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So if I'm reading it right they basically just tried it out and then decided to not use it, removing anything that used it? I can see how technically that it 'was used at all in development', but also seems a lil silly to pull the awards based on it.
They probably should have clarified how they used it a lot earlier, but I also don't blame them for trying out a new tool.
The game was released with AI assets. The rules required disclosure, and they failed to properly disclose. Whether this was on purpose or by accident, they were disqualified quite fairly. It's a shame, but fairness must apply equally to all studios.
This is where I am confused. I hear this, but I also keep hearing they used AI to create assets when it was first started development as placeholders for future assets. They were all replaced long before the game was ever released. I also heard that the assets used were stock unreal 5 assets which were AI generated but again replaced later long before the game released. So which is the real story?
They used them as placeholders, they may or may not have been stock ue5 assets, which is another problem altogether. But a few of them were left in game at release, presumably by accident since they were removed 5 days post launch. The game did release with AI assets, even if mistakenly.
Given the test, release and publishing timelines, the 5 days patch was already being actively worked on before the game was released. Had it be a few positions higher on the backlog, nobody would have known.
If this is against Indie GA, then for sure drop the award, but that makes me value less the IGA than the game.
The AI assets were only patched out at day 5 because fans noticed them. The devs likely rolled it into that patch because of the fans catching it in the live game.
The issue at hand, as the article above goes into, is that the devs said that they used no AI at all in developement, which is a condition of the award. They did however, as these assets and the devs themselves comfirmed in various interviews. They lied or at least misled the Indie game awards and violated its conditions.
Revoking the award seems like a pretty reasonable response on the IGA's part. The game itself can still be a masterpiece, but not one eligble for this award.
They used it to create placeholders during development. It wasn't something they decided not to use before. It's just something that was meant to be replaced. Usually these placeholders are a missing texture image or just a magenta texture, but they used generative AI to create something that fit into the world. Because it fit they forgot to replace it.
Honestly, I'm not opposed to this usage. It's not like it's replacing an artist. No one was going to create a placeholder to be replaced. However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you'll forget to replace items with this technique, like we saw here. The old style of incredibly obvious placeholders were used for a reason; so that you can't forget to replace them. It's probably smart to keep doing this.
I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there's one thing I disagree:
However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you'll forget to replace items with this technique
There are ways to ensure you don't forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_ or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won't be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.
I think it's okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don't, it's trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you're building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.
Except that they used the placeholder AI textures so that they would have a functional build to test on. They didn't just try it and decide it didn't work. They literally used it produce part of the rough draft and even shipped the game with some of those placeholder textures accidentally still in there. It was actively used in this instance to "do work".
It wasn't "well let me see what this looks like... No that's all wrong... Nevermind". It was "well let's get this AI to make some placeholders so we can continue working on this and we'll slap the real textures in later". Literally removing work from a human(concept artist), which is the complaint of anti-AI people. Funny enough, I'm pro-AI and even I'm agreeing with the anti-AI people here. You want a "no AI was used" award? Then don't ever use AI. Simple.
That's not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person's job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.
We're not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.
I don't know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I'm willing to bet we're talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn't exactly damning
Literally removing work from a human(concept artist)
It's not really "removing" work from a human, it's utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn't replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.
And they lied about it on the award application, but yes.
i can see how this would happen though: marketing team simplistically asks about AI assets, dev team says no because it’s not in the final product that they’re aware of, and that miscommunication is exactly that: neither team is trying to be dishonest, it’s just that some information got lost along the way
their award should have been rescinded for sure
but also that shouldn’t tarnish the reputation of the studio going forward as long as they apologise and it was legitimately internal miscommunication rather than an attempt to deceive
I see no issues here. These AI tools came out during the game's development. Its not unreasonable to try using new tools upon release. And its reasonable to be unaware of the harms of these new tools before the harms are widely reported on.
If things were as described, this seems fine. They now have a clear policy against AI. People, even in groups can be mistaken and learn and change their ways, which is what appears to have happened here. I can't fault anyone for making the occasional misstep.
So long as they stick to their commitment to not use AI.
Not only is AI bad it is also bad —
Look I've seen the hours those studios and devs put into design... If they want to prototype using a tool? Nobody's losing a job over that. Its a couple hours saved from doom scrolling though your existing assets looking for something temporary.
Yeah, it slipped out though the cracks. But then how many games are loaded with "Unintended Easter eggs" because people are human. I don't get it. The event is no more novel than finding an untextured brick off the beaten trail or a picture of a dev left in following an in joke amongst the team.
Want to mention that I really appreciate this reasonable, nuanced perspective of the situation that takes pains to see the humanity in the devs, that they are humans who make mistakes, and not ascribe malice to what can easily be ignorance.
The benefit of the doubt is lost in modern day and it's nice to see it still being given.
Yeah this is something that keeps getting completely lost in this conversation.
The assets in question were from development during 2022-2023 at the latest. GenAI image tools at that time were extremely primitive compared to what's out there now - remember DallE-Mini? That's the kind of thing they were using. And because these tools hadn't breached containment yet, literally no one was talking about ethical issues yet. Sandfall was basically just experimenting with brand new tech long before it was "good" and long before anyone was talking about it.
Now? It's good to see them committed to avoiding it. GenAI is a plague and should be treated as such. But 2022-ish was totally different than today.
The screeching over this is absolutely absurd. I can't believe people don't have better things to do than harass these people. Absolutely insane.
Fr. Witch hunting over fucking nothing.
more like fighting against the ai slop. Such huge controversy should make other companies think again before using ai for creative process. Its either this or having more and more ai slop, voting with your vallet is the new pull your self up by your shoestrings.
Fighting against AI slop is fine, but that's not what's happened here. The devs tested using gen AI for a brief time with the intention to make placeholders. They stopped using gen AI after they found problems with the outputs. They therefore continued to use humans to make the rest of the placeholders. They then replaced all the placeholders with finalized versions, which are entirely human made.
The issue is not that Expedition 33 has gen AI, the issue was that they used gen AI for a brief time in the game's development
I hate AI with a passion. A burning passion. And there is some muddied reporting and stuff with how the Clair Obscure team handled the use of AI but ultimately it does look to be an innocent use.
It does start a slippery slope argument, but I don't see much wrong with using AI generated textures or models if they are truly truly 100% meant to be replaced by the product ship date. There are many video games that start out with stolen ripped assets as placeholders because it's a whole lot easier to throw in completed assets that work right now so you can get to your iterative phase of game development a lot sooner.
During game development, there is a lot of wasted effort you need to try to avoid. A game is not fully complete when it is planned out. When you start video game development, you don't know where you're going to end. If you do not approach the iterative process of game design carefully, you will end up wasting tons of effort and artist time just for things and features and levels that will never see the final release.
Tldr; I don't see a big problem with using AI as placeholders but you better fucking be honest about it and they better actually be placeholders
yeah i don’t even think the dishonesty was necessarily dishonesty… i just think perhaps the marketing team wasn’t fully informed. i can absolutely see dev teams saying no to “AI use” not having been told that the question applied to the whole dev process, and marketing not understanding that that information was important
i have no problem with AI placeholders. i think that’s the right way to use AI… and dishonesty is a problem… miscommunication is really not a problem
but i also think that rescinding the award is the right call! but that shouldn’t tarnish the studios reputation in the future if they apologise and explain what happened
The problem with using AI textures is that at a glance they look like the real thing. So it's not always easy for QA to spot that a texture hasn't been swapped out. The thing is it's also super easy to deal with that, you just put all the AI textures in a temporary folder and then when you think you already to ship the game, delete that folder and see if you get any bright purple broken textures showing up.
Most game engines will let you set the missing texture to be something truly awful and very obvious.
Don’t even need to do that. With a visual spot check there is still a chance some things fall trough the cracks. Even a bright pink asset. Better to tag assets as a placeholder in the metadata and then let an automated validation process find the placeholders in the levels. And you can even configure it to run the validation process during a build so it will halt the build when it finds placeholders.
I think the issue is, that they didn't remove all the assets in the version they submitted for the award. Yes, the assets were later removed, but the version that was used for the awards still had those assets.
I agree with your argument as a whole, but it doesn’t really apply here. There wouldn't have been an issue if they had indeed replaced the assets with real art in time.
They already had the replacement assets created upon release, but forgot to swap them out and it was missed in QA. That's why, pretty much as soon as they discovered it, they got it all replaced just 5 days after release.
It's pretty common for games to mistakenly release with minor assets still as placeholders instead of the official version. Who's really going to look at something like the texture of a rock and be like "Wait just a minute! That's not the official rock texture!"
The more you learn about this, the more understandable it is. The only people mad are those who don't know the whole story, or those that are just looking for an excuse to be mad, no matter how dumb the excuse.
Would have been fine if they'd been up-front about it. Some people still wouldn't like it, but some people wouldn't play a game made by French devs. Maybe. I dunno. People are free to have preferences, even if we think they're weird or don't agree with them. I think Clair Obscur had a ton of great ideas. Game really wasn't for me, but I respect the hell out of it. It's a shame about the genAI. Nice that they're committing to avoid AI, but they really just need to be honest about what you're getting. I think if they told people what the AI was used for, it would have gone over better.
I think that the amount of love that went into Clair Obscur eclipses any use of AI. If you're under the impression that background textures they replaced must mean they used AI everywhere else — you must not have played the game.
I'm hard pressed to name a nominee that wasn't made with love. And it seems weird to insist a game as lauded as E33 needs another awards show genuflection to reaffirm it's status.
That's a fair point, Skong was made by like 3 people and it's probably one of the best games of all time — tons of love in the game.
While there's no doubt that they have technically break the rules, just the fact that they afaik patched the few textures before this controversy (as far as I know, it's possible that it was a reaction to this?), this simply sounds like a (very succesful) PR attempt by Indie Game Awards.
There's no doubt that Clair Obscire isn't a AI slop that cheapened on artists or art with GenAI, whis is the spirit of the rules IGA has. If you don't take the rules literaly, they deserve the award. And that's IMO important.
I've never heard about IGA before this, so it worked to draw attention to them.
I'm very OK with having rules in place to reject work where you replaced artists with AI. But this is not the case.
Depends on why they're so anti-AI. AI slop replacing artists isn't the only harm it causes.
good!
They lied or misstated during their submission.
We will never know what would have happened if they had been open and honest.
"Will"
lol
I played the game very shortly after release and I read all the newspapers. There was a lot of storytelling going on in them and they definitely weren’t this. Was some prerelease build or placeholder texture? Because if so, this controversy is pedantic, puritanical, witch-hunting garbage, and I say that as someone who is violently anti-AI.
Afaik, they patched it 5 days after release, so depends on how shortly after release you played.