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.
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.
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.
So if you make a noise mesh texture is that hand crafted?
That is procedural generation using an algorithm you can not only look up but even modify.
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.
Also it was a small team not a full studio with millions
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
This is the same use case that people are currently up in arms against Larian for
Good. Burn both companies to the ground. Set them as an example.
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.
When they understand the context behind this particular case, yes.
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?
No more than the ones pushing their pro-ai agenda.
<_<
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.
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
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.
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)
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:
- Unreal Engine Megaplants seems to contain configurable tree generation algorithms, that’s mostly handcrafted algorithms with maybe some machine learning to find the parameters ranges.
- Motion capture and 3D reconstruction models can be used to build the assets. I don’t believe these rely on stolen artist data.
- Full on image generation models (sora, etc.) to produce assets and textures, these require training on stolen artist data AFAIK (some arrangements were made between some companies but I suspect it’s marginal).
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
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?
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 was just about to buy this game too
Not now.
Fuck AI.
They used it for background assets but patched it quickly. It’s not as egregious as it sounds.
Read the article. I understand.
It’s not an excuse. I just simply don’t support AI slop. AT. ALL. I don’t care that they used it for a placeholder texture. And that texture didn’t end up in final release. If I have anything to say about it, these companies will not get my money if they dipped their toes in AI. AT. ALL.
There are workers that could have made placeholder textures for fucks sake.
There were no artists who would have been paid to create placeholder textures. They would have used textures from open source sources, or from previously used textures.
I agree that AI should never replace the job a person could do, but in this instance the user of AI caused no loss of income.
AI has been around for years well before the LLM craze. It’s not all evil ffs.
Generative forms as we now know them have been around for 2 years.
I take it you never made it beyond high school?
While AI is just tool like anything else, the fact it is being used to replace talented artists just to save a quick buck is why it is understandably being called evil. Context matters.
Except in this case it wasn’t used to replace talented artists.
AI is precisely for this kind of work, the uninspired, “someone’s gotta do it” kind of boilerplate bullshit. No artist is enthusiastic about having to make brick pattern number 3591. But someone’s gotta make it. At that point, it might be just one artist generating all required 8000 patterns via AI, knocking it out in one day, then getting back to working on things that do require their talent.
No artist is enthusiastic about having to make brick pattern number 3591.
People who are not artists love saying things like this.
AI has not replaced any jobs to any significant degree
Tell that to all the people who lost their jobs.
LOL who? The layoffs from over hiring during covid, high interest rates and the boneheaded tariffs this past half year?
Who?
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.
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
wait it used genAI? It’s coming off my wishlist… :/
Used for background assets. It was promptly removed through a patch. It’s not as egregious as it sounds.
I still don’t like it. The models being built on non-consensually scraped artwork has been known from the very start. If they still thought these were ok to use, I don’t really want to get involved with their output…
It’s the same as when any other company quickly replaces the genAI art when busted, “oops we didn’t mean to include it” - then maybe don’t use it in the first place?
Human workers could’ve made background assets.
FUCK AI
Human workers did make those assets. Using AI. As placeholders.
Maybe stop the rate hating for a moment to understand the situation before you comment absolute shite?
Correction: the robot made them, and human workers who were paid to watch it like a microwave used them.
It didnt replace anyone. The workers used AI 🤦♂️
An equal amount that would have worked on it otherwise? Even so do you think that will continue to be true?
You’re quite literally speculating and probably have no tech background
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.
The hive mind is cares about one thing: there is no room for shades of grey in the holy war.
