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

https://www.thegamer.com/clair-obscur-expedition-33-indie-game-awards-goty-stripped-ai-use/

by anigbrowl • 7 months ago

186 399 7 months ago

danielbln3• 7 months ago

I bet if they'd only used AI assisted coding would be a complete non-event, but oh no, some inconsequential assets were generated, grab the pitchforks!

hambes• 7 months ago

Maybe, but that is a different issue.

The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

The quality suffers in both cases and I would personally criticise generative AI in source code as well, but the ethical argument is only against profiting from artists' work eithout their consent.

ahartmetz2• 7 months ago

Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

As far as I'm concerned, not at all. FOSS code that I have written is not intended to enrich LLM companies and make developers of closed source competition more effective. The legal situation is not clear yet.

protimewaster3• 7 months ago

I'm not sure how valid it is to view artwork differently than source code for this purpose.

1. There is tons of public domain or similarly licensed artwork to learn from, so there's no reason a generative AI for art needs to have been trained on disallowed content anymore than a code generating one.

2. I have no doubt that there exist both source code AIs that have been trained on code that had licenses disallowing such use and art AIs have that been trained only on art that allows such use. So, it feels flawed to just assume that AI code generation is in the clear and AI art is in the wrong.

NitpickLawyer2• 7 months ago

rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers

The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.

jzebedee• 7 months ago

"Mostly" is doing some heavy lifting there. Even if you don't see a problem with reams of copyleft code being ingested, you're not seeing the connection? Trusting the companies that happily pirated as many books as they could pull from Anna's Archive and as much art as they could slurp from DeviantArt, pixiv, and imageboards? The GP had the insight that this doesn't get called out when it's hidden, but that's the whole point. Laundering of other people's work at such a scale that it feels inevitable or impossible to stop is the tacit goal of the AI industry. We don't need to trip over ourselves glorifying the 'business model' of rampant illegality in the name of monopoly before regulations can catch up.

wiseowise3• 7 months ago

The quality suffers in both cases

According to your omnivision?

eucyclos2• 7 months ago

I really don't agree with this argument because copying and learning are so distinct. If I write in a famous author's style style and try to pass my work off as theirs, everyone agrees that's unethical. But if I just read a lot of their work and get a sense of what works and doesn't in fiction, then use that learning to write fiction in the same genre, everyone agrees that my learning from a better author is fair game. Pretty sure that's the case even if my work cuts into their sales despite being inferior.

The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.

If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.

conradfr• 7 months ago

Is there a OSS licence that excludes LLM?

pona-a• 7 months ago

Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

I always believed GPL allowed LLM training, but only if the counterparty fulfills its conditions: attribution (even if not for every output, at least as part of the training set) and virality (the resulting weights and inference/training code should be released freely under GPL, or maybe even the outputs). I have not seen any AI company take any steps to fulfill these conditions to legally use my work.

The profiteering alone would be a sufficient harm, but it's the replacement rhetoric that adds insult to injury.

stinkbeetle3• 7 months ago

The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.

This reasoning is invalid. If AI is doing nothing but simply "learning from" like a human, then there is no "stealing from artists" either. A person is allowed to learn from copyright content and create works that draw from that learning. So if the AI is also just learning from things, then it is not stealing from artists.

On the other hand if you claim that it is not just learning but creating derivative works based on the art (thereby "stealing" from them), then you can't say that it is not creating derivative works of the code it ingests either. And many open source licenses do not allow distribution of derivative works without condition.

m-schuetz3• 7 months ago

Most OS licenses requires attribution, so AI for code generation violates licenses the same way AI for image generation does. If one is illegal or unethical, then the other would be too.

SirHumphrey• 7 months ago

No, the only difference is that image generators are a much fuller replacement for "artists" than for programmers currently. The use of quotation marks was not meant to be derogatory, I sure many of them are good artists, but what they were mostly commissioned for was not art - it was backgrounds for websites, headers for TOS updates, illustrations for ads... There was a lot more money in this type of work the same way as there is a lot more money in writing react sites, or scripts to integrate active directory logins in to some ancient inventory management system than in developing new elegant algorithms.

But code is complicated, and hallucinations lead to bugs and security vulnerabilities so it's prudent to have programmers check it before submitting to production. An image is an image. It may not be as nice as a human drawn one, but for most cases it doesn't matter anyway.

The AI "stole" or "learned" in both cases. It's just that one side is feeling a lot more financial hardship as the result.

tstrimple3• 7 months ago

I've always thought it was weird how artists are somehow separate and special in the creation process. Sometimes to the point of getting royalties per copy sold which is basically unheard of for your meager code monkey.

altairprime2• 7 months ago

I’d take that bet against you.

danielbln3• 7 months ago

Ok great, but you don't really say much.

JKCalhoun8• 7 months ago

The challenge of course is determining if AI was used in the coding.

kcb3• 7 months ago

You think there’s any non niche game developers not using a coding assistant at this point? You think Epic is not using code assistants to develop Unreal Engine?

expedition32• 7 months ago

It is a non event for consumers the only ones who care much are artists.

As always the market decides.

ares6232• 7 months ago

Great opportunity for a new award body that allows AI use.

Ekaros2• 7 months ago

True. Especially indie game awards. That have the least resources available and most like would benefit most from some use of AI. At that scale often even reasonably paid game developers are expensive.

manojlds2• 7 months ago

Just to be clear, it's some Indie Game awards, not the main The Game Awards

citizenkeen• 7 months ago

That’s not how awards work. Awards trade on prestige. In order for an award to matter, the people you’re giving it to have to care.

I think you’ll find most of the small teams making popular indie video games aren’t going to be interested in winning a pro-AI award.

nottorp4• 7 months ago

In order for an award to matter, the people you’re giving it to have to care.

Are you sure? Maybe not in gaming, but I'm sure most large companies create awards just to get them and mention them in marketing.

I wouldn't be surprised if the likes of EA and Ubisoft create a "best use of AI in gaming" award for next year.

rowanG0773• 7 months ago

I don't think pro-AI was discussed. It was rather not being anti-AI.

YokoZar• 7 months ago

I hear FIFA makes new awards these days

protimewaster3• 7 months ago

I wonder what definition of AI they're using? If you go by the definition in some textbooks (e.g., the definition given in the widely used Russell and Norvig text), basically any code with branches in it counts as AI, and thus nearly any game with any procedurally generated content would run afoul of this AI art rule.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

Their FAQ only states:

Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.

I haven't found anything more detailed than that; I'm not sure if anything more detailed actually exists, or needs to.

protimewaster3• 7 months ago

That's all I've found as well, but, personally, I find that a bit unclear, for a couple of reasons. First, are they saying that the game itself can use generative AI, but it can't be used in the development of the game? So that would mean that if the game itself generates random levels using a generative AI approach, that's allowed, but, if I were to use that same code to pre-generate and manually modify the levels, that wouldn't be allowed because I'm now using generative AI as part of the development process? I.e., I can create a game that itself is a generative AI, but I can't use that AI I've built as part of the development of a downstream game?

And, second, what counts as generative AI? A lot of people wouldn't include procedural generative techniques in that definition, but, AFAIK, there's no consensus on whether traditional procedural approaches should be described as "generative AI".

And a third thing is, if I use an IDE that has generative AI, even for something as simple as code completion, does that run afoul of the rule? So, if I used Visual Studio with its default IntelliCode settings, that's not allowed because it has a generative AI-based autocomplete?

gus_massa• 7 months ago

AI is a moving goalpost. At least now the moving goalpost is call AGI.

A bunch of 'if' is an "expert system", but I'm old enough to remember when that was groundbreaking AI.

enraged_camel• 7 months ago

This is so ridiculous that I suspect that it will be even better publicity for them than the award itself.

manojlds2• 7 months ago

It's some random Indie award, not the main The Game Awards. Clair Obscur has enough publicity already and rightly so.

marginalia_nu• 7 months ago

Dunno if they even care too much about that, the game is already a breakaway success.

dartharva3• 7 months ago

I think it's more the fact that they lied before nomination than the AI usage itself. Any institution is bound to disqualify a candidate if it discovers it was admitted on false grounds.

I wonder if the game directors had actually made their case beforehand, they would have perhaps been let to keep the award.

That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?

voidfunc• 7 months ago

That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?

AI OK: Code

AI Bad: Art, Music.

It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative. They still think of us as monkeys banging on keyboards.

Fuck 'em. We can replace artists.

spencerflem3• 7 months ago

You get why people hate AI when AI boosters talk like this, right?

dartharva3• 7 months ago

It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative.

It's more like the code is the scaffolding and support, the art and experience is the core product. When you're watching a play you don't generally give a thought to the technical expertise that went into building the stage and the hall and its logistics, you are only there to appreciate the performance itself - even if said performance would have been impossible to deliver without the aforementioned factors.

zajio1am• 7 months ago

It is silly, considering there is obviously much higher chance that code-generating LLM generates copy of existing copyrighted code than image-generating diffusion model generates copy of existing copyrighted image.

pwdisswordfishy• 7 months ago

Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot

Which LLM told you that?

dartharva3• 7 months ago

Please, LLM code assistants are ubiquitous enough nowadays with inline code suggestions in vscode on by default. It's an extremely safe claim.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot

I think that is almost certainly untrue, especially among indie games developers, who are often the most stringent critics of gen ai.

m-schuetz3• 7 months ago

Only when it comes to graphics/art. When it comes to LLMs for code, many people do some amazing mental gymnastics to make it seem like the two are totally different, and one is good while the other is bad.

1gn153• 7 months ago

Are you sure? A survey by the YouTuber Games And AI found that the vast majority of indie game developers are either using, or considering using AI. Like around 90%.

Mkengin4• 7 months ago

This is just one example, but today I found this where two people build their passion project using GenAI for image generation (+ photoshop), maybe otherwise this project wouldn't even be possible: https://reddit.com/comments/1prqfsu

blackbrokkoli2• 7 months ago

Is anyone else detecting a phase shift in LLM criticism?

Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this.

No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's fascinating

wiseowise3• 7 months ago

Typical brigading, same with blm, woke, right wing, etc.

AmbroseBierce2• 7 months ago

Wow you do mentally group things efficiently, that much I can say.

GaryBluto• 7 months ago

People were told by other people to dislike LLMs and so they did, then told other people themselves.

AmbroseBierce2• 7 months ago

Just like feminism when it was starting, back then millions of women believed it was silly for them to vote, and those who believed otherwise had to get loud to get more on their side, and that's one example, similar things have happened with hundreds other things that we now take for granted, so it's value as judgment measure it's very low by itself alone.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

Just as they were told to like them in the first place. A lot of this is driven that way because most of the public only has a surface-level understanding of the issues.

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

Ha! You’re actually exactly right.

We’ve observed this in AI gen ads (or “creatives” as ad people call them)

They work really well, EXCEPT if there is a comment option next to the ad - if people see others calling the art “AI crap” the click rate drops drastically :)

latexr8• 7 months ago

That’s a bad faith argument using weasel words. Do not assume everyone who disagrees with you is an unthinking tool.

https://xkcd.com/610/

Look at how easy it is to make the argument in the other direction:

People were told by large companies to like LLMs and so they did, then told other people themselves.

Those add nothing to the discussion. Treat others like human beings. Every other person on the planet has an inner life as rich as yours and the same ability to think for themselves (and inability to perceive their own bias) that you do.

dragonwriter2• 7 months ago

No, AFAICT, AI hate has been common (but not the majority position, and still not) in normie contexts for a while.

sph• 7 months ago

You’re reading it wrong: rather, 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.

What you derogatorily call normies are the rest of the world caring about their business until one day some tech wiz came around to say “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.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

It feels like a similar trend to the one that NFTs followed: huge initial hype, stoked up by tech bros and swallowed by a general public lacking a deep understanding, tempered over time as that public learns more of the problematic aspects that detractors publicise.

vanviegen• 7 months ago

I think this comparison makes little sense, as in the case of AI there is some actual impactful substance backing the hype.

Hamuko6• 7 months ago

NFTs have way less downsides than LLMs and GenAI, since the main downside was just wasting electricity. I didn't have to worry about someone cloning my voice and begging my mom on the phone for money.

Ukv• 7 months ago

I don't feel NFTs ever really had much interest among the general public - average reaction just being "I don't get it, that sounds pointless".

Whereas AI seemed to have a pretty good run for around a decade, with lots of positive press around breakthroughs and genuine interest if you showed someone AI Dungeon, DALL-E 2, etc. before it split into polarized topic.

spencerflem3• 7 months ago

Read the other comments in the thread lol- “Fuck artists, we will replace them”

This is not a winning PR move when most normal people are already pretty pro-artist and anti tech bro

tokioyoyo• 7 months ago

It’s the usual “I don’t like it, I’m against, but it’s okay if I use it” thing. People understand the advantage it gives a person over another one, so they will still use it here and there. You’ll have some people who will be vehemently against it, but it will be the same as people who categorically against having smartphones, or avoiding using any Meta products because of tracking and etc.

Macha2• 7 months ago

The art bubble is generally considered more "normie" than the tech bubble and they've been strongly anti AI art for longer than even the introduction of the original GitHub copilot

jlouis• 7 months ago

LLMs has had a couple of years by now to show their usefulness, and while hype can drive it for a while, it's now getting to the point where hype alone can't. It needs to provide a tangible result for people.

If that tangible result doesn't occur, then people will begin to criticize everything. Rightfully so.

I.e., the future of LLMs is now wobbly. That doesn't necessarily mean a phase shift in opinion, but wobbly is a prerequisite for a phase shift.

(Personal opinion at the moment: LLMs needs a couple of miracles in the same vein as the discovery/invention of transformers. Otherwise, they won't be able to break through the current fault-barrier which is too low at the moment for anything useful.)

JKCalhoun8• 7 months ago

It is fascinating. It's showing of course that AI has gone mainstream.

There was a time that I remember when you could gripe at a party about banner ads showing up on the internet and have a lot of blank stares. Or ask someone for their email address and get a quizzical look.

I pointed my dad to ChatGPT a few days ago and instructed him on how to upload/create an AI image. He was delighted to later show me his AI "American Gothic" version of a photo of him and his current wife. This was all new to him.

The pushback though I think is going to be short-lived in a way other push-backs were short-lived. (I remember the self-checkout kiosk in grocery stores were initially a hard sell as an example.)

asadotzler4• 7 months ago

How many American Gothic AI fake photos do you think he'll make. Sounds like a novelty experience to me. I also loved my first day in Apple's Vision Pro. It was mind blowing. On the 4th day I returned it. Novelty wears off, no matter how cool it might seem initially.

PunchyHamster8• 7 months ago

It's because amount of AI slop bombarding people from every side increased and created knee-jerk reaction to anything AI, even if it is actually the "remove the boring part of work"

j_w• 7 months ago

The issue with "removing the boring part of work" is that which part of the work is "boring" is subjective. There are going to be plenty of people that don't think that what they do is the "boring stuff that should be automated away." Whether this is genuine enjoyment for what they do or just an attempt to protect their career, both are valid feelings to have.

blibble2• 7 months ago

all news is prophesying that everyone is going to lose their jobs to "AI"

along with news about "AI" causing electricity bills to rise

every form of media is overrun and infested with poor quality slop

garbage products (microsoft copilot) forced on them and told by their bosses to use it, or else

gee I wonder why normal people hate it

xboxnolifes• 7 months ago

LLM hate for use in art has been pretty mainstream from the start. The difference in criticism between use in code generation and use in art generation is palpable. I dont think anyone took kindly to the discourse of movie producers buying actor likeness rights and having perpetually young old actors for all future movies.

Programmers criticized the code output. Artists and art enjoyers criticized cutting out the artist.

wtcactus2• 7 months ago

It’s interesting, because we have examples of other sects in the past that also opposed human progress through technology. History is repeating itself.

For instance, see Luddites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

eucyclos2• 7 months ago

I really like Neal Stephenson's neologism 'amistics' - referring to which technologies a culture knows about but chooses not to use.

surgical_fire6• 7 months ago

It's unclear if Gen AI promotes any sort of human progress.

By all means, I use it. In some instances it is useful. I think it is mostly a technology that causes damages to humanity though. I just don't really care about it.

ad_hockey2• 7 months ago

That does the Luddites a bit of a disservice:

But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”[1]

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-the-luddites-rea...

1gn153• 7 months ago

In that case, the neo-Luddites are worse than the original Luddites, then? Since many are definitely not "totally fine with the machines", and definitely do not confine their attacks only on the manufacturers that go against worker rights, but they include the average person in their attacks. And the original Luddites already got a lot of hate for attempting to hold back progress.

wtcactus2• 7 months ago

That seems a lot like the beef people have nowadays with AI. They also want machines, they love their iPhones and MacBooks.

They just don't like it when the machines are able to do the mediocre job they get paid to do.

Imagine if we had listened to the Luddites back in the day...

skibidithink2• 7 months ago

The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures.

https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c...

Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.

thiht2• 7 months ago

That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

I agree, even though I'm not in favour of gen ai. It was a terrible mistake letting placeholder assets get out in the final release, but it shouldn't actually count as shipping AI-generated content in your product.

Hamuko6• 7 months ago

The problem of allowing "placeholder AI assets" is that any shipped asset found to be AI is going to be explained away as being "just a placeholder". How are we supposed to confirm that they never meant to ship the game like this? All we know is that they shipped the game with AI assets.

gyomu• 7 months ago

I don't find it that surprising. The creatives that are against generative AI aren't against it only because it produces slop. They are against it because it uses past human creative labor, without permission or compensation, to generate profit for the companies building the models which they do not redistribute to the authors of that creative labor. They are also against it due to environmental impact.

In that view, it doesn't matter whether you use it for placeholder or final assets. You paying your ChatGPT membership makes you complicit with the exploitation of that human creative output, and use of resources.

huhtenberg• 7 months ago

Generating a brick wall texture using an AI should be acceptable as well, even when it's not a placeholder.

oliwarner• 7 months ago

But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Now they're automated off the back of somebody else's work. And here we have an admission, but how many artists are being sidestepped in major games developers now? It won't be long before the EAs and Ubisofts of the world fire theirs. Then it'll be developers. Then it'll just be a committee of dolphins picking balls to feed into a black box that pumps out games.

It doesn't seem strange that an industry award protects the workers in the industry. I agree, it seems harsh, but remember this is just a shiny award. It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.

dathinab5• 7 months ago

it's even worse then that

there is a whole basked of technologies which you can label as "gen AI" but which have non of the problems why people hate "gen AI"

as a very dump example, some pretty decent "line smoothing" algorithm are technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues

throwaway613745• 7 months ago

Blanket ban on AI generated assets, but nobody cares about AI generated code apparently. lol

morkalork• 7 months ago

Blanket ban on generative AI? Games have been using some form or another every since the days of RTS map generation and perlin noise

kcb3• 7 months ago

I don’t care if the whole game from end to end is generative AI if it’s an incredible game. Having a moral stance against a specific use of floating point numbers and algorithms in a medium filled with floating point numbers and algorithms is strange.

latexr8• 7 months ago

From the submitted article:

"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. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination."

Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.

I can understand the Indie Game Awards preferring to act now. Had they done nothing, they would have been criticised too by other people for not enforcing their own rules. They no doubt would’ve preferred to not have to deal with the controversy. Surely this wasn’t an easy decision for them, as it ruined their ceremony.

We’re all bystanders here with very little information, so I’d refrain from using unserious expressions like “witch hunt”, especially considering their more recent connotations (i.e. in modern times, “witch hunt” is most often used by bad actors attempting to discredit legitimate investigations).

PunchyHamster8• 7 months ago

Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.

If it was malicious they wouldn't say a word. They probably interpreted the rule as "nothing in shipped game is AI" (which is reasonable interpreteation IMO), they implemented policy to replace any asset made by AI and just missed some texture.

Also the term was pretty vague, like, is using automatic lipsync forbidden ? That's pretty much generative AI, just the result is not picture but a sequence of movements.

ctoth• 7 months ago

“witch hunt” is most often used by bad actors attempting to discredit legitimate investigations).

By that logic, "fake news" is now unusable because Trump weaponized it, despite the term accurately describing a real phenomenon that existed before and after his usage. "Gaslighting" would be suspect because it got picked up by people dramatizing ordinary disagreements. Every useful term for describing social dynamics gets captured by someone with an agenda eventually.

Hitler liked chocolate, doesn't mean you shouldn't eat chocolate. "You used a word that bad people also use" is not interesting - it's a way of avoiding the object-level debate while still claiming moral high ground.

PoignardAzur• 7 months ago

Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.

The article where Meurisse admitted to using AI in the pipeline is from April. You're implying a level of dishonesty that clearly isn't there.

skibidithink2• 7 months ago

Conceding our vocabulary to bad actors is Orwellian.

BoredPositron• 7 months ago

It's not about the asset it's about them first claiming that they did not use gen ai during production. One is an oopsie and the other a blatant lie. If the award requirements say you can't participate if you used generative AI and you lie about it it's a pretty clear cut case. Either be certain you don't ship AI placeholders or just don't lie. The outrage in this thread and hyper focusing on the asset instead of the lie is the problem.

rurban• 7 months ago

The award category is essentially racist. Nobody should who care created it. A man, a woman, a H1B worker, an AI, an animal.

instagib• 7 months ago

All press is good press.

Few care about the mainstream game review sites or oddball game award shows as their track record is terrible (Concord reviews).

Most go by player reviews, word of mouth, and social media.

jfernandezr• 7 months ago

After the huge impact on the PC gaming community, it's logical to despise AI and ban it from any awards. First cryptocurrencies pumped huge price raises on GPUs, then prices won't return to normal due to AI and now it's impacting RAM prices.

Next year a lot of families will struggle to buy a needed computer for their kids' school due to some multibillion techs going all-in.

foxheadman• 7 months ago

I play games on cheap hardware. I would like awards to focus on the quality of the game, rather than how they were made.

Awards that focus on quality is too desired to not be a thing.

I expect generative AI to become a competitive advantage taken up by the vast majority.

lostmsu• 7 months ago

Compute demand likely improved today's availability and performance of hardware.

spuz2• 7 months ago

There is a small irony that the Indie Game Awards rejects nominations of games using AI but The Game Awards does not. It is independent teams of developers who are less likely to be able to afford to pay an artists who may be able to produce something of value with AI assets that they otherwise would not have the resources for. On the other side, it is big studios with a good track record and more investment who are more likely to be able to pay artists and benefit from their artistry.

To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer. Maybe if it's successful, the programmer can afford to pay an artist to help create their next game. If we want to encourage human made art, I think we should focus on rewarding the big game studios who do this and not being so strict on the 2 or 3 person teams who might not exist without the help of AI.

(I say this knowing Clair Obscur was made by a large well respected team so if they used AI assets I think it's fair their award was stripped. I just wish The Game Awards would also consider using such a standard.)

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

I agree that this holds in theory, but in practice? All the overhyping of AI I've heard from the gaming sector has come from the big studios, not indies. And, as you point out, Clair Obscur isn't the 'most indie' of indies anyway.

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

Maybe the small studios just use it as a tool and don’t need to hype it to make it look good for stock holder interests.

Mkengin4• 7 months ago

It doesn't have to be hyped to be used, for example today I found these two building their passion project using GenAI, which would otherwise maybe not possible, who knows: https://reddit.com/comments/1prqfsu

JKCalhoun8• 7 months ago

Who is hyping the technology doesn't seem to be too relevant. Big studios have a bigger megaphone and, as another has pointed out, possibly even a financial motivation for shouting it from the rooftops for their investors to hear.

armchairhacker• 7 months ago

Maybe next year

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46297348

spencerflem3• 7 months ago

You’re not wrong, but I think a hardline stance is pragmatic for keeping AI out while it’s not yet normalized.

Hamuko6• 7 months ago

There's not that much irony considering how people into indie games are more about the art and craft of video games, whereas The Game Awards is a giant marketing cannon for the video game industry, and the video game industry has always been about squeezing their employees. If they can hire fewer artists and less QA because of GenAI, they're all for it.

Just two days ago there were reports that Naughty Dog, a studio that allegedly was trying to do away with crunch, was requiring employees to work "a minimum of eight extra hours a week" to complete an internal demo.

https://bsky.app/profile/jasonschreier.bsky.social/post/3mab...

Devasta5• 7 months ago

To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer.

How though? If questions about style or substance can be answered with "because the AI did it, its just some stochastic output from the model" I don't see how that allows for expression between humans.

spuz2• 7 months ago

In this case, you'd be judging the AI made assets as simply AI made and the human made gameplay and programming as human made. I'm not suggesting the AI assets would be transformed into art just because they are part of some human creative work.

__alexs• 7 months ago

Because a human selected it for you to see. If I send you a book to read, the book still has content and value even if I didn't write it.

JKCalhoun8• 7 months ago

Simple fix, they need a separate categories for a game art award—no AI—and the rest of the categories (perhaps including game of the year, best new game) should allow AI.

Right now the rules they're using are going against larger forces in the world that are going to become standard (if they're not already).

And to your point, these are indie developers that are David's going up against the AAA Goliath's that have a bottomless purse with which to shower money on a "product". I dabble in art (and wrote some indie games decades ago) and I am fine with AI-generated art (despite my daughters' leanings in the opposite direction).

itishappy9• 7 months ago

I'd agree if this were about The Game Awards or similar, where indie devs are expected to compete against the AAA goliaths, but I've always understood the Indie Game Awards as being more about the craft then the end product.

From the FAQ:

The ceremony is developer-focused, with game creators taking center stage to present awards, recognize their peers, and openly speak without the pressure of time constraints.

https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq

Regardless of AI's inevitability, I don't particularly care to celebrate it's use, and I think that's the most reasonable stance for a developer focused award to take.

foundddit• 7 months ago

It's the same thing as local restaurants being picky about using organic and environmentally sustainable ingredients while big chain corporations have a preference for low cost ingredients that strip the environment bare. The big corporations could afford organic stuff, but their aim is to just get a product out there and get it done cheaply. The local restaurant can't often compete on price alone, so they sell themselves as being made with care for the consumer. Selling one's product as a moral option has been a fairly reliable marketing tactic for a long time and I'm kind of surprised it's taken this long to enter the gaming industry.

ryandrake• 7 months ago

This makes the most sense to me. I expect BigCorps to maximize profit and destroy their product to the point that it's slop. I don't expect indie developers or people "doing it for the craft" to make (or use) slop.

andrewstuart• 7 months ago

Well that’s a rule that makes no sense.

These awards are behind the times and risk irrelevance.

What software in 2025 is written without AI help?

Every game released recently would have AI help.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

Every game released recently would have AI help.

For indie games in particular, that is very much not true. In fact, Steam has a 'made with AI' label, so it's not even true on that platform.

qbit42• 7 months ago

You think many are built without any assistance for coding? My impression was that people were mostly concerned about game assets like graphics and music

asadotzler4• 7 months ago

If you join a contest with a rule that doesn't make sense, lie about following the rule when you did not, and the contest disqualifies you, it's not the rule that's the problem, it's the lying about complying with the rule when you did not. Are you really so confused by this whole thign that you don't get that or are you just another Big Tech AI fanbro?

user____name• 7 months ago

If a fraction of the AI money would go into innovative digital content creation tools and workflows I'm not sure AI would be all that useful to artists. Just look at all those Siggraph papers throughout the years that are filled with good ideas but lacked the funding and expertise to put a really good ui on top.

delichon• 7 months ago

To be consistent, if you wish to protect workers by rejecting artificially produced assets, you should feel the same about textiles produced by industrial machinary. Either this decision was wrong or the Luddites had a good point.

Ekaros2• 7 months ago

If the product is not made from material dug out from ground or plants or animals by only bare hands. And I mean bare hands. Is it even worth buying?

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

If the worker isn’t suffering because of useless manual work, I don’t want to buy it.

Machines? Bah, humbug!

JKCalhoun8• 7 months ago

Sure, but for the body of folks offering a gaming award, there is little power they have over the textile industry.

To others you may be addressing, I suspect they would say the ship has already sailed on textiles. Perhaps they are trying to sink this ship before it sails.

m-schuetz3• 7 months ago

People were against steam engines, tractors, CGI, self-checkouts, and now generative AI. After some initial outrage, it will be tightly integrated into society. Like how LLMs are already widely used to assist in coding.

Ray20• 7 months ago

Or not. Unlike all of the above, AI directly conflicts with the concept of intellectual property, which is backed by a much larger and more influential field.

joquarky4• 7 months ago

Intellectual property is a purely institutional abstraction agreed upon by arbitrary social contract written to satisfy the standard of "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts".

AI exists by calculations without invoking law or social agreement.

Which will endure?

IP depends on belief and enforcement.

AI depends on matter and energy.

littlecranky67• 7 months ago

Why is usage of AI even a discussion point? Steam also now enforces publishers to disclose if they used AI during game creation. It is a tool, and as a consumer I judge the end product. I don't care what tools were used in the production, just as I don't care if you use Photoshop, Pixelmator, Maya, 3DSMax or whatnot. The end result is what counts. And if the end result is full of bullshit AI slop and is not fun to play, don't give them an award. I played Claire Obscure and it is an absolut stunning and beautiful game.

b3lvedere• 7 months ago

These things will keep happening and the bar to be against certain use cases of AI will shift gradually over time.

Before we know it we will have entrusted a lot to AI and that can be both a good or a bad thing. The acceleration of development will be amazing. We could be well on our way to expand into the universe.

jokoon• 7 months ago

indie game? with their budget and staff? really?

those guys worked in AAA studios and they got a 10 millions budget

how "indie" is that?

krapp2• 7 months ago

"indie" is just a marketing term now, it doesn't actually mean anything specific.

oneeyedpigeon11• 7 months ago

Exactly like "AI"!

jltsiren• 7 months ago

Indie Game Awards defines it like this:

"Existing outside of the traditional publisher system, a game crafted and released by developers who are not owned or financially controlled by a major AAA/AA publisher or corporation, allowing them to create in an unrestricted environment and fully swing for the fences in realizing their vision."

In other words, "indie" means a developer-driven game independent of the establishment. It doesn't necessarily imply a low budget or the lack of professional experience.

qwertytyyuu• 7 months ago

Oh its AI that makes not indie, not the huge funding.

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

Should indie games have a maximum budget?

Arwill• 7 months ago

Yes. If you get 120M+ in funding, you no longer qualify to be called indie.

10xDev2• 7 months ago

You need to separate AI usage from automating certain parts of a pipeline from end to end creation.

Taking a scorched earth approach to AI usage is just being a luddite.

AssassinDuck• 7 months ago

I don't think this argument is going to be very compelling. The people whom you would be trying to convince here, would just argue that the Luddites were correct in their fight against human labor being displaced. They'll argue that the power artisans had over their work was diminished with the advent of the loom, just like the power artists have over their labor is being diminished right now.

10xDev2• 7 months ago

No you are just not understanding the difference between changing and optimising workflow from displacing creativity and artists.

soerxpso• 7 months ago

You don't really need to win an argument with luddites. Completely rejecting extremely useful technology and then picking a fight with people who don't is a way to speedrun losing, whether you have "compelling arguments" or not. If the Luddites were correct, they wouldn't be dead.

JKCalhoun8• 7 months ago

I don't disagree with your point, but regardless of how you or I feel about it, this flap will likely seem quaint a decade from now. It's the unstoppable way the world is moving.

I'd love for them to create a separate category for "Best non-AI game". They can fight it out over that award. Perhaps then in a decade or so they will quietly let the award category fade away.

PunchyHamster8• 7 months ago

That's very easy problem to solve, take the things from them that were created thanks to problems, they will change mind quickly

113• 7 months ago

What's wrong with being a Luddite?

sergioisidoro• 7 months ago

This is crazy. Tools like photoshoot have gen ai tools in them. Does that mean that Photoshop is now a minefield for artists? If a single artist uses the wrong tool once they disqualify the entire final product for awards, even if the asset is fully removed on the final build.

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

IDEs now have “AI” autocomplete; will a game become ineligible if a single dev accidentally presses tab instead of writing the whole function by hand? If a script writer uses ChatGPT to generate ideas, straight up ban?

Where does the organisation intend to draw the line?

miohtama• 7 months ago

They don't. Because selling hate does not draw lines.

Devasta5• 7 months ago

Where does the organisation intend to draw the line?

The answer to this question is always "somewhere". Just because I can't proclaim an exact number of trees that constitute a forest doesn't mean the concept doesn't exist.

quectophoton• 7 months ago

Better blacklist Google as well. You don't want anyone on the team searching anything on Google lest their search accidentally triggers the LLM response (meaning: they prompted Google Gemini).

program_whiz2• 7 months ago

Ultimately this move might have just been to increase visibility for an otherwise niche awards show (which it has clearly done). Also by eliminating the obvious best indie game of the year -- it opens up the field a bit to more "normal" contenders. Expedition 33 is basically a AAA-quality game, its only considered "indie" because a small unknown team made it.

veidr4• 7 months ago

LOL this is beyond idiotic. Banning AI-generated assets from being used in the game is a red line we could at least debate.

But banning using AI at all while developing the game is... obviously insane on its face. It's literally equivalent to saying "you may not use Photoshop while developing your game" or "you may not use VS Code or Zed or Cursor or Windsurf or Jetbrains while developing your game" or "you may not have a smartphone while developing your game".

nottorp4• 7 months ago

you may not use VS Code or Zed or Cursor or Windsurf or Jetbrains while developing your game

Just to nitpick, AAA game developers probably don't use the editors you mentioned since they do native applications.

veidr4• 7 months ago

Interesting. I don't do games, so I may be wrong, but I thought a lot of Unreal Engine devs used Jetbrains. So what editors do they use? Are there current IDEs or code editors shipping in 2025 that don't have any LLM-based coding features?

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

What do you think they use?

I work in mobile games and practically everyone is using either VSCode or some Jetbrains IDE. A few use Visual Studio but it has AI autocomplete too.

krapp2• 7 months ago

If LLMs were simply a niche but somewhat useful technology people could choose to use or avoid, then sure, such an absolutist stance seems excessive. But this technology is being aggressively pushed into every aspect of our lives and integrated into society so deeply that it can't be avoided, and companies are pushing AI-first and AI-only strategies with the express goal of undermining and replacing artists (and eventually programmers) with low quality generic imitations of their work with models trained on stolen data.

To give even an inch under these circumstances seems like suicide. Every use of LLMs, however minor, is a concession to our destruction. It gives them money, it gives them power, it normalizes them and their influence.

I find the technology fascinating. I can think of numerous use cases I'd like to explore. It is useful and it can provide value. Unfortunately it's been deployed and weaponized against us in a way that makes it unacceptable under any circumstances. The tech bros and oligarchs have poisoned the well.

theshrike7916• 7 months ago

It’s like banning any and all uses of chainsaws for any kind of work ever just because some bros juggle with them and have chainsaw juggling conventions.

It’s just a tool, but like any tool it can be used the right way or wrong way. We as a society are still learning which is which.

veidr4• 7 months ago

I mean, I share some of the concerns you expressed, but at the same time there is no chance at all that working programmers and artists won't be using LLMs (and whatever "AI" comes next).

I'm a programmer, and I enjoyed the sort of "craftsman" aspect of writing code, from the 1990s until... maybe last year. But it's over. Writing code manually is already the exception, not the rule. I am not an artist, and I also really do understand that artists have a more legitimate grievance (about stealing prior art) than we programmers do.

As a practical matter, though, that's irrelevant. I suspect being an "artist" working in games, movies, ads, etc will become much like coding already is: you produce some great work manually, as an example, and then tell the bots "Now do it like this ... all 100 of you."

potsandpans• 7 months ago

To give even an inch under these circumstances seems like suicide.

Seems like a histrionic take.

viraptor4• 7 months ago

Since it's not shown in the article, the placeholder was the newspapers here; https://rl.bloat.cat/preview/pre/bn8bzvzd80ye1.jpeg?width=16... via https://rl.bloat.cat/r/expedition33/comments/1k6yv8a/does_th...

latexr8• 7 months ago

That’s the after image, here’s the before (also from that thread):

https://rl.bloat.cat/preview/pre/k7zsc1nls7af1.jpeg?width=19...

This does make it a bit more suspicious. It seems unlikely they coincidentally used gen AI placeholders only for the one case where it’s absurdly obvious.

viraptor4• 7 months ago

Sorry for the... clicko? Thanks for posting the right one.

Alex2037• 7 months ago

man, a reddit clone that reads exactly like reddit. what's the point, even?

latexr8• 7 months ago

what's the point, even?

Learning. From the website:

I started it on January 13, 2023, to learn something new and improve my GNU/Linux skills.

https://bloat.cat/about/

Also, not relying on a single service for one thing is a good thing, as Reddit itself demonstrated when they closed off API access.

Devasta5• 7 months ago

Excellent news.

A blanket ban is the way to go on this, people trying to muddy the waters professing they just have nuanced opinions know what they are doing... it's only a horse armour pack, it doesn't affect gameplay, you don't have to use it, you won't notice if it's not there...

anotheryou• 7 months ago

Ironic ally at some point it will just be anti-indy.

torginus• 7 months ago

Rather than going into a huge rant about this, let me just give a quick anecdote.

It used to be there were tons of websites, like textures.com, which curated a huge database of textures, usable by art professionals and hobbyists alike. Some of it was free, others you had to pay for, both generally speaking, it wasn't too expensive, and if you picked up 3d modeling as a hobby, you could produce pretty decent results without spending a dime.

Then came the huge companies (you know which ones) which slurped up all these websites, and turned them into these SaaS monstrosities, with f2p mechanics. Textures were no longer free, but you had to pay in 'tokens' which you got from a subscription, which pushed you into opaque pricing models, bundling subscriptions, accidental yearly signups with cancellation fees, you know the drill.

Then came AI, which is somehow fair use, and instead of having to pay for that stuff, you could ask SD to generate a tiling rock texture for you.

Is this blatant copyrightwashing? I'd argue yes. But in this case, does copyright uphold any morally supportable princible, or does it help artists get paid?

F no.

reactordev• 7 months ago

This is a travesty. Where winds meet uses LLMs, yet everyone seems to love that. Wtf.

More and more AAA games are going to have AI. Whether it’s AI content, AI dialogue, AI driven storytelling, or AI driven animation.

Having game of the year title stripped over some texture use is some next level petty BS.

mlok• 7 months ago

"While the assets in question were patched out, it still goes against the regulations we have in place. As a result, the IGAs nomination committee has agreed to officially retract both the Debut Game and Game of the Year awards"

Looks like "regulations nitpicking". In the end it doesn't represent the players best interests.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

The game won GOTY on its merits. Then the AI disclosure came out and it got stripped. If AI use produces obviously inferior work, how did it win in the first place? Seems like the objection is to the process, not the result.

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.

fooqux2• 7 months ago

I think it's the artists, not the tools, that make the art.

I've never liked this argument. If AI is a tool, then having my own personal woodworker on staff makes me a woodworker too.

drysart• 7 months ago

I've never liked the argument that there's some imaginary line between the acceptibility of AI as a tool for creating art and Photoshop/Krita/Procreate/etc as a tool for creating art.

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.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

I love debating, but I want debate to learn things, not to walk people into traps.

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.

NeutralCrane5• 7 months ago

We do make this argument all the time though. Film is probably the number one example in my mind. After actors, we celebrate directors more than any other individual in film. Directors often don’t write the script. They don’t handle the camera or the lighting or sound. They don’t create the music. They don’t do the editing in post. They don’t do the acting. But they do direct all of the people doing those things to achieve an overall vision, and we recognize that has significant artistic merit. Directors are not artists, or cinematographers, or composers, or actors, or visual effects artists, or sound technicians. But they are still artists, because art is more than the technical skill to produce something.

orwin2• 7 months ago

I dislike this argument only when taken to the extreme 'GenAI allows anyone to create arts'. It's like saying 'Ikea allow anyone to be a woodworker'!

dathinab5• 7 months ago

If AI use produces obviously inferior work, how did it win in the first place?

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.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

I've actually considered hiring artists to help me out a few times too under sort of comparable circumstances? I could use AI to generate basic assets, and then hire artists for the real work! More work for artists, better quality for me. Unfortunately, I fear I'd get yelled at (possibly as a traitor to both sides?)

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!)

delecti• 7 months ago

AI placeholders during development as it can majorly speed up/unblock

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.

itishappy9• 7 months ago

Seems like the objection is to the process, not the result.

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.

joquarky4• 7 months ago

Schrodinger's AI: It can only produce useless "slop" simultaneously while threatening creative jobs.

spankibalt2• 7 months ago

Correct decision. Skidmarks were detected to be present and it wasn't sabotage or somesuch. That means no award as skidmarks are considered so unprofessional at that particular award that, at this point, there's a rule against them.

smusamashah• 7 months ago

This is a bit ironic in a way that video games in particular have been using "AI" since the beginning.

fxwin2• 7 months ago

I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday. Last year's award show has <100k views on youtube, and the first article mentioning this (insider-gaming.com's) is written by one of the judges involved. I'll leave it up to the reader to judge how much of this is genuine and how much is jumping the twitter bandwagon to boost the award show's popularity.

HelloUsername2• 7 months ago

I would consider myself pretty embedded in the gaming space, and I hadn't heard of the "Indie Game Awards" before yesterday

Very curious to hear what channels you follow and how often per week. My RSS feed was spammed by it this and previous years

kryptiskt• 7 months ago

That was probably The Game Awards[0], which is a big deal. I guess whoever is behind Indie Game Awards sees the name confusion as a feature rather than a bug.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_Awards_2025

fxwin2• 7 months ago

Mostly daily browsing of twitter and reddit, r/livestreamfail + various discord communities. Note that i have heard lots about The Game Awards, but this is a different event.

iowemoretohim2• 7 months ago

How could it be spammed in previous years since this is only the 2nd year of "The Indie Game Awards". Not to mention the event only had less than 7.5k total views to the 171 million for the "The Game Awards".

itishappy9• 7 months ago

FYI, last year was the first ever Indie Game Awards.

miladyincontrol2• 7 months ago

I'll admit I'm not nearly as in the gaming space as I once was, but this is a sentiment I've heard repeated numerous times from friends who still are.

That and utter surprise of the lack of recognition they had towards Silksong.

dragonelite• 7 months ago

When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models.

But i don't mind people using AI it's their own choice, the focus then just becomes in the curation skill of the individual, team, company etc of the generated AI output. So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.

Majromax• 7 months ago

When it comes to AI im more of a luddite at the moment, things change like every 6 months when it comes to prompting the models. [...] So taking away the award is kind of weak given people enjoyed the game.

To nitpick: the independent game awards are the Luddites here. The Luddites were a protest movement, not just a group of people unfamiliar with technology.

In the historical context that's apparently become appropriate again, Luddites violently protested the disruptive introduction of new automation in the textile industry that they argued led to reduced wages, precarious employment, and de-skilling.

ares6232• 7 months ago

What happened to the Luddites? Did they end up upskilling and living happily ever after?

andersa2• 7 months ago

This isn't even an indie game, with funding rivaling major studios, what are we doing?

jajuuka• 7 months ago

Is indie music no longer indie if they sell really well? Is an indie film no longer indie if it gets too many awards? This kind of redefinition of indie as "poor people" is ahistorical and unhelpful. Indie means independent of a major studio. Which they are.

andersa2• 7 months ago

If your studio has enough resources that it could easily be its own publisher, the definition "independent from a publisher" is no longer of much use. It's also wrong: this project did have a publisher and various other investment in it.

The founders of this studio come from rich family backgrounds, to think they have anything in common with what the average person understands as an "indie game" developer is laughable. For example, they supposedly rented an office to work in, in a building owned by the founder's father's real estate firm, of course.

Projects like these used to be called AA games. It's a fantastic game, it doesn't have to be indie to be good.

peacebeard• 7 months ago

To help prevent confusion: Clair Obcur was not stripped of its record-breaking 9 awards at the Game Awards.

The Indie Game Awards, despite sounding similar to The Game Awards, is an unrelated organization that holds their awards the same week. They are small and this is their second year.

Verdex• 7 months ago

My objection to LLMs is the same that I had for TDD. There's all these people saying that you just gotta try it, but when I do, the effect is lesser than just using my preexisting skills. Oh, it's not for you? Wrong, here's some tautological or contradictory or poetic or nonsensical advice that'll be 'the wrong way' a week from now.

Does TDD and LLMs have a kernel of utility in them, yeah, I don't see why not. But what the majority of people are saying doesn't seem to be true and what the minority of people I can actually see using them 'for reals' are doing just doesn't applicable to anything I care about.

With that in mind, the only thing less real to me than a tool that I have to vibe with at a social zeitgeist level to see benefits from is an award when I already have major financial and industrial success.

Half the people in my team has played the game. For months all I would hear about w.r.t. games was how this game was smashing milestones and causing the entire industry to do some soul searching or putting their fingers in their ears.

I'm sure they can console themselves from having lost this award with their piles of money.

[An LLM did help me with a cryptography api that was pretty confusing, but I still had to problem solve that one because it got a "to bytes" method wrong. So... once in a blue moon acceleration for things I'm unfamiliar with, maybe.]

SonnyTark• 7 months ago

As an indie game developer the idiots who made this decision do not represent us and are completely detached from actual game production over the last 3 years.

For those who might care, we use generative AI as much as possible in every way possible without compromising our vision, this includes sound, art, animation, and programming. These are often edited or entirely redone (effectively placeholders). It's part of the process, similar to using procedural art generation tools like geometry nodes in Blender or fluid sim particles generators.

And btw, both UE5 and Unity now have gen AI features (and addons) that all developers can and will use.

avaer• 7 months ago

We should probably strip the Indie Game Awards of their awards show because the accountant used ChatGPT.

If they want to ban AI from their show that is their perogative, but considering that every nominee probably used AI somewhere (I'd bet money on this), this feels like blatantly dishonest posturing.

spankibalt2• 7 months ago

"Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable, etc."

Not if it's against the rule. They got caught with skidmarks. And while the "Ackshually, those skidmarks are just placeholders"-defense may elicit a few cheap laughs, it doesn't matter if you follow the rule to its logical conclusion. Any possible deception in such cases comes on top of it. As it always has; that doesn't change just because you found a new plaything (LLMs) in the box.

noio• 7 months ago

As an indie developer, I take much more issue with E33 falling under the “Indie” category than them using AI.

Kim_Bruning4• 7 months ago

There's an interesting question about scope.

The IGA FAQ states, in its entirety on this topic: "Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination." [1]

Sandfall probably interpreted this reasonably: no AI assets in the shipped product. They say they stripped out AI placeholders before release (and patched the ones they missed). But the IGA is reading it strictly: any use during development disqualifies.

If that's the standard, it gets interesting. DLSS and OptiX are trained neural networks in an infrastructure-shaped raincoat—ML models generating pixels that were never rendered. If you used Blender Cycles with OptiX viewport denoising while iterating on your scenes, you "developed using generative AI."

By a strict reading, any RTX-enabled development pipeline is disqualifying. I wonder if folks have fully thought this through.

[1] https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq (under "Game Eligibility")

Filligree• 7 months ago

Before people chime in to claim "That isn't what we meant"...

DLSS and Cycles denoising are, well, denoising. It's the same process as denoising in Stable Diffusion, essentially, and was trained in the same way.

starkparker2• 7 months ago

Nobody's probably thought this through, but if I had to guess, the first revision to the rule will be "no _assets_ generated with gen AI" because the most upset parties about gen AI use in gamedev are asset creatives who create textures, models, and audio, perform music and voice acting, etc.

Upscaling technologies are transformative but post-processing. The uproar isn't over what happens in the render pipeline but in the creative process.

Same reason why auto-LoD generation wouldn't and hasn't pissed anyone off: it's not generating LoDs of a mesh that's problematic, it's generating the source model that an artist would create.

pseudalopex2• 7 months ago

Sandfall probably interpreted this reasonably: no AI assets in the shipped product.

Developed and shipped are different words.

But the IGA is reading it strictly

You meant they meant it strictly? They wrote the policy.

journal• 7 months ago

I wish they had CRUD application awards.

_23sd• 7 months ago

Gamer social movements always burn bright at first, then die when they demand too much purity to reconcile with the fundamental truths: people want to make games and, when they're good, people want to play them. Trying to stop people from using (even experimenting with!) new tools is doomed, just like the old attempts to boycott games over their business models or their creators' politics/sexuality/whatever.

akimbostrawman3• 7 months ago

deserved it wasn't even indie either

mvkel• 7 months ago

This is like disqualifying Banksy because they use stencils

internet_friend2• 7 months ago

Couldn't care less if a great game is made completely by AI, assets, code, and all

internet_friend2• 7 months ago

Couldn't care less if a great game is made completely by AI; assets, code, and all.

constantcrying2• 7 months ago

Really makes it clear how ridiculous the mania about AI usage is. The game is great and there is absolutely nothing in it that would suggest to the player that AI was used for anything.

Putting essentially arbitrary limitation on which tools game developers are allowed to use is just nonsensical. Yes, the output of AI models can be really bad, but then a game obviously does not deserve an award. Especially for an indie game, with limited resources, AI can be a huge force multiplier. Gatekeeping awards based on these meaningless characteristics seems just very strange.

rcarmo• 7 months ago

This is the kind of rule that won’t hold water in the very near future. It’s going to be impossible to do certain kinds of things at scale without AI, and media production is a very competitive field. As long as the quality bar is held high and there are professional artists curating its use, I see no problem at all in using AI as a tool.

perryizgr8• 7 months ago

The reason I hate AI generated code is because it's low quality and a pain to review. Similarly, AI generated images and videos are also low quality and not worth paying attention to.

If a game is well made and people enjoy it then what's the problem with utilising AI generated code or assets? What's the objective?

matty22• 7 months ago

“Whoops! We forgot to disclose that we ripped off thousands of other artists when we made our game. But don’t worry, it was only for placeholder stuff!”

gguncth• 7 months ago

This policy will be in place for about 2-3 more years at which point it will be excluding almost everything, at which point it will be reversed

Yizahi• 7 months ago

I dislike LLM-slop too, but this is clearly a situation where enforcement of a policy is impossible. If those two new winners were using LLMs to generate code or media, we wouldn't know and neither would awards committee. This can only end up as a tool to selectively ban contenders, devaluing the whole award idea in the process.

somat• 7 months ago

The real reason Clair Obscure should not have received indie game of the year in the first place is that it was developed by Sandfall interactive and published by Kepler interactive and as such is not an independent game.

altairprime2• 7 months ago

Tangentially, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46369590

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

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