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.
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
Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process
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.
Is a user of a pro-genAI instance
Can we put our collective pitchforks away for this case at least?
NO.
My pitchfork stays sharpened and at the ready until this stupid bubble pops.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Lol you think people on lemmy are going to put away their AI pitchforks?
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.
Why are you responding to me? Your message doesn’t seem to have anything to do with my statement that lemmy is a hive mind circle jerk over AI (and steam, etc.)
When they understand the context behind this particular case, yes.
Has not been my experience. Rip your comment votes
Yeah I figured this app had more tech savvy and educated people. Evidently, it’s littered with people that barely got through high school.
Not in general but for this at least? Maybe?
Nah there’s already a slap fight down in the comments between the hard liners and the “can’t we just give it a rest” folks. It’s gotten to the point I’m convinced there’s at least a few ai bots generating hate spam against ai bots.
Or maybe people are just fed up with AI being shoehorned into anything and their mum and overcorrect a bit?
A bit? People on this reddit-lite platform seem to care more about clair obscur using AI for concept art than they do about murdering Venezuelans and the US turning to literal piracy. A bit doesn’t begin to describe.
No more than the ones pushing their pro-ai agenda.
<_<
Are there pro-ai posts? I don’t think I’ve ever seen any. My posts are ai-neutral at best and I still get downvoted to oblivion.
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.
“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “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. “In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination.”
Additionally, here is another article where they are clarifying HOW it was used.
Following the publication of this article, Sandfall Interactive wishes to provide the following clarifications. The studio states that it was in contact with El País on April 25 - three months prior to this publication. During these exchanges, Sandfall Interactive indicated that it had used a limited number of pre-existing assets, notably 3D assets sourced from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. None of these assets were created using artificial intelligence. Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative Al-created assets in the game. When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.
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:
- AI didn’t steal anyone’s job in this instance. It was simply used as a tool to help make an artists job easier.
- It was never meant to be a part of the final product, and currently isn’t.
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 questionable
Make 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.
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.
there was no AI in the final product.
Some of the AI textures slipped through the cracks on release day
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.
In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all,
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.
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
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.
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.
Good.
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 has to be more nuanced than “self-published”
It doesn’t need to. Definining it as “self-publishing” is enough.
otherwise everything EA craps out is “indie”.
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?
An indie video game or indie game is a video game created by individuals or smaller development teams, and typically without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher,
After inking a partnership with Kepler Interactive, which was officially announced in early 2023, and securing funding from said publisher, Sandfall grew into a studio of about thirty developers, three of whom—including Broche and Guillermin—were former Ubisoft employees.[38][39][40][29][27][30][excessive citations] The funding also allowed Sandfall to expand the manpower contributing to the project beyond this core team, having outsourced gameplay combat animation to a team of eight South Korean freelance animators and quality assurance (QA) to a few dozen QA testers from the firm QLOC, as well as receiving assistance from a half-dozen developers from Ebb Software to port the game to consoles. The studio also hired a couple of performance capture artists; brought in musicians for the soundtrack recording sessions; contracted with translators from Riotloc for language localization; and partnered with Side UK and Studio Anatole as to voice casting and production in English and French respectively.[39][41] Finally, the partnership with Kepler Interactive enabled Sandfall to pay for noted professional voice actors, including Charlie Cox, Andy Serkis and Ben Starr.[35][37]
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.
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.
Considering the backlash, maybe it was silly of them to use it for placeholders.
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.
Also it was a small team not a full studio with millions
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.
The hive mind only cares about one thing: there is no room for shades of grey in the holy war.
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.
While Hades, Hollow Knight, and Celeste being both owned and published by the same company are not indie.
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
- Hades production cost was over $15 Million
- Hades 2 production cost was over $20 Million
- E33 was less than $10 Million.
Hollow Knight was developed by 2 people with a $58,000 budget. How more independent do you want to get?
I mean. Usage of AI should be disclosed. But it feels more Like they’re trying to take it down. This has a taste of jealousy to me.
Or I don’t get the full picture Here.
