For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I’m less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even think having an artist make the “core” texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn’t a problem for me.
Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.
And little tools like that give studios like this an edge over AAAs. It’s the start of negating their massive manpower advantage.
In other words, the anti-corpo angle seems well worth the “cost” of a few generations. That’s the whole point of AI protest, right? It really against the corps enshittifying stuff.
And little niche extensions in workflows is how machine learning is supposed to be used, like it was well before it got all the hype.
Right, so the barrier was that they had to pay for this “outsourced bulk art”, and now with AI they don’t have to. It looks like we are in agreement when I say “I’m glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art”?
I think AI is too dumb, and will always be too dumb, to replace good artists.
I think most game studios can’t afford full time art house across like 30 countries, nor should they want the kind of development abomination Ubisoft has set up. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “outsourced”; development that has just gotten too big, with too many people and too generic a target market. And yes, too many artists working on one game.
I think game artists should have a more intimate relationship with their studio, like they did with E33.
And it’d be nice for them have tools to make more art than they do now, so they can make bigger, richer games, quicker, with less stress and less financial risk. And no enshittification that happens when their studio gets too big.
Oh fuck off with that sentiment. You're very well aware that that's not what happened here, nor is it what's happening in a majority of genAI usage cases. In fact in most cases it IS artists using genAI to speed up the design process.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn't afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn't exist they simply wouldn't have been hired.
Yes, there IS a currently ongoing shift. Just like there was e.g. with the mechanic loom. Did that kill off handmade clothing? No - even today we still have artists making handmade clothing and in fact making tons more off of it, while the masses got access to cheap clothing. The initial sudden rush to the new tech is annoying and yes it exposes some people to hardships (which is why we should switch from capitalism, and start providing UBI), but it WILL balance out. Remember, the luddites were wrong at the end.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn’t afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn’t exist they simply wouldn’t have been hired.
That excuse can be used by big publishers as well, no?
Who made the textures or took the photos that them AI generated ones were derived from, do they get a cut? That justification is even more bizarre now, considering the tools we have to photoscan.
If you do that and proceed to say “No we didn’t use any AI tools”. Then yes, that should be a disqualification.
“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.”
But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.
Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.
…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.
You have to draw the line somewhere, saying any game cant use AI is much simpler than an arbitrary definition of what slop is. Also means we reward real artistry everytime.
At the end of the day it's all about the quality in my opinion.
The entire game could be written by ONE passionate person who is awesome at writing the story and the code, but isn't good at creating textures and has no money for voice actors - in which case said textures and all the voices would be AI generated, then hand retouched to ensure quality. That would still be a good game because obvious passion went into the creation of it, and AI was used as a tool to fill out gaps of the sole debeloper's expertise.
A random software house automating a full on pipeline that watches various trends on TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, etc., and chains together various genAI models to create slopware games by the dozens, on the other hand, is undefendable. There's no passion, there's no spirit, there's just greed and abuse of technology.
Differentiation between the two is super important.
If they’re paying a bunch of money to OpenAI for mega text prompt models, they are indeed part of the slop problem. It will also lead to an art “monoculture,” Big Tech dependence, code problems, all sorts of issues.
Now, if they’re using open weights models, or open weights APIs, using a lot of augmentations and niche pipelines like, say, hand sketches to 3D models, that is different. That’s using tools. That’s giving “AI” the middle finger in a similar way to using the Fediverse, or other open software, instead of Big Tech.
I have the same feeling about Kojima's and Vincke's latest comments on AI. Am I supposed to get mad at every single person who said they used/plan to use AI for something? I'd be as outraged as the average Fox News viewer, and it would be impossible to be taken seriously. I still won't be using AI myself (fuck surveillance state AI) and I'd be making every effort to encourage others not to use it, but there's no point in burning bridges and falling for rage bait.
They're creative people who care about the craft and care about the teams in their employ, which gives their statements weight, where some Sony/Microsoft/EA executive making an identical statement has none.
I understand the principle. Even if E33 is not slop, people should fear a road that leads to dependence on “surveillance state AI” like OpenAI. That’s unacceptable.
That being said, I think a lot of people don’t realize how commoditized it’s getting. “AI” is not a monoculture, it’s not transcending to replace people, and it’s not limited to corporate APIs. This stuff is racing to the bottom to become a set of dumb tools, and dirt cheap. TBH that’s something that makes a lot of sense for a game studio lead to want.
And E33 is clearly not part of the “Tech Bro Evangalism” camp. They made a few textures, with a tool.
When I give myself the leeway to think of a less hardliner stance on AI, I come back to Joel Haver's video on his use of ebsynth:
It lets me create rotoscoped animations alone, which is something I never would have the time or patience for otherwise. Any time technology makes art easier to learn, more accessible, we should applaud it. Art should be in the hands of everyone.
Now my blood boils like everyone else's when it comes to being forced to use AI at work, or when I hear the AI Voice on Youtube, or the forced AI updates to Windows and VS Code, but it doesn't boil for Joel. He clearly has developed an iconic style for his comedy skits, and puts effort into those skits long before he puts it through an AI rotoscope filter. He chose his tool and he uses it sparingly. The same was apparently true for E33, and I have no reason not give Kojima and Larian the same benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, Joel probably has no idea what I'm talking about when I say "surveillance state AI." People Make Games has a pretty good video exposing its use case. There's also...
the global and localized environmental impacts of all these data centers,
Nvidia and Micron pricing the consumer out of owning their own hardware,
aforementioned companies fraudulently inflating an economic bubble,
the ease with which larger models can be warped to suit their owners' fascist agendas (see Grok).
Creatives may be aware of some, or all, or none of those things, which is why it's important to continue raising awareness of them. AI may be toothpaste that can't go back in the tube, but it's also a sunk cost fallacy, you don't have to brush your teeth with shit-flavored toothpaste.
People have made it excessive due to turning AI into a modern witch hunt. Maybe if people had a more nuanced take than “all AI bad” companies could be more open about how they use AI.
I can guarantee that if E33 came out with the AI disclaimer it would’ve been far more controversial and probably less successful. And technically they should have an AI label because they did use Gen AI in the development process even if none of it was supposed to end up in the final game.
But we can’t have companies being honest because people can’t be normal.
Its not surprising when even people who like AI are now being affected by consumer hardware prices that is leading to shift in previously positive perception of it.
Becoming harder to ignore its effects. Gone from a philosophical difference of opinion to actual tangible consequences.
So becomes a question of is AI cool enough to make them happy to put up with the rising cost of hardware, which is something tech enthusiasts tend to care a lot about with it being something needed to even enjoy AI generated stuff in the first place.
I agree the current state of affairs makes people even more against AI and I think people have a good reason to be against AI, but don’t you find it a bit contradictory how people are less antagonistic towards E33 AI use now that it has been revealed?
People are far more antagonistic towards games when the first thing they see is the AI label, to the point where they dismiss the entire game as AI slop, but it seems people are willing to be more lenient on AI usage when they first get to experience the game for what it is. This unreasonable reaction to the first impression is why companies would rather hide their AI usage rather than inform the customer.
I don’t know that people are less antagonist because of E33. I think regular tech hardware enthusiasts are getting gradually angrier after the initial excitement over them when it came to potential improvements in things like NPC behavior. Because its shifting towards not being able to afford hardware to begin with.
Things have moved from somewhat background noise to no longer something they can pretend to be unaffected by. I think the period of discourse over AI was most relevant couple years before hardware issues popped up. Those who hate AI now likely don’t even care that much about creative elements. They are just pissed that AI is why prices are going up. They are angry at the AI data centers buying up all the hardware and supplies moving to corporations as consumers get cut off.
AI isn’t exactly the cause of the rise in the price of hardware. Only 1/6th of the purchased Nvidia cards are actually in data centers. Same for the memory.
We’re not using it.
What’s really drumming up all the prices is that the billionaires are convinced that AI is going to replace tons and tons of people. It’s not. It’s the insane corporate hype that’s doing all the damage.
It will replace some, sure. The same way the electric drill replaced carpenters. One electric drill does not replace one carpenter. That’s not how that works. Instead the carpenters can work a bit faster and their job is a bit easier. It’s worth buying and it’s worth using, but it doesn’t really replace a person. Accountants didn’t disappear as a profession when spreadsheets were invented.
There were books written in the 1980s about how household appliances raised the standard of cleanliness. Turns out people change clothes more when cleaning clothes doesn’t involve a washing board. And I don’t think Roombas replaced that many jobs either.
In particular, I think this is a thing that will happen for software development. I don’t think it’ll reduce the number of developers we need. I think the standards for development will just be higher. All the front end stuff in particular is going to get easier, and you won’t need as many frameworks. We’ll especially need just as many devs, if not more, in the short term. Someone’s going to have to fix the mess all these companies are going to make after they’ve fired half their devs and tried to just vibe code everything.
Horrid article, unless the intention was to throw shit around and hope to cause a commotion. There are no AI assets in Clair Obscur, and it should have been made clear by the article. From the IGA’s own statement:
[…] the use of gen AI art in production […] does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination. While the assets in question were patched out and it is a wonderful game, it does go against the regulations we have in place.
They replaced the art later, but shouldn’t the bar be high like this? Otherwise, the caution won’t be there. It also could be abused, like games only getting adjusted post-launch if a certain measure of success hits. Plus the final product is not the only part of matters in the was-AI-used discussion, it is also about the process. If AI is the product of stolen human artwork being fed into a machine, and then that machine is used during creation, then AI has been used in the process that led to the final product no less than the concept art that may not be seen in game but was important in steering the ship.
Maybe someone can share their thoughts though. I’m still formulating mine and this is where I am at the moment.
Nearly any game with more than a few people involved is going have someone use cursor code completion, or use one for reference or something. They could pull in libraries with a little AI code in them, or use an Adobe filter they didn’t realize is technically GenAI, or commission an artist that uses a tiny bit in their workflow.
If the next Game Awards could somehow audit game sources and enforce that, it’d probably be a few solo dev games, and nothing elsex
Not that AI Slop should be tolerated. But I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be enforced so strictly.
As much as I hate to admit it, non-flagrant AI use will likely become generally accepted. The truth is that there’s a lot of content in games these days that sometimes just isn’t that important to dedicate man hours to it (Ex: Generic brick texture #431). The fact that this slipped through the cracks is proof enough.
However, overly slacking to the point the end point looks obviously AI generated with just bad art. It’s pretty much akin to just delegating to some shady third party studio that works for pennies and spits out generic, low quality stuff.
Ethics and copyright, are of course, different questions entirely. (In my opinion most AI providers are committing blatant copyright infringement by using machines that crunch down copyrighted data and resell it back to you). But it seems like Silicon Valley’s marketing and public relations team managed to figure out the copyright one at this point. <>/
That part is, the next part is who is it going to replace? Which artist isnt going to be hired because they just made something with AI instead? Thats some pure creativity just lost from the world.
I hope this wasn’t used as an excuse to disqualify the game so they wouldn’t have to give it an award… Cause if it turns out it was, that would look really bad…
This feels like unecessary absolutism and fear mongeting. I am by no means an AI lover, but people shouldn’t let the worst implimentations of something cloud their judgement.
I feel the question should be “Does this project use AI responsibly?” not “Was AI used?”
Maybe what we should be advocating for is transparency with these decisions?
AI isnt needed at all, we didnt need it in the past to create art. And with all the tools and knowledge available online, for free, theres even less reason we need it these days.
I've never pirated a game, but if developers are going to use pirated content to make a game, they cant be mad when we pirate their game.
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