Comment on After GOTY pull, Clair Obscur devs draw line in sand: 'Everything will be made by humans by us'

astropenguin5@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨17⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The rules required disclosure, and they failed to properly disclose. Whether this was on purpose or by accident, they were disqualified quite fairly. It’s a shame, but fairness must apply equally to all studios.

  source

  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It was released with the original placeholder AI assets, but patched out within 5 days. It’s pretty clear that they just missed replacing those assets prior to release.

    I don’t know exactly which assets, or exactly how many… but from several article it seems one of them was a newspaper only used in the prologue, that no one would notice without directly looking at it up close, which 99.9% of people would never do, and could easily be overlooked doing final testing for game breaking issues prior to release.

    And the failure to properly disclose could easily be explained by them messing around. Early in development, deciding not to use AI, and then forgetting about it. Which also explains it being left in for release accidentally. Updated assets were clearly made, just never replaced.

    The disqualification had nothing to do with the assets being there for the release, it was solely about development as mentioned in every statement from the awards. Meaning even if it hadn’t been there at release, they still would have been disqualified. Hard criteria like that which disqualifies any sort of context or consideration is not fair. Especially when we’re talking about cutting edge technologies that teams will obviously be experimenting with before making decisions.

    source
  • HeyJoe@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is where I am confused. I hear this, but I also keep hearing they used AI to create assets when it was first started development as placeholders for future assets. They were all replaced long before the game was ever released. I also heard that the assets used were stock unreal 5 assets which were AI generated but again replaced later long before the game released. So which is the real story?

    source

    • Harvey656@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      They used them as placeholders, they may or may not have been stock ue5 assets, which is another problem altogether. But a few of them were left in game at release, presumably by accident since they were removed 5 days post launch. The game did release with AiI assets, even if mistakenly.

      source

      • Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Given the test, release and publishing timelines, the 5 days patch was already being actively worked on before the game was released. Had it be a few positions higher on the backlog, nobody would have known.

        If this is against Indie GA, then for sure drop the award, but that makes me value less the IGA than the game.

        source
• Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  They used it to create placeholders during development. It wasn’t something they decided not to use before. It’s just something that was meant to be replaced. Usually these placeholders are a missing texture image or just a magenta texture, but they used generative AI to create something that fit into the world. Because it fit they forgot to replace it.

  Honestly, I’m not opposed to this usage. It’s not like it’s replacing an artist. No one was going to create a placeholder to be replaced. However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique, like we saw here. The old style of incredibly obvious placeholders were used for a reason; so that you can’t forget to replace them. It’s probably smart to keep doing this.

  source

  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I agree with almost everything here, I think using LLMs to generate placeholders is fair game and allows studios to nail down the feeling of the game sooner. That being said there’s one thing I disagree:

    However, it is obvious to see that occasionally you’ll forget to replace items with this technique

    There are ways to ensure you don’t forget, things like naming your placeholders placeholder_<name> or whatever so you ensure there are no more placeholders when you make the final build. That is the best way to approach this because even extremely obvious placeholders might be missed otherwise, since even if you have a full QA team they won’t be playing every little scene from the game daily looking for that, and a few blank/pink/checkered textures on small or weird areas might be missed.

    I think it’s okay for studios to use generative AI for placeholders, but if one of them makes it to the release you screwed up big time. And like I said there are ways to ensure you don’t, it’s trivial to make a plugin for any of the major engines (and should be even easier if you’re building the engine yourself) where it would alert you of placeholders in use at compile time.

    source
• fishos@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  Except that they used the placeholder AI textures so that they would have a functional build to test on. They didn’t just try it and decide it didn’t work. They literally used it produce part of the rough draft and even shipped the game with some of those placeholder textures accidentally still in there. It was actively used in this instance to “do work”.

  It wasn’t “well let me see what this looks like… No that’s all wrong… Nevermind”. It was “well let’s get this AI to make some placeholders so we can continue working on this and we’ll slap the real textures in later”. Literally removing work from a human, which is the complaint of anti-AI people. Funny enough, I’m pro-AI and even I’m agreeing with the anti-AI people here. You want a “no AI was used” award? Then don’t ever use AI. Simple.

  source

  • I_Has_A_Hat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Dude, it was 2022. AI was nothing back then. Certainly not something that people were debating the morality of at the time. It was a new tool. A developer tried it out for a few very minor assets that were only meant to be placeholders. This was’t “literally removing work from a human(concept artist)”. FFS, it probably was the concept artist who used it!

    Like imagine a new type of paint comes out that’s supposed to spread on canvas better. An artist gets some and tries a few test strokes on a blank canvas, goes “huh, interesting”, and then paints over it entirely with traditional paint. Then, the public turns against the new paint. Maybe it’s made from orphan blood, maybe it causes cancer; it doesn’t matter why, but it is now heavily frowned upon to use it. An art studio displaying the original artists work puts out a claim that none of their art uses the new type of paint. Were they lying? Like, ya technically I guess, but if you can’t see the nuance and understand how such a thing could happen, then your logic is less that of a human, and more that of a machine.

    source
  • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    We’re not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.

    I don’t know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I’m willing to bet we’re talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn’t exactly damning

    Literally removing work from a human(concept artist)

    It’s not really “removing” work from a human, it’s utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn’t replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.

    source
  • Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    That’s not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person’s job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.

    source
• DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It was only the "indie’ games award. A small ragtag group that was completely in niche discussions online until they pulled this stunt to get all the gaming outlets to bait about

  "omg E33 got an AWARD PULLED???!

  Nobody knew or gave a fuck about the “indie” game awards until this happened.

  Because this paid off, expect more smaller groups to pull similar ideas to feign “outrage” for exposure

  source
• JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  And they lied about it on the award application, but yes.

  source
• BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  But did you consider “ai bad” and “nuance is stupid, ai bad?”

  source