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Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

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Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#231

Post by itishappy »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #195
spuz wrote: post #32

There 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…

Simple fix, they need a separate categories for a game art award—no AI—and the rest of the categories (perhaps including game of the year, best new game) should allow AI. Right now the rules they're using are going against larger forces in the world that are going to become standard (if they're not already). And to your point, these are indie developers that are David's going up against the AAA Goliath's that have a…

I'd agree if this were about The Game Awards or similar, where indie devs are expected to compete against the AAA goliaths, but I've always understood the Indie Game Awards as being more about the craft then the end product.

From the FAQ:

> The ceremony is developer-focused, with game creators taking center stage to present awards, recognize their peers, and openly speak without the pressure of time constraints.

https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq

Regardless of AI's inevitability, I don't particularly care to celebrate it's use, and I think that's the most reasonable stance for a developer focused award to take.

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#232

Post by dathinab »

thiht wrote: post #59
skibidithink wrote: post #21

The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c... > 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, insta…

That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.

it's even worse then that

there is a whole basked of technologies which you can label as "gen AI" but which have non of the problems why people hate "gen AI"

as a very dump example, some pretty decent "line smoothing" algorithm are technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#233

Post by PunchyHamster »

latexr wrote: post #129
skibidithink wrote: post #21

The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c... > 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, insta…

From the submitted article: > "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 art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination." Whatever placeholder you…

> Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.

If it was malicious they wouldn't say a word. They probably interpreted the rule as "nothing in shipped game is AI" (which is reasonable interpreteation IMO), they implemented policy to replace any asset made by AI and just missed some texture.

Also the term was pretty vague, like, is using automatic lipsync forbidden ? That's pretty much generative AI, just the result is not picture but a sequence of movements.

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#234

Post by PunchyHamster »

Anarch157a wrote: post #104
culturestate wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product. When someone goes three miles per hour over the speed limit they are literally breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean they should get a serious fine for it. Sometimes shit happens.

Countries with sane laws include a tolerance limit to take into account flaws in speedometers and radars. Here in Brazil, the tolerance is 10%, so tickets clearly state "driving at speed 10% above limit".

and the rules of the contest did not include any sane boundaries.

Like, using automatic lipsync is "generative AI", should that be banned ? Do we really want to fight with that purely work-saving feature ?

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#235

Post by PunchyHamster »

huhtenberg wrote: post #97
thiht wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.

Generating a brick wall texture using an AI should be acceptable as well, even when it's not a placeholder.

Yeah I'm fine with replacing generic stuff with generic AI stuff. Or cutting out the boring part, nobody needs to spend hours manually lip-syncing character or generating thousands of intermediate movement animation steps.

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#236

Post by throwaway613745 »

thiht wrote: post #59
skibidithink wrote: post #21

The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c... > 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, insta…

That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.

Blanket ban on AI generated assets, but nobody cares about AI generated code apparently. lol

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#237

Post by ghaff »

vulcan01 wrote: post #208
latexr wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether “everyone does it” has no bearing on it being what should be done. Most people also speed up on yellow lights, but you should be doing the exact opposite.

This depends on the country. In certain countries, speed limits are set by civil engineers as a true upper limit that one is not supposed to exceed. In others, speed limits are set slightly above the average speed one is expected to drive at. In the former sort of country, drivers are expected to use their judgement and often drive slower than the limit. In the latter sort of country, driving at the speed limit is ra…

The problem I have with the whole "licensing standards" thing is that, for everyday activities for most of the population, it's not realistic to regulate to the point that there are really substantial barriers to entry to the degree there are for flying in general. And experience probably counts for more than making people shell out a couple thousand more for courses.

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#238

Post by asadotzler »

theshrike79 wrote: post #161
krapp wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LLMs were simply a niche but somewhat useful technology people could choose to use or avoid, then sure, such an absolutist stance seems excessive. But this technology is being aggressively pushed into every aspect of our lives and integrated into society so deeply that it can't be avoided, and companies are pushing AI-first and AI-only strategies with the express goal of undermining and replacing artists (and even…

It’s like banning any and all uses of chainsaws for any kind of work ever just because some bros juggle with them and have chainsaw juggling conventions. It’s just a tool, but like any tool it can be used the right way or wrong way. We as a society are still learning which is which.

More like banning automated forest clearing power chainsaw robots because they mowed down all the forests killing most life on earth. That's a terrible analogy, but better than yours.

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#239

Post by PunchyHamster »

theshrike79 wrote: post #140
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that this holds in theory, but in practice? All the overhyping of AI I've heard from the gaming sector has come from the big studios, not indies. And, as you point out, Clair Obscur isn't the 'most indie' of indies anyway.

Maybe the small studios just use it as a tool and don’t need to hype it to make it look good for stock holder interests.

That's what semi-recent whining about Larian saying they use AI was about. They just use it to cut some of the boring work and iterate over some ideas, once the idea is in stone actual artist does it.

I don't see the problem because it isn't cutting more artists out of the loop, if anything they get more of the meaningful work

Re: Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

#240

Post by kryptiskt »

HelloUsername wrote: post #226
fxwin wrote: post #222

I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday. Last year's award show has <100k views on youtube, and the first article mentioning this (insider-gaming.com's) is written by one of the judges involved. I'll leave it up to the reader to judge how much of this is genuine and how much is jumping the twitter bandwagon to boost the award show's p…

> I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday Very curious to hear what channels you follow and how often per week. My RSS feed was spammed by it this and previous years

That was probably The Game Awards[0], which is a big deal. I guess whoever is behind Indie Game Awards sees the name confusion as a feature rather than a bug.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2025

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