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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

#391

Post by ragequittah »

defrost wrote: post #373
CamperBob2 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no difference. What about a dungeon hack game that uses generated mazes? Random level generators put level designers out of work, but you never saw anyone carrying signs and carrying on about those.

When did random level generators advance to the stage of generating rich background art in the style of long term DeviantArt contributors simply by rolling a few PRNGs ? Was that before or after real people had their work scraped w/out permission or acknowledgement? Describing these things as having no difference appears delibrately obtuse.

>Was that before or after real people had their work scraped w/out permission or acknowledgement?

Well after. Ever notice how a good game was made and then suddenly 50 like it appeared? Everyone scraped id soft's ideas and tech. Everyone followed Blizzard's ideas. The amazing thing that happened IMO is when companies started putting up patents so that such scraping couldn't be done.

One that comes to mind is the Shadow of Mordor nemesis system. Great idea, would've been neat to see in other games. Nope not allowed for 11 years. If things like this were around at the start of gaming it would likely be in a very sorry state.

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

#392

Post by tstrimple »

surgical_fire wrote: post #135
SirHumphrey wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the only difference is that image generators are a much fuller replacement for "artists" than for programmers currently. The use of quotation marks was not meant to be derogatory, I sure many of them are good artists, but what they were mostly commissioned for was not art - it was backgrounds for websites, headers for TOS updates, illustrations for ads... There was a lot more money in this type of work the same w…

Finally a good point in this thread. There is a problem with negative incentives, I think. The more generative AI is used and relied upon to create images (to limit the argument to inage generation), the less incentive there is for humans go put in the effort to learn how to create images themselves. But generative AI is a deadend. It can only generate things based on what already exists, remixing its training data.…

I feel like these exact same arguments were made with regard to tools like Photoshop and Dreamweaver. It turns out we can still build websites and artists can still do artist things. Lowering the bar for entry allows a TON of people to participate in things that they couldn't before, but I haven't seen that it kills curiosity in the folks who are naturally curious about things. Those folks will still be around taking things apart to see how they work.

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

#393

Post by kibwen »

iowemoretohim wrote: post #352
kibwen wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not trying to defend "The Indie Game Awards", which I also have never heard of, but The Game Awards are universally acknowledged to be a joke, and always have been. By runtime, it's 80% soulless, samey trailers for AAA games, 10% Imagine Dragons, 5% rooting for that coked-up clarinet player on the edge of the orchestra, and 5% Jeff Keighley rapid-firing off the winners of made-up award categories in under five se…

The Game Awards 2025 had more viewers than the Superbowl with a total of 171 million global livestreams vs The Indie Game Awards (7.1k Youtube views and 433 Twitch views).

Sure, I know all of these things because me and all my friends make a tradition to watch it... to laugh at it. It's a hilarious farce. Which advertisers are fine with, naturally, but don't mistake someone admiring the spectacle of a catastrophic trainwreck for someone admiring the engineering of the railway. The actual awards given are a meaningless afterthought.

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

#394

Post by rerdavies »

queenkjuul wrote: post #330
NeutralCrane wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the point. No one cares about line smoothing algorithms but they lose their mind if it’s background textures or throwaway voice lines.

No artists were previously smoothing lines for a living but they were painting textures and voice acting

Artists were previously drawing lines that didn't need to be smoothed for a living.

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

#395

Post by rerdavies »

yallpendantools wrote: post #174
oliwarner wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist. I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift…

> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria

And up to us to decide whether The Indie Game Awards has impaired their credibility by choosing such a ridiculous criterion.

Do you think AAA game development teams pass on AI despite the fact that it produces better results at a fraction of the cost. I think not. Why would you cripple Indie developers by imposing such a standard on indie developers?

It seems completely out of touch with what's going on in the world of software development.

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

#396

Post by ares623 »

Majromax wrote: post #249
dragonelite wrote: post #224

When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models. But i don't mind people using AI it's their own choice, the focus then just becomes in the curation skill of the individual, team, company etc of the generated AI output. So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.

> When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models. [...] So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game. To nitpick: the independent game awards are the Luddites here. The Luddites were a protest movement, not just a group of people unfamiliar with technology. In the historical context that's apparently become appr…

What happened to the Luddites? Did they end up upskilling and living happily ever after?

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

#397

Post by dathinab »

delecti wrote: post #295
dathinab wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If AI use produces obviously inferior work, how did it win in the first place? they uses some AI placeholders during development as it can majorly speed up/unblock the dev loop while not really having any ethical issues (as you still hire artists to produce all the final assets) and in some corner case they forgot to replace the place holder also some of the tooling they might have used might technically count as g…

> AI placeholders during development as it can majorly speed up/unblock Zero-effort placeholders have existed for decades without GenAI, and were better at the job. The ideal placeholder gives an idea of what needs to go there, while also being obvious that it needs to be replaced. This [1] is an example of an ideal placeholder, and it was made without GenAI. It's bad, and that's good! [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/to…

it's not better as they fundamentally fail to capture the atmosphere and look of a scene

this means that for some use cases (early QA, design 3D design tweaks before the final graphic is available etc.) they are fully useless

it's both viable and strongly preferable to track placeholders in some consistent way unrelated to their looks (e.g. have a bool property associated with each placeholder). Or else you might overlook some rarely seen corner cases textures when doing the final cleanup

so no, placeholder don't need to be obvious at all, and like mentioned them looking out of place can be an issues for some usages. Having something resembling the final design is better _iff_ it's cheap to do.

so no they aren't failing, they are succeeding, if you have proper tooling and don't rely on a crutch like "I will surely notice them because they look bad"

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

#398

Post by tstrimple »

hambes wrote: post #4
danielbln wrote: post #2

I bet if they'd only used AI assisted coding would be a complete non-event, but oh no, some inconsequential assets were generated, grab the pitchforks!

Maybe, but that is a different issue. The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this. The quality suffers in both cases and I would personally criticise generative AI in source code as well, but the ethical argument is only against profiting from artists…

I've always thought it was weird how artists are somehow separate and special in the creation process. Sometimes to the point of getting royalties per copy sold which is basically unheard of for your meager code monkey.

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

#399

Post by tstrimple »

NeutralCrane wrote: post #311
thatswrong0 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way. Yeah right. AI art models can and have been used to basically copy any artist’s style many ways that make the original actual artist’s hard work and effort in honing their craft irrelevant. Who profits? Some tech company. Who loses? The artists who now have to compete with an impossibly cheap copy of their own work. This is theft at a massive scale. We are forcing cou…

Copying a style isn’t theft, full stop. You can’t copyright style. As an individual, you wouldn’t be liable for producing a work of art that is similar in style to someone else’s, and there is an enormous number of artists today whose livelihood would be in jeopardy if that was the case. Concerns about the livelihood of artists or the accumulation of wealth by large tech megacorporations are valid but aren’t rooted i…

It's almost like some of these people have never seen artists work before. Taping up photos and cutouts of things that inspire them before starting on a project. This is especially true of concept artists who are trying to do unique things while sticking to a particular theme. It's like going to Etsy for ideas for projects you want to work on. It's not cheating. It's inspiration.

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

#400

Post by Sabinus »

craftkiller wrote: post #227
culturestate wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That is not sane, it is dumb. I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s perfectly sane if your legal system recognizes and accepts that speed detection methodologies have a defined margin of error; every ticket issued for speeding within that MoE would likely be (correctly) rejected by a court if challenged. The buffer means, among other things, that you don’t have to bog down your traffic courts with thousan…

So the sign says "100", the police read your speed at "112" but the device has a 5% MoE and in this case your actual speed was 107. Seems like you have exactly the same problem because the laws state the actual speed limit was "110" which you are under, despite being over the posted limit and the police reading you as over both the real and posted limits.

Why does the sign say 100 when the actual limit was 110?
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