Oh its AI that makes not indie, not the huge funding.
Should indie games have a maximum budget?
Yes. If you get 120M+ in funding, you no longer qualify to be called indie.
Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
181–190 of 421 posts
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#182There is a small irony that the Indie Game Awards rejects nominations of games using AI but The Game Awards does not. It is independent teams of developers who are less likely to be able to afford to pay an artists who may be able to produce something of value with AI assets that they otherwise would not have the resources for. On the other side, it is big studios with a good track record and more investment who are…
> To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer.
How though? If questions about style or substance can be answered with "because the AI did it, its just some stochastic output from the model" I don't see how that allows for expression between humans.
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.
But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Now they're automated off the back of somebody else's work. And here we have an admission, but how many artists are being sidestepped in major games developers now? It won't be long before the EAs and Ubisofts of the world fire theirs. Then it'll be developers. Then it'll just be a committee of dolphins picking balls to feed…
It's bad because it takes someone's job? However, that job was mundane petty work that seniors didn't want to bother with. Were cars terrible for taking all of those stableboy jobs? Is Excel or data engineering terrible for the obliteration of data entry and low level bookkeeping jobs? Or is it not just a slippery slope argument, when what's happening is IMO evolution of tech? IMO People will adapt. While it's up to any event organizers to decide their rules, AI witch-hunts are a Luddite response. AI/LLM can be major tools in the belt of indies to dethrone AAA. I'd like to be clear that I'm arguing in favor of tooling such as the example of placeholder usage and a pipeline to remove it. I wouldn't defend a scumbag leveraging AI to ripoff another game, artist, or dev. It just seems like the lines are being blurred to justify AI witchhunts.
The game industry, especially AAA, is actually having major identity crisis right now as technology evolves and jobs adapt around the new tool of AI/LLMs. The game awards (not indie) should demonstrate this dolphin committee you fear already exists because the limiting factor in all industries are major resources: time, capital, experience. AI/LLMs will enable far more high skill work to be accomplished with less experience, time, and possibly capital (sidestepping ethics/practicality of data centers).
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#184Is anyone else detecting a phase shift in LLM criticism? Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this. No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's…
No, AFAICT, AI hate has been common (but not the majority position, and still not) in normie contexts for a while.
You’re reading it wrong: rather, AI hype had been common (but not the majority position) in tech contexts for a while, especially from those that have something to sell you.
What you derogatorily call normies are the rest of the world caring about their business until one day some tech wiz came around to say “hey, I have built a machine to replace all of you! Our next goal is to invent something even smarter under our control. Wouldn’t that be neat?” No wonder the average person isn’t really keen on this sort of development.
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't find it that surprising. The creatives that are against generative AI aren't against it only because it produces slop. They are against it because it uses past human creative labor, without permission or compensation, to generate profit for the companies building the models which they do not redistribute to the authors of that creative labor. They are also against it due to environmental impact. In that view,…
The creatives that are the loudest voices against AI for art asset generation in my experience are technically competent but lacking any real pizzazz or uniqueness that would set them apart from generated art, so they feel extremely threatened. There's also been an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the major entertainment industry players to get creatives to come out against AI vocally. I'd like to see what…
>There's also been an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the major entertainment industry players to get creatives to come out against AI vocally.
Where can I find out more about this?
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#186You need to separate AI usage from automating certain parts of a pipeline from end to end creation. Taking a scorched earth approach to AI usage is just being a luddite.
I don't think this argument is going to be very compelling. The people whom you would be trying to convince here, would just argue that the Luddites were correct in their fight against human labor being displaced. They'll argue that the power artisans had over their work was diminished with the advent of the loom, just like the power artists have over their labor is being diminished right now.
No you are just not understanding the difference between changing and optimising workflow from displacing creativity and artists.
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
People were told by other people to dislike LLMs and so they did, then told other people themselves.
Ha! You’re actually exactly right. We’ve observed this in AI gen ads (or “creatives” as ad people call them) They work really well, EXCEPT if there is a comment option next to the ad - if people see others calling the art “AI crap” the click rate drops drastically :)
If I was vegan and found out after the fact that a meal that I enjoyed contained animal products in it that doesn't mean I'm some hypocrite for consuming it at the time. Whether I enjoyed it or not at the time it still breaches some ethical standard I have, abstaining from it from then on would be the expected outcome.
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's all I've found as well, but, personally, I find that a bit unclear, for a couple of reasons. First, are they saying that the game itself can use generative AI, but it can't be used in the development of the game? So that would mean that if the game itself generates random levels using a generative AI approach, that's allowed, but, if I were to use that same code to pre-generate and manually modify the levels,…
> AFAIK, there's no consensus on whether traditional procedural approaches should be described as "generative AI" Sure there is. "Generative AI" is just a marketing label applied to LLMs - intended specifically to muddy these particular waters, I might add. No one is legitimately confused about the difference between hand-built procedural generation techniques, and LLMs.
That's not quite true though, right? Because diffusion models are also generative AI and they're not LLMs. Heck, they probably got disqualified, not for the use of an LLM, but for the use of a diffusion model.
So I think Gen AI is an umbrella. The question is, do older techniques like GANs fall under Gen AI? It's technically a generative technique that can upscale images, so it's generating those extra pixels, but I don't know if it counts.
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#189I think it's more the fact that they lied before nomination than the AI usage itself. Any institution is bound to disqualify a candidate if it discovers it was admitted on false grounds. I wonder if the game directors had actually made their case beforehand, they would have perhaps been let to keep the award. That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programme…
> Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot I think that is almost certainly untrue, especially among indie games developers, who are often the most stringent critics of gen ai.
This is just one example, but today I found this where two people build their passion project using GenAI for image generation (+ photoshop), maybe otherwise this project wouldn't even be possible: https://reddit.com/comments/1prqfsu
Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use
#190This is crazy. Tools like photoshoot have gen ai tools in them. Does that mean that Photoshop is now a minefield for artists? If a single artist uses the wrong tool once they disqualify the entire final product for awards, even if the asset is fully removed on the final build.
IDEs now have “AI” autocomplete; will a game become ineligible if a single dev accidentally presses tab instead of writing the whole function by hand? If a script writer uses ChatGPT to generate ideas, straight up ban? Where does the organisation intend to draw the line?
They don't. Because selling hate does not draw lines.