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

Even if all the AI-generated content had been replaced before release, this would still be a lie.

This is just another scheme where those at the top are appropriating the labor of many to enrich themselves. This will have so many negative consequences that I don't think any reactions against it are excessive.

It is irrelevant whether AI has "soul" or not. It literally does not matter, and it is a bad argument that dillutes what is really going on.

There is still human intentionality in picking an AI generated resource for surface texture, landscape, concept art, whatever. Doubly so if it is someone that create art themselves using it.

There's also been an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the major entertainment industry players to get creatives to come out against AI vocally. I'd like to see what percentage of those artists made the statement to try and curry favor with the money suits.

It'll never happen because the grift is the point.

It’s been insane to me to watch the “creative class”, long styled as the renegade and anti-authoritarian heart of society, transform into hardline IP law cheerleaders overnight as soon as generative law burst onto the scene.

And the environmental concerns are equally disingenuous, particularly coming from the video game industry. Please explain to me how running a bunch of GPUs in a data center to serve peoples LLM requests is significantly more wasteful than distributing those GPUs among the population and running people’s video games?

At the end of the day, the only coherent criticism of AI is that it stands to eliminate the livelihood of a large number of people, which is perfectly valid concern. But that’s not a flaw of AI, it’s a flaw of the IP laws and capitalistic system we have created. That is what needs addressing. Trying to uphold that system by stifling AI as a technology is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Realistically, no.

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 off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.

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

True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.

This argument in this industry is problematic. The entire purpose of computers is to automate processes that are labor intensive. Along the way, the automation process went from doing what was literally impossible with human labor to capturing ever deeper levels of skill of the practitioners. Contrast early computer graphics, which involved intensive human intervention, to modern tools. Since HN almost certainly has more developers than graphics artists, contrast early computer programming (where programmers didn't even have the assistance of assemblers and where they needed a deep knowledge of the computer architecture) to modern computer programming (high level languages, with libraries abstracting away most of the algorithmic complexity).

I don't know what the future of indie development looks like. In a way, indie development that uses third-party tools that captures the skills of developers and graphics artists traditionally found in major studios doesn't feel very indie. On the other hand, they are already doing that through the use of game engines and graphics design/modelling software. But I do know that a segment of the industry that utterly ignores those tools will be quickly left behind.

The game industry, especially AAA, is actually having major identity crisis right now as technology evolves and jobs adapt around the new tool of AI/LLMs. The game awards (not indie) should demonstrate this dolphin committee you fear already exists because the limiting factor in all industries are major resources: time, capital, experience. AI/LLMs will enable far more high skill work to be accomplished with less experience, time, and possibly capital (sidestepping ethics/practicality of data centers).

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.

They didn’t have a choice, it was obvious it was AI. They might still have other places where they used it but it’s harder to notice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344279

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.

So, in essence, you’re agreeing.

> Hitler liked chocolate, doesn't mean you shouldn't eat chocolate.

Arguments have nothing to do with dietary preferences, that comparison makes no sense.

Gaslighting would be simply incorrect, since gaslighting refers to an elaborate scheme of making somebody doubt their own perception/sanity. It a a severe form of abuse, requires an ongoing relationship with power dynamics (it cannot happen from a single instance of interaction), and typically results in long-term PTSD for the victim(s).

Agree on the capturing. Watering down terms is highly unfortunate for everyone.

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

We should be able to celebrate the creation, execution, concept of a game without letting AI assets nullify the rest.

Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.

Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.

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 countless artists whose work was stolen from them to compete with a model trained on their art without their consent and are paying them NOTHING for it. Just because it is impressive doesn’t make it ok.

Shame on any tech person who is okay with this.

I'm not sure that LLMs respect that restriction (since they generally don't attibute their code).

I'm not even really sure if that clause would apply to LLM generated code, though I'd imagine that it should.

so... all of them

There are artists who would (and have) happily consented, licensed, and been compensated and credited for training. If that's what LLM trainers had led with when they went commercial, if anything a sector of the creative industry would've at least considered it. But companies led with mass training for profit without giving back until they were caught being sloppy (in the previous usage of "slop").

Analogy: the common area had grass for grazing which local animals could freely use. Therefore, it's no problem that megacorp has come along and created a massive machine which cuts down all the trees and grass which they then sell to local farmers. After all, those resources were free, the end product is the same, and their machine is "grazing" just like the animals. Clearly animals graze, and their new "gazelle 3000" should have the same rights to the common grazing area -- regardless of what happens to the other animals.

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. It cannot come up with anything truly new.

I think this may be the only piece of technology humans created that halts human progress instead of being something that facilitates further progress. A dead end.

Like most things, art exists on a spectrum and there are many levels. Most would say a single pixel isn't art, yet at some point many cross some invisible line where it becomes art. Likewise, at some point a bunch of logic and pixels become a best-selling indie game. It's more than the sum of its parts, and I don't agree with saying that sum is suddenly less just because one of those parts was AI generated. The sum should logically be the same value regardless.

But then that's a very mathematical way of looking at it. Art and the appreciation of it has never been logical, but instead emotional. AI invokes negative emotions in many people, and so the art is diminished in their eyes. This makes sense to me.

However, I don't necessarily agree with this approach of yanking back the award. It reeks of horse buggy whip manufacturers trying to push back the tide. But then I've never understood comparing one piece of art to another and declaring one the winner. If art is simply something that invokes emotion in the viewer, and everyone's emotional response is different, it makes no sense to have awards to me.

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"

- annoyance at stupid AI features being pushed on them

- Playing around with them like a toy (especially image generation)

- Using them for work (usually writing tasks), to varying degrees of effectiveness to pretty helpful to actively harmful depending on how much of a clue they have in the first place.

Discussion or angst about the morality of training or threats to jobs doesn't really enter much into it. I think this apathy is also reflected in how this has not seemingly affected the sales of this game at all in the months that it has been reported on in the video game press. I also think this is informed by how most people using them can fairly plainly see they aren't really a complete replacement for what they actually do.

> “hey, I have built a machine to replace all of you! Our next goal is to invent something even smarter under our control. Wouldn’t that be neat?” No wonder the average person isn’t really keen on this sort of development.

Nope, most are just annoyed from AI slop bombarding them at every corner, AI scams getting news of claiming another poor grandma, and AI tech industry making shit expensive. Most people's job are not in current direct threat of being employed, unless you work in tech or art.

No, I don't think I am.

> AI hype had been common (but not the majority position) in tech contexts for a while, especially from those that have something to sell you.

There's a whole lot of that for quite a long time targeting normie contexts, too; in fact, the hate in normie contexts is directly responsive to it, because the hype in normie contexts is a lot of particularly clumsy grifting plus the nontechnical PR of the big AI vendors (which categories overlap quite a bit, especially in Sam Altman’s case), and the hate in normy contexts shows basically zero understanding of even what AI is beyond what could be gleaned from that hyper plus some critical pieces on broad (e.g., total water and energy use, RAM price) and localized (e.g., from fossil fuel power plants in poor neighborhoods directly tied to demand from data centers) economic and environmental impacts.

> What you derogatorily call normies

I am not using “normie” derogatorily, I am using it to contrast to tech contexts.

I for one cannot wait for a future where grandparents get targeted ads showing their grandchildren, urging them to buy some product or service so their loved ones have something to remember them by...

No, but it becomes a dubious concept when you define forests as a collection of only conifer trees and that deciduous trees don't count for the definition of a forest.

Sure there is. "Generative AI" is just a marketing label applied to LLMs - intended specifically to muddy these particular waters, I might add.

No one is legitimately confused about the difference between hand-built procedural generation techniques, and LLMs.

The issue is not the technology per se, it's how it's applied. If it eliminates vast swathes of jobs and drives wages down for those left, then people start to have a problem with it. That was true in the time of the Luddites and it's true today with AI.

Games always have their game engine touch and often for indie games it's a good part of the process. See for example Clair Obscur here which clearly has the UE5 caracter hair. It's what the game can and cannot do and shapes the experience.

Then the gameplay itself depend a lot on how the code was made and iterations on the code also shape the gameplay.

> Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using VSCode.

Which clearly isn't the case, unless they like to suffer in regards to the Unreal and Unity integrations.

Of course you'd use Jetbrains for Android...