Doubly so if the usage was de minimis.
I think it's the artists, not the tools, that make the art. Overuse of anything is gauche; but I am confident that beautiful things can be made with almost any tool, in the hands of a tasteful artist.
Right. The game is not eligible for the award. This is not a comment on the quality of the game.
The Indie Game Awards require zero AI content. The devs fully intended to ship without AI content but made a mistake, disqualifying themselves for the award. This is simply how competition rules work. I have a friend who plays competitive trading card games, and one day he showed up to a national event with an extra card in his box after playing with some friends late at night. It was an honest mistake, and the judges were quite sympathetic, but he was still disqualified!
BTW, the game is incredible.
I've never liked this argument. If AI is a tool, then having my own personal woodworker on staff makes me a woodworker too.
Rubbing a brush on a canvas was good enough for the renaissance masters, why are we collectively okay with modern "artists" using "virtual brushes" and trivializations of the expressive experience like "undo" when it's not "real art" because they're leaning so heavily on the uncaring unthinking machine and the convenience in creation it offers rather than suffering through the human limitations that the old masters did? Are photographers not artists too then, because they're not actually creating, just instead capturing a view of what's already there?
The usual response to this is some trite response about how AI is 'different' because you're 'just' throwing prompts at it and its completely creating the output itself -- as if it's inconceivable that there might be someone who doesn't just shovel out raw outputs from an AI and call it 'art' and is instead actually using it in a contributatory role on a larger composition that they, themselves, as a human, are driving and making artistic decisions on.
E33 is a perfect example here. Is the artistic merit of the overall work lessened by it having used AI in part of its creation? Does anyone really, truly believe that they abdicated their vision on the overall work to machines?
Just because someone can drag and drop to draw a circle in an image editing app instead of using their own talent and ability to freehand it instead doesn't mean what they then go on to do with that circle isn't artistic.
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.
Obviously the woodworker is a person. And you would be on a team that has woodworking as part of their skillset.
But the way you set up your reductio-ad-absurdum it can be read as implying the AI is a person too. O:-)
You know what, rather than just going for a flip rhetorical takedown, what if we took that implication seriously for a second?
What if you did mean to argue that (the) AI is a proto-person. Say you argue that they deserve to be in the credits as a (junior?) member of the team. That'd be wild! A really interesting framing, which I haven't heard before.
Or the weaker version: Use said framing pro-forma as a (practical?) legal fiction. We already have rules on (C) attribution. It might be a useful framing to untangle some of the spaghetti.
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 gen AI, e.g. way before LLM became big I had dabbled a bit in gen AI and there where some decent line work smoothing algorithms and similar with non of the ethical questions. Tools which help removing some dump annoying overhead for artists but don't replace "creative work". But which anyway are technical gen AI...
I think this mainly shows that a blank ban on "gen AI" instead of one of idk. "gen AI used in ways which replaces Artists" is kinda tone deaf/unproductive.
Frankly, in the wider debate, I think engagement algorithms are partially to blame. Nuanced approaches don't get engagement, so on every topic everyone is split into two or more tribes yelling at each other. Folks in the middle who just want to get along have a hard time.
(Present company excepted of course. Dang is doing a fine job!)
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/totalwar/comments/1l9j2kz/new_amazi...
A GenAI placeholder fails at both halves of what a placeholder needs to do. There's no benefit for a placeholder to be good enough to fly under the radar unless you want it to be able to sneak through.
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"