Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thegamer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 421 posts

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

#411

Post by andyclap2 »

ragequittah wrote: post #391
defrost wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Shad…

Agree with what you say, sometimes an original idea blossoms and improves the state of the art, especially in UI. Those that do this work with that intent rather than IP are very much appreciated.

As for patents, heard of Ralph Baer?

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

#412

Post by halJordan »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #233
latexr wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" (whic…

You're only saying that because it's a witch-hunt. These sorts of oversights are routinely made and forgiven daily at all levels of society. Citi regularly sends millions of dollars to wrong accounts and then says "my bad, give it back" and no one bats an eye.

But some ai gen'd placeholders beak through and suddenly we're all about punishing an oversight?

That's the definition of a witch hunt, and it's past time we admit it.

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

#413

Post by davidjytang »

halJordan wrote: post #412
PunchyHamster wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" (whic…

You're only saying that because it's a witch-hunt. These sorts of oversights are routinely made and forgiven daily at all levels of society. Citi regularly sends millions of dollars to wrong accounts and then says "my bad, give it back" and no one bats an eye. But some ai gen'd placeholders beak through and suddenly we're all about punishing an oversight? That's the definition of a witch hunt, and it's past time we a…

> That's the definition of a witch hunt

You gave examples of a witch hunt. Not definition.

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

#414

Post by gamblor956 »

halJordan wrote: post #412
PunchyHamster wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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" (whic…

You're only saying that because it's a witch-hunt. These sorts of oversights are routinely made and forgiven daily at all levels of society. Citi regularly sends millions of dollars to wrong accounts and then says "my bad, give it back" and no one bats an eye. But some ai gen'd placeholders beak through and suddenly we're all about punishing an oversight? That's the definition of a witch hunt, and it's past time we a…

It's literally not the definition of a witch hunt. They weren't hunting for AI use in E33 or other nominees. Sandfall was stripped of the award because it admitted to using AI after the fact, despite pledging that no AI tools had been used *at any point of the development process.

Sandfall opened themselves up to this when they accepted the nomination knowing the rules for this particular award prohibited AI use of any kind.

Note that there is also now a discussion about how much AI was used to design the enemies as well, given the rather bizarre appearances of many of them enemies in the latter portions of the game.

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

#415

Post by gamblor956 »

dathinab wrote: post #232
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.

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

some pretty decent "line smoothing" algorithm are technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues

You'd have to cite an actual example of something this ridiculous. Non gen-AI algorithms have been line smoothing just fine for 2 decades now for less than a trillionth of the resources required to use gen AI for the same task.

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

#416

Post by theshrike79 »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #239
theshrike79 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The best quote I've heard about this is: "Replace tasks not jobs".

Use AI to automate the boring shit so you can focus on the stuff that matters.

That throwaway texture that's on one model in the tutorial doesn't need days of focused work, so have the AI whip something up. Now your artist has two extra days for key art that's more visible.

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

#417

Post by jajuuka »

andersa wrote: post #256

This isn't even an indie game, with funding rivaling major studios, what are we doing?

Is indie music no longer indie if they sell really well? Is an indie film no longer indie if it gets too many awards? This kind of redefinition of indie as "poor people" is ahistorical and unhelpful. Indie means independent of a major studio. Which they are.

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

#419

Post by andersa »

jajuuka wrote: post #417
andersa wrote: post #256

This isn't even an indie game, with funding rivaling major studios, what are we doing?

Is indie music no longer indie if they sell really well? Is an indie film no longer indie if it gets too many awards? This kind of redefinition of indie as "poor people" is ahistorical and unhelpful. Indie means independent of a major studio. Which they are.

If your studio has enough resources that it could easily be its own publisher, the definition "independent from a publisher" is no longer of much use. It's also wrong: this project did have a publisher and various other investment in it.

The founders of this studio come from rich family backgrounds, to think they have anything in common with what the average person understands as an "indie game" developer is laughable. For example, they supposedly rented an office to work in, in a building owned by the founder's father's real estate firm, of course.

Projects like these used to be called AA games. It's a fantastic game, it doesn't have to be indie to be good.

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

#420

Post by DangitBobby »

theshrike79 wrote: post #356
Devasta wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same works the other way, and actually a lot better IMO. Let's imagine a scenario with two identical restaurants with the exact same quality of food. One sells their dish as a fully vegan option, but doesn't tell the customers. Hardline "oorah, meat only for me" dude walks in and eats the dish, loves it. If he goes to the other restaurant and is told beforehand that "sir, this dish is fully vegan" - do you think…

Does that make it ethical to mislead people? You are stripping people of agency.
Post reply on HN