The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French studio was probed about recent AI controversies. Game director Guillaume Broche clarified some of the misinformation surrounding the studio and reiterated what other Sandfall developers have said about generative AI usage during interviews held earlier in the year.
Transcription of the Q&A comes courtesy of gaming content creator Sushi, who was one of the handful of influencers who were present at the session. Twitch streamer crizco prefaced his question by recounting the storm surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios’ admission about using generative AI during game development.
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.
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.
And they lied about it on the award application, but yes.
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.
But did you consider “ai bad” and “nuance is stupid, ai bad?”
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.
It was released with the original placeholder AI assets, but patched out within 5 days. It’s pretty clear that they just missed replacing those assets prior to release.
I don’t know exactly which assets, or exactly how many… but from several article it seems one of them was a newspaper only used in the prologue, that no one would notice without directly looking at it up close, which 99.9% of people would never do, and could easily be overlooked doing final testing for game breaking issues prior to release.
And the failure to properly disclose could easily be explained by them messing around. Early in development, deciding not to use AI, and then forgetting about it. Which also explains it being left in for release accidentally. Updated assets were clearly made, just never replaced.
The disqualification had nothing to do with the assets being there for the release, it was solely about development as mentioned in every statement from the awards. Meaning even if it hadn’t been there at release, they still would have been disqualified. Hard criteria like that which disqualifies any sort of context or consideration is not fair. Especially when we’re talking about cutting edge technologies that teams will obviously be experimenting with before making decisions.
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 AiI 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.
It was only the "indie’ games award. A small ragtag group that was completely in niche discussions online until they pulled this stunt to get all the gaming outlets to bait about
"omg E33 got an AWARD PULLED???!
Nobody knew or gave a fuck about the “indie” game awards until this happened.
Because this paid off, expect more smaller groups to pull similar ideas to feign “outrage” for exposure
Seems like an overreaction. Oh well.
No AI in video games, period. We’ve learned when we draw the line the major players push at it until they get what they want. AI benefits the wealthy, no one else. AI data centers are a blight on communities.
But maybe if I use AI I can be wealthy. Sure it is accelerating climate change and will undoubtedly cost lives, but that is a small price to pay for me to horde money like a dragon.
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.
Regardless of why anyone involved did the the things they did, the rules were clearly stated. The violation of the rules may have been an honest mistake, but that doesn’t change the facts at hand.
Furthermore, even if no single bit or pixel produced by or with the help of AI made it to the production release, the fact remains that it was used in the production process. It is hard to give them the benefit of the doubt on this part; how could it have slipped their mind that they did this?
The awards are a contest with rules just like any other contest, and the rules are what makes it a contest in the first place. If football ignored some of their rules, it would just be a big field with 22 guys beating the shit out of each other for a ball.
Depends on why they’re so anti-AI. AI slop replacing artists isn’t the only harm it causes.
It’s IMO pretty clear that the purpose of the rule is to rule out AI slop and games that cheapened on artists and replaced them by genAI., which I extremely agree with.
Expeditin is neither. It feels like an (succesful) PR stunt by a lesser known award show not many people knew about.
… It feels like an (succesful) PR stunt by a lesser known award show not many people knew about.
Exactly this.
Expect this shit to be more frequent
The people still defending them is sad. If you give them even a single pass, they will take it for granted. Be glad atleast someone is trying to set a precedent.
Also this game has to be the most polarising one this year. People that played it love it to death and the other well on a lot of social media are now hating it to death(they’re probably salty because of the game awards).
They lied or misstated during their submission.
We will never know what would have happened if they had been open and honest.
