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.
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.
Exactly this.
Expect this shit to be more frequent