking about when I say "surveillance state AI." People Make Games has a pretty good video exposing its use case. There's also...
Creatives may be aware of some, or all, or none of those things, which is why it's important to continue raising awareness of them. AI may be toothpaste that can't go back in the tube, but it's also a sunk cost fallacy, you don't have to brush your teeth with shit-flavored toothpaste.
You don’t hate AI. You hate Big Tech Evangelism. You hate corporate enshittification, AI oligarchs, and the death of the internet being shoved down your throat.
…I think people get way too focused on the tool, and not these awful entries wielding them while conning everyone. They’re the responsible party.
You’re using “AI” as a synonym for OpenAI, basically, but that’s not Joel Haver’s rotoscope filter at all. That’s niche machine learning.
As for the exponential cost, that’s another con. Sam Altman just wants people to give him money.
Look up what it takes to train (say) Z Image or GLM 4.6. It’s peanuts, and gets cheaper every month. And eventually everyone will realize this is all a race to the bottom, not the top… but it’s talking a little while :/
True on most fronts except one. On a personal level, I do hate AI lol. The large language model itself. I just don't think typing out or speaking out a series of instructions is that useful or efficient. If I want a computer to do something for me, I much prefer the more rigid and unnatural syntax and grammar of programming language. AI tools themselves just don't produce a result that satisfies me.
Again, they’re tools. Some of the most useful applications for LLMs I’ve worked on are never even seen by human eyes, like ranking, then ingesting documents and filling out json in pipelines. Or as automated testers.
Another is augmented diffusion. You can do crazy things with depth maps, areas, segmentation, mixed with hand sketching to “prompt” diffusion models without a single typed word. Or you can use them for touching up something hand painted, spot by spot.
You just need to put everything you’ve ever seen with ChatGPT and copilot and the NotebookLM YouTube spam out of your head. Banging text into a box and “prompt engineering” is not AI. Chat tuned decoder-only LLMs are just one tiny slice that a few Tech Bros turned into a pyramid scheme.
Don't produce a result that's satisfies you yet. Early programming also was absolute dog s***.
Give it 20 years, and there's bound to be new things that will replace the current concept of AI that do functionally the same thing just in a manner that actually does produce good results.
Just like we did with everything else computing related.
Hating a tool is the single stupidest f****** thing anyone can do.
That and chat prompting engineer b******* is one tiny tiny slice of the greater hole. It's a footnote in the grand scheme of everything that the colloquial term AI represents. It's just the most marketable one to end users so it's the one that you see everywhere.
Give it another 5 years maybe and local self-trainable models and alternative versions of it will be available that won't have all the theft problems, surveillance problems and other issues. The tech is new and mainly controlled by giant companies right now.
It's not like the tech is going to forever exist in a vacuum in the exact state. It's in nothing ever does. Makes it doubly silly to get mad over a tool.
At the end of the day it's all about the quality in my opinion.
The entire game could be written by ONE passionate person who is awesome at writing the story and the code, but isn't good at creating textures and has no money for voice actors - in which case said textures and all the voices would be AI generated, then hand retouched to ensure quality. That would still be a good game because obvious passion went into the creation of it, and AI was used as a tool to fill out gaps of the sole debeloper's expertise.
A random software house automating a full on pipeline that watches various trends on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and chains together various genAI models to create slopware games by the dozens, on the other hand, is undefendable. There's no passion, there's no spirit, there's just greed and abuse of technology.
Differentiation between the two is super important.
So is the source.
If they’re paying a bunch of money to OpenAI for mega text prompt models, they are indeed part of the slop problem. It will also lead to an art “monoculture,” Big Tech dependence, code problems, all sorts of issues.
Now, if they’re using open weights models, or open weights APIs, using a lot of augmentations and niche pipelines like, say, hand sketches to 3D models, that is different. That’s using tools. That’s giving “AI” the middle finger in a similar way to using the Fediverse, or other open software, instead of Big Tech.
People claimed Photoshop would cause a monoculture if you honestly and genuinely believe that AI will as well you're stupid as f***. Like there is no way you can look back on the history of computers, art or human innovation in genuinely believe that anything at any point could create an artistic monoculture.
No, it won't happen. It physically cannot happen humans for the sake of being goddamn stubborn s*** stands will make counterculture art for the sake of it.
The concept of a monoculture is an infeasible made-up nonsensical b******* idea. Humans are too diverse in our whims for to ever happen.
The only way a monoculture could come about is if everyone but one person died off. And that person also decided to never make any form of artistic expressive anything till the day he died.
Do your parents forbid you to swear, so you have to do it whispering under the blanket?
Sauce: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-creative-revolution-how-technology-is-making-art-accessible-to-everyone.html
Not exactly a massive AI slop problem, right?
Can we put our collective pitchforks away for this case at least?
This is the same use case that people are currently up in arms against Larian for
Not quite. Larian also wants to use it for concept art, which is not the same thing as placeholder assets. To give you a bit of context, the standard for placeholder textures at the software development companies I worked so far has mostly been "vaguely fitting images you found on Google".
Atleast in my experience bigger companies have either their own libraries, libraries of bought assets or dedicated sites with free to use stuff, so they can use the placeholdes without a risk of having copyrighted stuff in the files.
Concept art is little tricky because it often is 10 version of the same character or random piece of the scenery and it takes hundreds of pieces and revision before art director finally decites "this is it, this is what our game looks like". Personally i dont care if those are drawn on a paper or made in photoshop, paint, by a ai tool or trowing wet cats on a canvas. In the end i care that human decites what they are going to use and artist finishes the model. I dont see the point having artist spend their time creating seven different looking bandoliers for the protagonist, when nobody even knows if any version of those end in the game.
And i just want to say way before the consept art when the product is in its early planning state there are often "feeling boards" that are just i want our game to feel like picture of breath of the wild and picture of skyrim or picture of cuphead and picture of warm and cozy fireplace and these feeling boards may stay in use until the very end of the production.
Good. Burn both companies to the ground. Set them as an example.
NO.
My pitchfork stays sharpened and at the ready until this stupid bubble pops.
The AI was used for background assets that they failed to remove but patched quickly after. It’s not as egregious as the headline makes it out to be.
I think you misunderstood me. All AI is humanity-ending garbage that needs to be eliminated. I don't give two figs how or where it's used - I want it all gone.
AI that finds protein foldings or cures for cancer is humanity-ending? Careful with that stretching, you might hurt yourself.
You can list a thousand nifty end results of AI and it won't change the impact it's having on our environment right now.
How about this: we put all this nonsense on hold until we solve cold fusion first?
The impact directly depends on the area of application. AlphaFold has been around for at least seven years, it's got jackshit to do with the current LLM bubble. Were you against AlphaFold in 2020, or are you a hypocrite?
If you want a government with the kind of regulatory power to "put all this nonsense on hold" why not use that regulatory power to generate cleaner energy and solve the problem? The current clean energy sources we have right now are cheaper than what's currently being used for energy generation. They're also faster to get online and can be put in more places. The reason we're not using those sources right now is because of politics, not economics or technology. The solution to environmental damage caused by energy production is to use cleaner energy. Stopping people from using technology on the user level won't do much of anything.
From your votes and lack of response I can indeed surmise that you're a hypocrite who's never had a remote semblance of an opinion about AI until it's become fashionable to hate it, whereupon you promptly jumped on the bandwagon and started shouting about how all AI ruins the planet, regardless of the nuances that are too much for you to think of. It's remarkable how loud schmucks like you can hijack the conversation. Just cry wolf as much as you can, that's enough for the entirety of the cognitive capacity of yourself and people like you. What an embarrassment.
Do you even have a tech background? How is a machine learning algorithm going to end humanity?
Brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, societal and economic collapse...
Explain how an AI calculating protein foldings will cause brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, and societal and economic collapse.
Explain how protein folding software, which predates "genAI" by decades and has as many similarities with it as with Tetris, has anything to do with this conversation.
That’s fearmongering. It has use cases and has had them well before this LLM AI bubble. The bubble will pop and hopefully these CEOs are actually charged unlike 2008.
By feeding people's collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, etc.
Do have a humanities background? All tech people should have one.
Explain how an AI calculating protein foldings feeds people’s collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, and whatnot.
It's not. Trap circumvented. Do you have another question?
I have both actually. There are many, many use cases for AI and again, they were used before people like you even knew it was a concept.
Well, you're not putting it to very good use.
I was a network engineer at one of the biggest backbones on Earth before retiring. Before that, I designed and programmed industrial automation. So, no tech background at all.
Now that that's out of the way: a blind squirrel could see that sucking up all the energy and wasting endless fresh water is a bad thing for the environment. The "bigger-than-2008" market crash that's also coming won't help.
You have no idea what an 'AI' is, so apparently none of that tech background helped if you're still that ignorant.
And again, AI has been around for many years before the LLM craze and these select few companies advocating to shove it in all our faces, forcefully pushing data centers everywhere and integrating it into as much as they can. That is not something that could or should be done with AI. It is these company executives choosing to push it like this. It wasn’t always like this nor did it have to be
It's not a bubble though. That's like waiting for the internet bubble to pop back in the 90s. AI will be around from now on, just not as such an in your face way. It will eventually become ubiquitous, just like many other pieces of tech.
This massive new economic sector that is eclipsing the GDP of most nations combined in under 10 years, which is almost entirely subsidized by a combination of venture capital, which is being forced in to any product that involves electricity regardless of suitability, this industry and that loses money every time a user interacts with it (even the paying customers) is not a bubble?
Please, enlighten us on what you think an economic bubble is. A lot of us were around for the dotcom bubble; to say it was not one, when we were standing there watching the market rise into the stratosphere and come crashing down, is a bit much.
I don't like billion dollar corporations, and I'd be fine to stop and leave that be all the context, but I also don't like them using technology to manufacture truth while polluting the earth to do it.
So tell your coders to give you a tune up, the damage control algorithm didn't pan out.
Not in general but for this at least? Maybe?
Or maybe people are just fed up with AI being shoehorned into anything and their mum and overcorrect a bit?
No more than the ones pushing their pro-ai agenda.
<_<
When they understand the context behind this particular case, yes.
Yeah I figured this app had more tech savvy and educated people. Evidently, it’s littered with people that barely got through high school.
I kinda feel like Clair Obscur is sort of stretching the definition of indie game.
I guess _technically _ it is.
I’m not saying every game needs to be made in someone’s garage and take 12 years to make, but it sounds like this game was completely funded by Kepler and parts of the game were outsourced to other companies. Sandfall is made up of experienced developers from places like Ubisoft. Kinda feels like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise made their own movie with funding from a lesser known subdivision of Warner Bros, outsourced SFX to 300 animators, and called it indie because they filmed it with 10 people.
I do think Clair Obscur is a fantastic game and deserves to be Game of the Year (aside from the AI use). Sandfall and Kepler did a great job with a reported budget of $10M(!) and I especially appreciate what Kepler is doing to support the gaming industry.
I guess I see the point of the award to inspire people to believe they shouldn’t give up on their dreams by recognizing small teams making games outside of the traditional industry. I just don’t feel like Sandfall qualifies.
In the end, it’s not my award and they can give it to whoever they want!
I agree with your take. The definition of what an "indie" is is very vague and subjective, but given the budget and resources and circumstances of E33's development it seems outside the scope of what seems to be the "spirit of the award".
Blue Prince should have gotten the award to begin with.
Well the definition for indie is independently published. Its not vague in its self, but the way people have started to use the word have changed its meaning to from something well defined to something more feeling based consept. I personally dont like it. People counted game like Dave the Diver to be an indie game when it had huge company Nexon publishing it.
If followed by the original meaning of the word Blue Prince is not indie game either. It was published by Raw Fury, but Baldurs gate 3 would be indie as Larian published it.
Indie as a word is like AI. It does not follow its original definition and because people have became used to misusing the word it has became the new norm.
People didn't call Dave the Diver an indie game. The Game Awards nominated it in that category, and rightly got a lot of shit for it.
Indie is a fraught and vague term in whatever genre of culture it gets applied to. During the early 00s indie music era you had tons of mass produced "indie rock" pushed out by big labels too.
Everyone kind of knows what it's supposed to mean: small budget, small crew, independent of the major commercial publishers/labels/whatever. But there will always be edge cases in both directions.
Plenty of people called Dave the Diver indie game. There are also lots of reviews from the time that call it indie game, both from youtubers and "real reviewers" like IGN.
We can talk forever what indie means personally for everyone and everybody who has a opinion has little different view.
But originally in both movies and music indie meant indepented publishment. That means the artist have no oblications for outside parties and can freely and without restrictions carry out their own artistic vision. Budget or crew size has nothing to do with it. Only reason people associate it with small teams is that largest portion of indepentedly published projects were done by small teams and or passion projects.
Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets is indie movie with budget of 220 million while average hollowood movie budget is somewhere between 100-150 million . Hell, passion of the crist, had budget of 30million and is maybe one of the most famous indie movies.
It's not indie, it had the full support of a publisher. Indie is a handful of people making a game with their own money, not getting a millions of dollars in investment from a publisher.
A DBD creator I like made a video about this topic, and the degradation of the term.
The Second Wind folks put out a video yesterday about what defines an indie game. Short answer: these days pretty much it's just vibes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ4NPjw71ss
People are saying "it's fine because it was used in the early stages of the game for placeholder art" but that's kind of missing the point
The problem is that they used AI and didn't disclose it, as well as releasing the game with AI textures still in it. Yes, these textures were quickly replaced, but it's still very concerning they weren't upfront on how they were using it in the game making process
Edit: there isn't even a disclosure on their steam page
They replaced the art later, but shouldn't the bar be high like this? Otherwise, the caution won't be there. It also could be abused, like games only getting adjusted post-launch if a certain measure of success hits. Plus the final product is not the only part of matters in the was-AI-used discussion, it is also about the process. If AI is the product of stolen human artwork being fed into a machine, and then that machine is used during creation, then AI has been used in the process that led to the final product no less than the concept art that may not be seen in game but was important in steering the ship.
Maybe someone can share their thoughts though. I'm still formulating mine and this is where I am at the moment.
If we’re banning games over how they make concept art… I’m not sure how you expect to enforce that. How could you possibly audit that?
Are you putting coding tools in this bucket?
Same way you’d celebrate a studio for “No workplace abuse.” People would have to come forward to testify about it, as concept art generation is very likely to arise from hiring fewer artists.
It’s also pretty easy if the credits list an abnormally low, or zero, number of concept artists.
They didn't just replace the art later. It was intended to be placeholder art from the beginning. And was replaced 5 days after release. That tells me that they just missed replacing those temporary assets among tens of thousands of assets before release.
Using GenAI for something temporary that's not intended to be final seems like the perfect use case for it. Especially on a small team where artist time is much better spent working on the final assets.
There is no use of Gen AI in an indie game that should be tolerated. Period.
That’s just not going to happen.
Nearly any game with more than a few people involved is going have someone use cursor code completion, or use one for reference or something. They could pull in libraries with a little AI code in them, or use an Adobe filter they didn’t realize is technically GenAI, or commission an artist that uses a tiny bit in their workflow.
If the next Game Awards could somehow audit game sources and enforce that, it’d probably be a few solo dev games, and nothing elsex
Not that AI Slop should be tolerated. But I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be enforced so strictly.
Doesn't matter. AI literally hallucinates 90% of the bullshit it spews and it steals from artists. There's a reason every triple A game that has an AI bro as a CEO gets broken further every update thanks to the unscrupulous use of gen AI coding.
In any game, not just indies.
True but I don't expect AAA studio business suits to understand that.
Of course not, big games were ruined before the AI craze, but that doesnt mean they are getting a pass of any kind.
You’re categorically wrong.
Edit: Grammar
His categorically wrong what?
His grammarly.ai subscription must have ran out.
*run out
No AI is the product of any theft. If we’re talking about piracy, piracy is NOT theft. I thought we all agreed on this already.
For me it boils down to: were the artists, whose work was used to build the large commercial models, asked about this and agreed to it? No.
Piracy only affects existing work, genAI affects all the future artwork they would try to make a living from. See AI hitting cultural sector hard: Fifth of freelance artists have lost income, work | NL Times
Still not theft? Things can be bad without being theft.
That was the point I was trying to make too. The question of "is it theft" is moot, it still causes harm.
But piracy is a MUCH smaller issue than theft. Piracy doesn’t deprive the original owner of any material thing. Piracy might decrease sales and profits (research actually says the opposite 🤷♂️).
And we have no idea the actual material impact AI will have on the arts. From the reaction we’re seeing it might even make people turn more and more to physical hand crafted art.
We’re already seeing that social media is favoring videos of artists’ processes much more than the final results.
So yeah, no, I don’t see this situation as so much more terrible than theft. I really don’t understand how it could be.
To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.
Absolutely. It seems like 90% of the issues we have in society is because of this fucked-up economic system :/
This is certifiable baloney.
They were disqualified for failing to disclose the AI usage, not just for using AI at all.
To me, this is worse.
We are getting closer and closer to not being able to tell the difference between AI and reality. This lying about the use of it or hiding the use of it is a bad fucking idea.
They didn’t disclose it because there was no AI in the final product. The AI was for placeholder textures, which were replaced by real artists’ work as they were made. Some of the AI textures slipped through the cracks on release day, but a week 1 patch removed all traces of the AI before anyone even realized it was AI.
IMO this looks bad on the awards show, because the final product didn’t have any AI. And the production team was proactive in ensuring it didn’t have any AI before any kind of public backlash ever happened. Once they realized the issue, they issued a patch to fix it on their own, without needing to be pushed into it by public pressure. That’s what a company should do, and it shows that the devs really cared about their game.
The reason they didn't disclose it as being used in the creation of the game is probably because no AI was used in the ultimate development. It's an artist who uses AI to generate concepts and inspiration using AI in their artwork, even if everything in the end is hand crafted and doesn't resemble any of the generated images?
One thing we need to take into account going forward too is that AI will inevitably be used for things like texture maps and environmental generation. Things that have been randomly generated with algorithms. In a year it's going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all, unless you want the pool of potential to be incredibly small.
Damn, that sucks. I guess I'll have to find a new hobby.
Nah, just pirate the stuff.
If they don't give a fuck about original creators, why should we give a fuck about paying them?
You think my problem with AI is that it costs money?
Of course not, but I think not supporting those that use it to produce something you want to enjoy doesn't necessarily imply not enjoying what they produce, as long as it's not too thoroughly damaged by their use of it and as long as it can be obtained in ways that won't support them.
Looks like. Board games are pretty awesome. Heck, you could become a game designer/developer!
Funny you mention that.
Because so many people are blowing up without reading the article I felt it was worth posting this. Based on the wording it sounds like they were not disqualified for having AI in the game, they were disqualified for not disclosing AI had been used in development.
Additionally, here is another article where they are clarifying HOW it was used.
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-creative-revolution-how-technology-is-making-art-accessible-to-everyone.html
TL;DR: They experimented with Generative AI when it first came out, used some of the results as temporary assets that were always intended to be temporary. They still got in to the final product because QA missed them, which was promptly fixed in a patch. Indie Game Awards disqualified them for failing to disclose this in the first place.
Key takeaways:
They used generative AI around when it when it first came out, probably before most people started realizing it was being trained off stolen artwork as well as a lot of the other problems with AI.u/Crazazy brings up a good point and this part is somewhat questionableMake of that what you will. I personally think this is being blown out of proportion. They made a mistake and have openly corrected themselves. Good for them.
I feel like this is virtue signaling more than actually addressing a real problem with Clair Obscur.
Welcome to the internet. No one knows each other, no one considers context, no one reads past the headline, everyone makes snap judgements based on half understood heuristics, and then rushes to the comments to grandstand. A job that could be trivially done by AI, and almost certainly is, but instead we'll all pretend like we're the last bastion of human sanity.
That and attention seeking through controversy
Yeah.
Maybe a technicality too. The rule said “no AI,” and E33 used AI.
I get their intent: keep AI slop games out. But in hindsight, making the restriction so absolute was probably unwise.
Like that the story is bifurcated and that the combat in the late game is parry or die?
And yet someone completed the game without parrying a single time.
Good for them. Did they do it without dodging too?
Yes. It was reported basically everywhere.
https://gamerant.com/clair-obscur-expedition-33-no-doge-parry-completion-all-hit-run-feat/
Want to move that goalpost again?
My experience was my experience. I'm glad for that person that they found that build. I did not, and I'll wager most others didn't either. The last third of my game was spent pumping points into defense and vitality to alleviate the issue, but it was a drop in the bucket. This is like when I vented frustrations with RE2 remake's scaling difficulty, and someone pulled up, "Well, speedrunners don't run into this issue, because..." I'm not a speedrunner. I'm a guy playing the game for the first time, and I used the information in front of me to make the best choices I could, and I still came away with criticisms. In CO:E33, it led to situations where the damage was so high and the action economy so constrained that it was faster to throw the fight and reload than it was to take a hit on the first turn and recover from it, and that sucked.
...dawg, I think you're just dogshit at the game. are these issues you had on the lowest difficulty? Because if so, then no, at no point did you ever "get good", I promise.
I beat the game on normal difficulty. Believe it or not, you can be good a thing and still dislike it. And I like the game, for the record, but my criticisms of how much weight they give to certain parts of the combat, which changed somewhere around the back half of act 2, mind you, hampered my desire to do more of it in act 3.
Get good or lower the difficultly and stop crying. Also, you know there's a dodge button right
Sure do. I got good and still have this criticism.
What are the odds that a mechanic introduced to you in the first tutorial combat (and continuously iterated on throughout all the prologue combat encounters) is a required component of the game? Crazy.
I think you should probably give up on gaming. Doesn't seem like your scene: it's for people that have the ability to process information and learn from it.
I have a criticism or two about one video game, and you leapt to "gaming isn't for you".
They're just incredibly bad criticisms tbh. The first one is only subjectively a "criticism" in the first place, and the other is- at best- a poorly made observation.
So yes, let me double down. If whenever a game says "this is how you play the game" and your response to that is "it shouldn't be", maybe gaming isn't for you.
That response is what a critique is. Metroid Prime 4 says, "you play the game by collecting these green crystals," and many critics said, "it shouldn't be."
...no, that is quite literally not a valid example of criticism. Sorry.
Fuck using Gen AI to replace human-made art, and fair enough for pulling the award, but I do think it's worth making it clear exactly how much of the art is/was AI. And the answer is, very little at launch and none currently.
AI wasn't used to "replace human-made art", though.
To me it sounds like the team needed generic textures in big batches, and instead of spending precious designer time on hand crafting them, AI was utilised to allow the designers to focus on actual art they enjoy. I'm a software engineer, not a designer, but if I were given the option to write 8000 classes that are almost the same, or write 5 classes that will take the same effort as the 8000, but actually require using my creative skills... I'd choose the latter, and offload the 8000 boilerplates to AI.
The fact that it was replaced with human made art so quickly suggests that the AI generated ones were meant to be placeholders only anyway.
That's exactly the takeaway I got from it as well.
It seems most likely that those were placeholders that were supposed to be replaced before release but were missed. Once they realized that some were missing, they got them replaced and pushed the update.
GenAI being used for placeholder stuff is arguably the perfect use case, especially for small studios without massive art teams.
So instead of buying the textures they didnt want to create, they paid for AI to generate derived versions from stolen art??
Whats the point? Just give the artists the money directly.
But these aren’t textures that are intended for use. They’re filler for development purposes.
It’s like putting a gray box in and fixing it later or putting a TODO in code.
Yes, so they can buy some cheap marketplace textures instead of paying to use stolen content. What are we not understanding here?
But, why for placeholders that aren’t meant for anything? No one will ever see these (intentionally).
I’m very anti AI in games for art but this feels like an arbitrary line in the sand for “support artists”. This feels like the stupid busywork that AI can alleviate. If there’s a large market for placeholder stuff maybe but most of the stuff in stores you’re paying to ship in production normally.
Why purchase stock things that may not be the dimensions you need or need tweaking to make work when you can just have something craft a placeholder?
Why go through the effort of AI then for them? It's the same amount of work, well less even, you'll get a full pack of textures at different resolutions with UV maps and all, versus AI where you then have to check it and potentially do more.
It says it all, when purchasing a texture is now "stupid busywork". You literally type in what you want, get hundreds of results, buy one, put in the game. They used UE5, Epic Games have Fab and it's integrated into the engine, they even give away lots of free assets there (granted that is probably going to fill with AI slop soon). There's loads of other options out there too.
This argument of "its placeholder textures" is null.
How is the argument null?
The major rub of Gen AI art is profiting off of others work. If you’re never displaying it and don’t ever want it shown then who cares?
I don’t know the red tape around them purchasing packs. They also may not have wanted to do that if they wanted to check for a specific aesthetic. I don’t know and quite frankly I don’t think this is the hill to die on for Gen AI usage.
I’d rather fight the slop or production use of it vs stuff that will never see the light of day.
No. Instead of making designers work on Brick Texture #7298, they allowed them to work on actually interesting design bits while the necessary textures were placeholdered by AI.
Also, stolen art... The same argument comes up here as with piracy. If I take something you created, BUT you're not deprived of said thing, then it's not theft. It is a breach of licence but not theft.
I do agree that some genAI models have very questionable copyrighting issues due to source dataset usage, but, just by creating a model you haven't deprived anyone of ownership of their property. You haven't actually done any financial damage to them.
So please stop overblowing the issue and instead begin by pushing for support of artists' rights to decide if their art can be used by third parties for the purpose of AI training, which is the core issue here. And even go and push for artists' rights to reserve their art's training data usage to themselves, thus allowing artists to create their own specialised models with their own style that they can use to offer cheaper art, or even license the use of the model out for money, thereby allowing artists to directly benefit from AI instead of being fervently against it.
You're also forgetting that most companies like Sandfall Interactive, that work on a budget, have their own designers so they don't just shop around for artists, even without AI. But without AI it would've meant that those hundreds of brick etc. textured would've gotten a placeholder that was unsightly. See e.g. Valve's Source Engine pink-black checkerboard placeholder. Would you have preferred that?
Did you even read my short comment? They can buy a brick texture from one of many marketplaces. Giving an artist money directly. Instead of giving money to use stolen assets. So that argument doesnt hold up.
Did you read MY comment at all?
When you have in-house designers you won't go shopping around for textures, especially not placeholder ones.
Why are you being obtuse? If the in-house designers didn't want to make some placeholder textures, they could have used a marketplace instead of AI. Are you just going to keep going in circles?
Why are YOU being obtuse here?
No company with an in-house design team will start trawling marketplaces to spend money on PLACEHOLDERS.
And it's not like the designers "didn't want" to make the textures, you donut - it's that resources need to be allocated, and making minor textures falls on very tail end of the priority list.
At which point they probably had one designer generate the needed placeholders using AI, to ensure they're good enough for placeholders, and called it a day.
I'll ask you one better - why are you trying to force companies to go out of their way to spend money? When digital design tools hit the market, would you have been standing in line telling companies to instead hire out actual manual art instead of working with digital tools, if they didn't have the required in-house resources?
Also based on development timelines, these couple of textures were likely from the DallE-Mini era, long before anyone was even talking about ethical concerns with the tech and before fuckass Altman was a known name.
There's another article going around where they say they use a "little bit" of AI but they're very obviously referring to Unreal tools and regular old machine learning.
This whole thing is dramatically overblown. Absolutely fuck genAI and every data center should be bulldozed over. But this is a huge case over literally nothing.
E33 should be disqualified for all these awards for not being an indie game (the devs themselves have called it "AA" if I recall, and they had a sizeable budget to burn). Should genAI be tolerated in any part of the development process? Absolutely not. Should a game and studio be completely brought down because of 2022-ish placeholders from before the ethical issues of the tech were common knowledge, which were also quickly patched out in less than a week? Absolutely not.
This is fucking stupid. There's no AI assets in the final game, and it was used for placeholders during development.
I dislike AI for a lot of reasons, but this is massively overblown. The genie is out of the bottle and there's no putting it back. This is right up there with artists airbrushing, photoshop, and so on. People are going to use the tools available if it leads to quicker development cycles to get a product out.
Horrid article, unless the intention was to throw shit around and hope to cause a commotion. There are no AI assets in Clair Obscur, and it should have been made clear by the article. From the IGA's own statement:
I think you have missed the actual issue here. The issue is not whether or not the game currently contains AI assets, the issue is whether AI was used during development. Quoting the article (emphasis mine):
The actual problem is that simply using generative AI during development disqualifies a game from being nominated, and Sandfall Interactive lied and said they did not use gen AI.
The issue is not that the game was disqualified. If the rules clearly and unequivocally state that at no point can generative AI be used (
and also clearly state what, in the spectrum from algorithms -> machine learning -> chatbot slop, they consider to be unacceptable, which I don't know if they did or not, guess what, they didn't, but that's not the point), then there is no controversy, and I'm not criticising that.The issue is that the article completely disregards mitigating facts that counter the narrative. There are no credible sources linked in the article save for one that was grossly misrepresented. Critically, we don't know what Sandfall actually said before the nomination or after, or how the decision to disqualify was made, only the second-hand account in the FAQ. The article presents circumstances in a biased way, leading the reader to interpret it with the assumption that there are AI-generated assets currently in the game. It is, frankly, sloppy journalism.
Do you know where those rules are? I'm genuinly interested in where exactly they draw the line. I constantly see people ranting about gen AI when used for art, but even simple, basic code autocomplete is AI under the hood these days. I can't imagine developers not using autocomplete.
The rules are on the same page I linked (https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq), under the "Game Eligibility" tab. I gave them the benefit of doubt and assumed that they had defined the exact terms of what is and isn't allowed, but apparently I was wrong. Regarding AI, the document contains a grand total of one sentence:
I'm assuming the definition of what that entails is "at their discretion", meaning whatever they feel like at the moment. I see that sentiment reflected in this thread too.
It's possible that potential nominees have to sign some kind of declaration that they've complied with the rules, and that might include a more detailed list of rules, but I have no evidence to support this.
Unfortunately the boundary between "AI" and "not AI" is the polar opposite of sharp and well-defined. I've used Allegorithmic Substance Designer a lot for CGI work (before Adobe ate the devs; fuck Adobe, all my homies hate Adobe), and it contains a lot of texture generator algorithms from simple noise to complex grunge textures. Things like Perlin noise and Voronoi diagrams are well-known algorithms and definitely not AI. Chatbot slop is right out, but in between those two, things get remarkably fuzzy and Heisenbergian. What about an algorithm that uses real-world samples, like an image? Or multiple images? Machine learning is not the same as AI, so is that allowed? Where's the line? I'm reasonably certain that everybody has a different answer for different situations based on different criteria.
So any game whose developer has used a recent version of VSCode will be disqualified in the future? VSCode has a GenAI autocomplete turned on by default.
One single question about an API to ChatGPT and your game is out.
Use Photoshops generative features for a marketing asset: out.
You get how insane the rule is?
You can only qualify it you write your game in vanilla vim with no extensions and graphics must be drawn in an old version of Gimp? 😆
So insane that people have to go back to the primitive workflows of... 2021 🤣
The problem is that Chinese, Indian and Turkish developers couldn’t care less about western AI purity tests and will blast past any competition who does.
Unless Captain AI Planet stops them, the cat is out of the bag and not going back.
If you want to run a AAA live service game the amount of content you put out every X weeks is how you make money. And the one who can keep up the best amount/quality ratio will always win.
The average gamer won’t care if the latest Gooner F2P or FPS game DLC is AI generated, AI assisted or lovingly hand crafted. They’ll throw their money at it anyway…
AI isnt needed at all, we didnt need it in the past to create art. And with all the tools and knowledge available online, for free, theres even less reason we need it these days.
I've never pirated a game, but if developers are going to use pirated content to make a game, they cant be mad when we pirate their game.
Seems a few “artists” disagree with you.
"make a dirt texture"
I loved the game.
I understand the use that was made did not in the least affect the final product.
I don't think they should have a disclaimer on Steam.
I think they screwed up big time if the indie game awards rules could have been interpreted as requiring no use of AI at any stage in production.
Also, I dont really understand the point of saying it afterwards and I fear that may in itself mean that they are promoting the use of AI in game dev.
What I think is very good is that people are (over?)reacting like this: I would like to have devs perceiving the use of AI as fucking poison.
The fact that they were there in the first place is a problem.
Why does a game that has been published by some other company calls itself "indie"???
The term itself is becoming more and more meaningless with the passing time.
It has to be more nuanced than "self-published", otherwise everything EA craps out is "indie".
The definition of "indie game" is a case where there is no easy, clear line to draw in the sand.
It doesn't need to. Definining it as "self-publishing" is enough.
And because of the above, EA games might very well fit the definition, yes.
This clearly shows that maybe we shouldn't use "indie" to describe good games (or the lack of it to describe bad ones). It should just be used to define "means of publishing".
I think it's a small studio and it's their first game, no?
Indie game
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
With a team of 30 developers and dozens of consultants for things like QA, it doesn't sound like a small development team. And they clearly had support from a game publisher.
I'm sure all of the recently out of work artists and programmers are heartbroken over another game that paid for gen AI instead of hiring them. I'm sure the AI company executives just needed the money more. Fuck whomever decided to AI in the Clair project management team. You could have actually deserved that awards. Good on the Indie Game Awards for actually supporting indie developers
Did you even read? They used it for placeholders before replacing them with textures created by artists.
Considering the backlash, maybe it was silly of them to use it for placeholders.
Also it was a small team not a full studio with millions
The real silly thing is how much energy is being spent on caring about something so inconsequential.
If you had time for things that were consequential, you wouldn't be paying video games.
They didn't use it for placeholders (which wouldn't excuse them anyway, if you want a placeholder you can pay an artist to make it).
They got caught using it in production and came up with the placeholder excuse (which no one who's ever seen a placeholder texture would fall for) on the spot, throwing the QA team under the bus to try to cover what is clearly a systemic problem with the company.
It's a AA game if anything
Just a note, seems to just be in production. Possibly placeholders?
Reminds me of the old days, developers all the time put in copyrighted assets as placeholders. Rarely they get into the final release and cause trouble but it was fairly common practice.
GenAI shouldn't be used in any part of the process, including concepts and placeholders.
That being said, the assets that slipped through in E33 were from 2022. The most powerful publicly available genAI tool at the time was fuckin DallE-Mini, which basically just spit out fuzzy messes. None of the ethical concerns were common knowledge yet, Altman and his ilk were basically nobodies at the time, this was far before any of the current tools and companies that are driving everything to hell.
On top of that, there's a dogshit article going around where Sandfall says they "use a small bit of AI" internally, and elaborate that they're referring to Unreal machine learning tools and such, not genAI.
Fuck genAI, fuck Altman, and fuck anyone who intentionally uses any of this shit today, but the E33 case is a literal non-issue. They had 2022 fuzzy garbage slip through the cracks, immediately removed it, and there's absolutely nothing to indicate that they're using the modern, problematic tech today.
The only issue here is that there's no reason for it to be considered an indie game. That's it.
In "the old days"
Those assets were made by a human that got paid to do it, or at least enjoyed doing it.
A placeholder is a garbage excuse for using AI.
In the olden days those assets were pulled from the google search and the people who had made them never saw a dime from the usage.
Placeholder is excelent use for AI.
If i need to do place holder for a dirt by hand it is900x900 brown square named brown_square.png and no artist sees a dime for it. How if somebody uses AI to generate little nicer looking dirt that is not going to end in the final game is taking money from artist?
In both cases there will be an artist that makes the final thing.
Good.
This feels like unecessary absolutism and fear mongeting. I am by no means an AI lover, but people shouldn't let the worst implimentations of something cloud their judgement.
I feel the question should be "Does this project use AI responsibly?" not "Was AI used?"
Maybe what we should be advocating for is transparency with these decisions?
Asking whether the project uses AI responsibly means you either need to define responsibly in a way that people can apply objectively, noting that everyone will have opinions about whether it's a good definition. Or you leave it undefined and the answer basically means nothing.
Cool... Generative AI used for placeholders during development that are replaced by actual artist work for the release is the definition of responsibly.
Given these assets were replaced within days of release here... Definitely seems like placeholders that were just missed during the final checks before release.
A semantics discussion isnt required to know that to do something responsibly, that it means to act in good faith and to be confidently informed enough to do so. We measure responsibility by the absence of harm.
Unless the model that they used was trained entirely on artwork that was public domain, creative commons, licensed or owned, then its basically certain that it wasn't used responsibly.
You cannot make something on a foundation of someone else's exploitation and be considered responsible, ethical, original or independent.
They used AI for placeholder art.
It could’ve been literally Mickey Mouse downloaded from google images and still be fine. None of it was supposed to be shipped.
Big AAA studios have a person or team whose only job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Smaller studios don’t.
Sure, they could have used Mickey Mouse, a gray box, or a low poly model whipped in Blender in 5 minutes... After all, that's what people have been doing for like 30 years. None of those things would have required the mass industrialized exploitation of millions of people's work and culture. None of those things would add value to some tech bros business.
As a side note, something tells me that if they had used Mickey for their placeholder art it wouldn't have "accidentally" found its way into the final game.
Plus... how do I know they didn't use AI as the basis for all of the art in their game? For all I know, AI was central to setting the aesthetic of this game due to being at the very front end of their production pipeline. Hard to know, especially when they are so sketchy about it. (At least Larian were bold/stupid enough to admit that the concepts for their game start with AI.)
It cheapens the game and undermines whatever work they actually did.
Calling your game "indie" when you're actively exploiting artists to make it is like calling your Etsy store "diy" despite knowing that it's a bunch of Chinese dropped shipped junk made by children in a sweatshop. It's disingenuous at best.
So instead of "Did you pirate this game?", the question should be "Did you pirate this game, responsibly?"
Well, I just pirate games. Fuck responsibility.
Sure, that works too.
I could think of of plenty examples, but a good use for pirating would be Disco Elysium - the publishers stole the IP of the creators unjustly, so it would be cobsidered by many ethical to not purchase the game and instead pirate it and donate a comfortable amount to the actual creators patreons. You are actuallu combating theft, in this instance.
But of course it would not be responsible to pirate most indie games
Putting aside the massive ethical and legal implications of blatantly exploiting human culture and works in the name of corporate profits...
I really hope they aren't expecting us mere mortals to pay for AI generated games and media.
Because if I end up losing my job to a robot that was trained on my own stolen words, images, code and sounds, paying $70 for some slop is right down at the bottom of the list of things I want to do.
Exactly, they can't be angry if we don't pay anymore.
Clair Obscur is not indie by any definition of the term. I don't even know why it was considered at all.
Sandfall *interactive is independent from its publisher Kepler. Many of the other games Kepler produces are typically considered indie - why not Expedition 33? BG3 is "Indie" but this definition
While Hades, Hollow Knight, and Celeste being both owned and published by the same company are not indie.
So.. idk what definition everyone is using. Seems to be whatever suits their agenda at the time of award.
if your definiton of inide exclude Hades, Hollow Knight and Celeste because they are independent i have to say that it is a very bad definiton of what an indie game is.
personally, if a game has enough budget to hire Charlie Cox or Andy Serkins, it probably should not be in an indie award ceremony
Yes okay but how do you define it?
Because that is all that "Indiependent" means.
Remember Hades and Hades 2 had a bigger budget than E33
Hollow Knight was developed by 2 people with a $58,000 budget. How more independent do you want to get?
was it an indie in the first place?
I mean in the sense they are self published... Yes they are indie.
So Zelda is an indie game?
Personal i think the criteria for no longer being an indie dev is if the company is funded by a publisher or the company itself has been or has the capacity to be a publisher themselves
So is Animal Well not an indie game? Since they were funded and published by Bigmode.
Most other "indie" games are not indie under that definition, too.
The indie renaissance that occurred in the late 00's/early 10's was mostly indie developers obtaining good publisher deals. Some indie developers still self-publish, but the majority don't. There are even publishers that specialize in indie game publishing.
If you want to get technical yeah I guess it wouldn't be independent because it wasn't independently funded.
I thought they had a publisher
Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn't something that's relevant for Expedition 33, but I'm talking about in general).
Like, I tend to use the term "machine learning" for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and "AI" for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.
I might be wrong, because I've only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it's not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I'm not sure
You can use statistics to estimate a child's final height by their current height and their parents' height.
People "train" models by writing a program to randomly make and modify equations, then keep them depending on if new accuracy is higher.
Generative AI can predict what first result on google search or first reply on whatsapp will look like for llms.
There are problems. Training from 94% to 95% accuracy takes exponentially more resources as it doesn't have some "code" you can fix. Hallucinations will happen.
On the other side, procedural algorithms in games just refer to handwritten algorithms.
For example a programmer may go "well a maze is just multiple, smaller mazes combined." Then write a program to generate mazes based on that concept.
It's much cheaper, you don't need GPU or internet connection to use the algorithm. And if it doesn't work people can debug it on the spot.
Also it doesn't require stealing from 100 million people to be usable
(I kinda oversimplified generative AI, modern models may do something entirely different)
generative ai is a subset of procedural generation algorithms. specifically it's a procedural algorithm with a massive amount of weight parameters, on the order of hundreds of billions. you get the weights by training. for image generation (which i'm assuming is what was in use here), the term to look up is "latent diffusion". basically you take all your training images and blur them step by step, then set your weights to mimic the blur operation. then when you want an image you run the model backwards.
Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I'm curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI
most procedural algorithms don't require training data, for one. they can just be given a seed and run. or rather, the number of weights is so minimal that you can set them by hand.
From my understanding, AI is the general field of automating logical ("intelligent") tasks.
Within it, you will find Machine Learning algorithms, the ones that are trained on exemplar data, but also other methods, for instance old text generators based on syntactic rules.
Within Machine Learning, not all methods use Neural Networks, for instance if you have seen cool brake calipers and rocket nozzle designed with AI, I believe those were made with genetic algorithms.
For procedural generation, I assume there is a whole range of methods that can be used:
I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it's trained on stolen artist data, but I'm not sure how tenable "trained on stolen artist data" is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.
For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I'd still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it's impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)
Perhaps it's foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I've found it useful to try pin terms down where possible
I don't know of any games that use machine learning for procedural generation and would be slightly surprised if there are any. But there is a little bit of a distinction there because that is required at runtime, so it's not something an artist could possibly be involved in.
I'm not so much talking about machine learning being implemented in the final game, but rather used in the development process.
For example, if I were to attempt a naive implementation of procedurally generated terrains, I imagine I'd use noise functions to create variety (which I wouldn't consider to be machine learning). However, I would expect that this would end up producing predictable results, so to avoid that, I could try chucking in a bunch of real world terrain data, and that starts getting into machine learning.
A different, less specific example I can imagine a workflow for is reinforcement learning. Like if the developer writes code that effectively says "give me terrain that is [a variety of different parameters], then when the system produces that for them, they go "hmm, not quite. Needs more [thing]". This iterative process could, of course, be done without any machine learning, if the dev was tuning the parameters themselves at each stage, but it seems plausible to me that it could use machine learning (which would involve tuning model hyperparameters rather than parameters).
You make a good point about procedural generation at runtime, and I agree that this seems unlikely to be viable. However, I'd be surprised if it wasn't used in the development process though in at least some cases. I'll give a couple of hypothetical examples using real games, though I emphasise that I do not have grounds to believe that either of these games used machine learning during development, and that this is just a hypothetical pondering.
For instance, in Valheim, maps are procedurally generated. In the meadows biome, you can find raspberry bushes. Another feature of the meadows biome is that it occasionally has large clearings that are devoid of trees, and around the edges of these clearings, there is usually a higher rate of raspberry bushes. When I played, I wondered why this was the case — was it a deliberate design decision, or just an artifact of how the procedural generation works? Through machine learning, it could in theory, be both of these things — the devs could tune the hyperparameters a particular way, and then notice that the output results in raspberry bushes being more likely to occur in clusters on the edge of clearings, which they like. This kind of process would require any machine learning to be running at runtime
Another example game is Deep Rock Galactic. I really like the level generation it uses. The biomes are diverse and interesting, and despite having hundreds of hours in the game, there are very few instances that I can remember seeing the level generation being broken in some way — the vast majority of environments appear plausible and natural, which is impressive given the large number of game objects and terrain. The level generation code that runs each time a new map is generated has a heckton of different parameters and constraints that enable these varied and non-broken levels, and there's certainly no machine learning being used at runtime here, but I can plausibly imagine machine learning being useful in the development process, for figuring out which parameters and constraints were the most important ones (especially because too many will cause excessive load times for players, so reducing that down would be useful).
Machine learning certainly wouldn't be necessary in either of these examples, but it could be something that could make certain parts of development easier.
Sure, I could definitely see situations where it would be useful, but I'm fairly confident that no current games are doing that. First of all, it is a whole lot easier said than done to get real-world data for that type of thing. Even if you manage to find a dataset with positions of various features across various biomes and train an AI model on that, in 99% of cases it will still take a whole lot more development time and probably be a whole lot less flexible than manually setting up rulesets, blending different noise maps, having artists scatter objects in an area, etc. It will probably also have problems generating unusual terrain types, which is a problem if the game is set in a fantasy world with terrain that is unlike what you would find in the real world. So then, you'd need artists to come up with a whole lot of datat to train the model with, when they could just be making the terrain directly. I'm sure Google DeepMind or Meta AI whatever or some team of university researchers could come up with a way to do ai terrain generation very well, but game studios are not typically connected to those sorts of people, even if they technically are under the same company of Microsoft or Meta.
You can get very far with conventional procedural generation techniques, hydraulic erosion, climate simulation, maybe even a model of an ecosystem. And all of those things together would probably still be much more approvable for a game studio than some sort of machine learning landscape prediction.
People are tearing eachothers up in the comments, but does anybody know what the textures were?
Just production assets from what I understand. None of it is in the game proper.
If this is the case then i dont care.
Placeholders and production assets are just random low effort garbage somebody puts together and are just meant for people internally see how things work. No artist lost paycheck or merit.
I dont see any difference in this than when Batman Arkham asylum was released with placeholders. Skyrim had also placeholder textures on the release, so did Halo 2, Fallout new vegas, CoD MW2 and probably hundreds of more. Only difference is that they were done by coders in paint or something instead of generative ai.
The only takeaway is that the Indie Game Awards' rule is overly restrictive. Woops, one of your contracted artists used a GenAI model to generate a music playlist to set the mood while he was working on your game, you're disqualified and the fact that you didn't come forward with this information immediately makes you a liar. Obviously absurd. If they're going to take a strong anti-AI stance, it should be more realistic. At some point, maybe even already, every single competitor should be disqualified but isn't aware or forthcoming about it, so what's the rule actually doing except rewarding dishonesty?
The GenAI asset was in the final release. It wasn't that a subcontractor used GenAI to create a music playlist to listen to while they worked. That's a very different thing.
It was a placeholder texture that was always intended to be replaced by actual art made by a human. It was overlooked accidentally and promptly replaced. So no, it isn't a very different thing. It was never supposed to be part of the game or even a significant part of its development.
To me, "the music a subcontractor listens to while they work" is different to "the thing they're working on".
I heartily approve.
I mean they got to give the other games a chance at winning something this year 😁
Being a 500 person studio with a 400 million dollar publisher means you still qualify for the Indie™ Game Awards but using ChatGPT to make a random powerpoint is just a bridge too far.
Apparently Blue Archive, the game that was given the award after they disqualified E33, ALSO used AI.
As much as I hate to admit it, non-flagrant AI use will likely become generally accepted. The truth is that there's a lot of content in games these days that sometimes just isn't that important to dedicate man hours to it (Ex: Generic brick texture #431). The fact that this slipped through the cracks is proof enough.
However, overly slacking to the point the end point looks obviously AI generated with just bad art. It's pretty much akin to just delegating to some shady third party studio that works for pennies and spits out generic, low quality stuff.
Ethics and copyright, are of course, different questions entirely. (In my opinion most AI providers are committing blatant copyright infringement by using machines that crunch down copyrighted data and resell it back to you). But it seems like Silicon Valley's marketing and public relations team managed to figure out the copyright one at this point. <>/
Edit: 3 AM, and tired.
Trained on stolen art of people who actually spent time making that brick texture?
Games are an artform, AI shouldnt be used at all.
If it's trained on licensed material, would that be acceptable?
That part is, the next part is who is it going to replace? Which artist isnt going to be hired because they just made something with AI instead? Thats some pure creativity just lost from the world.
You are all over this thread repeating variations of the same comment which, despite wildly different responses from voters, mostly show you do not at all understand how image model training and generation work.
This sort of absolutism is dead. Do you think they should be disqualified if they Google something and the answer is in Google's AI summary?
Yawn. I dont think AI should be used at all and obviously an unintentional use of it appearing in a search result isnt the same as giving money to an AI company to generate textures derived from stolen artwork.
They could have just bought some textures from the large supply there is out there.
Nice religion.
It's a tool. You're attaching far too much moral virtue to something that in another breath you will describe as an autocomplete tool.
I do agree with you. But unfortunately making games is as much a business, as it is making art. Some things just aren't that important to spend man hours on. Before AI, those textures would be just stock assets from stock art websites, hence the example.
Cat's out of the bag right now. And it will only get worse, unless generative AI use is made outright illegal. Which I doubt due to moneyed interests.
So if you make a noise mesh texture is that hand crafted?
wait it used genAI? It's coming off my wishlist... :/
A placeholder isn't what they're working on either. It's a placeholder for something someone else is working on but hasn't completed yet.
Win
I was just about to buy this game too
Not now.
Fuck AI.
I fail to see how this isn't a good thing?
Yes the AI usage was known about previously, yes, the game probably doesn't really count as being an indie game, yes game awards are all genuinely terrible, but you have to take what you can get. A small victory is a still a victory.
Good. It's a decent enough game, if you like that style, but I think they won enough at the other awards.
Would you have preferred I just call out the game for being shitty and not in any way an "indie game?"
Oh, wait, I don't give a fuck what you think!
I hope this wasn't used as an excuse to disqualify the game so they wouldn't have to give it an award... Cause if it turns out it was, that would look really bad...
Ahhh okay this makes sense now I fully could not understand the buzz around this game and it always felt a bit...off.
Between this and the Divinity controversy, I think the gaming world needs some kind of Responsible AI seal, like the old Nintendo Seal of Quality. While Microsoft is shoving Copilot into Notepad, it can be really hard to guarantee every team member has never used an AI for anything.
Standards like “No generative AI” are a good one, and it turns out we’re also under debate whether AI for concept art - something absent from the game files - is okay. Many say not.
Agreed. If any AAA studio says "we will use AI just for templates" they are not going to do that. Not with their deadlines.
Also aren't there reports artists and programmers in studios doing that fucking hate it?
In fact, yes!
https://thisweekinvideogames.com/feature/concept-artists-in-games-say-generative-ai-references-only-make-their-jobs-harder/
Whatever, it's shit anyway
lol dumb disqualification. Game is overrated anyway
Insightful commentary, I’m glad you shared your thoughts with us.
Triggered over that comment, get real lmao. It is very overrated
Wow, two bangers in a row. How do you do it?