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

Submitted ⁨⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨tonytins@pawb.social⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.polygon.com/game-awards-expedition-33-disqualified-did-it-use-ai-response/

The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French studio was probed about recent AI controversies. Game director Guillaume Broche clarified some of the misinformation surrounding the studio and reiterated what other Sandfall developers have said about generative AI usage during interviews held earlier in the year.

Transcription of the Q&A comes courtesy of gaming content creator Sushi, who was one of the handful of influencers who were present at the session. Twitch streamer crizco prefaced his question by recounting the storm surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios’ admission about using generative AI during game development.

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Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
“Will”

lol

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Xenny@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I hate AI with a passion. A burning passion. And there is some muddied reporting and stuff with how the Clair Obscure team handled the use of AI but ultimately it does look to be an innocent use.

It does start a slippery slope argument, but I don’t see much wrong with using AI generated textures or models if they are. Truly truly 100% meant to be replaced by the product ship date. There are many video games that start out with stolen ripped assets as placeholders because it’s a whole lot easier to throw in completed assets that work right now so you can get to your iterative phase of game development a lot sooner.

During game development, there is a lot of wasted effort you need to try to avoid. A game is not fully complete when it is planned out. When you start video game development, you don’t know where you’re going to end. If you do not approach the iterative process of game design carefully, you will end up wasting tons of effort and artist time just for things and features and levels that will never see the final release.

Tldr; I don’t see a big problem with using AI as placeholders but you better fucking be honest about it and they better actually be placeholders

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- vxx@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I think the issue is, that they didn’t remove all the assets in the version they submitted for the award. Yes, the assets were later removed, but the version that was used for the awards still had those assets.
  
  I agree with your argument as a whole, but it doesn’t really apply here. There wouldn’t have been an issue if they had indeed replaced the assets with real art.
  
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astropenguin5@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
So if I’m reading it right they basically just tried it out and then decided to not use it, removing anything that used it? I can see how technically that it ‘was used at all in development’, but also seems a lil silly to pull the awards based on it.

They probably should have clarified how they used it a lot earlier, but I also don’t blame them for trying out a new tool.

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- SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨15⁩ ⁨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.
  
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  - halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.
    
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  - HeyJoe@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨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?
    
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- Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨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.
  
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  - Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.
    
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- fishos@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨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.
  
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  - halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.
    
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  - Nibodhika@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨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.
    
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- DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨13⁩ ⁨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
  
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- BananaIsABerry@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  But did you consider “ai bad” and “nuance is stupid, ai bad?”
  
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- JackbyDev@programming.dev ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  And they lied about it on the award application, but yes.
  
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hildegarde@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I see no issues here. These AI tools came out during the game’s development. Its not unreasonable to try using new tools upon release. And its reasonable to be unaware of the harms of these new tools before the harms are widely reported on.

If things were as described, this seems fine. They now have a clear policy against AI. People, even in groups can be mistaken and learn and change their was, which is what appears to have happened here. I can’t fault anyone for making the occasional misstep.

So long as they stick to their commitment to not use AI.

Not only is AI bad it is also bad —

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couldhavebeenyou@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
This controversy is going to look so dumb in 5 years

(when, for example, UE6 has been partly coded using AI)

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- ms_lane@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  UE6 doesn’t exist, it’s ‘UE for Fortnite’ now.
  
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Jax@sh.itjust.works ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I think that the amount of love that went into Clair Obscur eclipses any use of AI. If you’re under the impression that background textures they replaced must mean they used AI everywhere else — you must not have played the game.

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- UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I’m hard pressed to name a nominee that wasn’t made with love. And it seems weird to insist a game as lauded as E33 needs another awards show genuflection to reaffirm it’s status.
  
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  - Jax@sh.itjust.works ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    That’s a fair point, Skong was made by like 3 people and it’s probably one of the best games of all time.
    
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  - Mikina@programming.dev ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    While there’s no doubt that they have technically break the rules, just the fact that they afaik patched the few textures before this controversy (as far as I know, it’s possible that it was a reaction to this?), this simply sounds like a (very succesful) PR attempt by Indie Game Awards.
    
    There’s no doubt that Clair Obscire isn’t a AI slop that cheapened on artists or art with GenAI, whis is the spirit of the rules IGA has. If you don’t take the rules literaly, they deserve the award. And that’s IMO important.
    
    I’ve never heard about IGA before this, so it worked to draw attention to them.
    
    I’m very OK with having rules in place to reject work where you replaced artists with AI. But this is not the case.
    
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- Mikina@programming.dev ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  It’s IMO pretty clear that the purpose of the rule is to rule out AI slop and games that cheapened on artists and replaced them by genAI.
  
  Expeditin is neither. It feels like an (succesful) AI stunt by a lesser known award show not many people knew about.
  
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  - DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    … It feels like an (succesful) PR stunt by a lesser known award show not many people knew about.
    
    Exactly this.
    
    Expect this shit to be more frequent
    
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cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Would have been fine if they’d been up-front about it. Some people still wouldn’t like it, but some people wouldn’t play a game made by French devs. Maybe. I dunno. People are free to have preferences, even if we think they’re weird or don’t agree with them. I think Clair Obscur had a ton of great ideas. Game really wasn’t for me, but I respect the hell out of it. It’s a shame about the genAI. Nice that they’re committing to avoid AI, but they really just need to be honest about what you’re getting. I think if they told people what the AI was used for, it would have gone over better.

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andyburke@fedia.io ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
They lied or misstated during their submission.

We will never know what would have happened if they had been open and honest.

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- halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Depends on the exact scenario.
  
  We’re also dealing with language differences. English is not the developer’s first language. What may seem a clear sentence to a native speaker, could be easily misinterpreted/mistranslated to something similar, but different enough that the answer changes.
  
  It seems that the AI use was early in development, and limited to temporary placeholders that were going to be replaced. Since they were patched out within days of release, that seems to imply they already had replacement assets on hand, they were just missed during final checks before release.
  
  The answer from the devs also changed prior to the awards show that implies that they may have had an updated interpretation of the qualification question or answer. If they thought the question was about AI use in the final product, then accidentally missing a placeholder swap shouldn’t be disqualifying. Likewise, early experimentation with the tech and then deciding not to use it probably should not disqualify either. But if the qualification is a hard yes/no with absolutely no context or consideration whatsoever, then that’s a different outcome, and hence them clarifying for the awards team.
  
  Personally I think the hard limit without any room for consideration or interpretation is a shit qualification. Especially considering that isn’t really the case for most awards. Look at the definition of “indie” for example. There’s a half dozen different interpretations people have ranging from having to be self published, avoiding just large publishers, or just the publisher not having creative influence. That’s a lot of interpretation comparatively.
  
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Jessvj93@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Image

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- Jessvj93@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Image
  
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IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Seems like an overreaction. Oh well.

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- BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  No AI in video games, period. We’ve learned when we draw the line the major players push at it until they get what they want. AI benefits the wealthy, no one else. AI data centers are a blight on communities.
  
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  - daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨40⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    It’s good to have morals, but also to have realistic expectations.
    
    We haven’t been able to stop dlc, micro transaction, gambling… I don’t think we would be able to stop AI in videogames.
    
    I have the suspicion that all these quick and fast remakes in HD are pulling AI assets as crazy to be able to have results quickly and cheap.
    
    Going too hard ln these devs, which doesn’t seem like bad people won’t ever change what EA. Ubisoft, Nintendo or any big player will do. It would only hurt this small studio for nothing.
    
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  - IEatDaFeesh@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    That’s a pretty reductive take. I consider auto-formatting a form of AI because that’s a function that I ask ChatGPT to do. “Reformat the code” “tidy it up.” But I’m assuming even that is “AI” to you because ChatGPT was involved. The level of “AI” that the Claire devs used seemed to be on the same level as what I just described. A tool to help get the ball moving but not be the sole engine of the project.
    
    Also, you don’t need to use LLMs from companies like OpenAI or Google, you can just run your own LLM.
    
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  - zbyte64@awful.systems ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    But maybe if I use AI I can be wealthy. Sure it is accelerating climate change and will undoubtedly cost lives, but that is a small price to pay for me to horde money like a dragon.
    
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Eyck_of_denesle@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The people still defending them is sad. If you give them even a single pass, they will take it for granted. Be glad atleast someone is trying to set a precedent.

Also this game has to be the most polarising one this year. People that played it love it to death and the other well on a lot of social media are now hating it to death(they’re probably salty because of the game awards).

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