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The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures. https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-creative-revol

• thiht 10mo ago
  That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.
  • oneeyedpigeon 10mo 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.
    • mvdtnz 10mo ago
      It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product.
      • culturestate 10mo ago
        > It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product. When someone goes three miles per hour over the speed limit they are literally breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean they should get a serious fine for it. Sometimes shit happens.
        • fluxusars 10mo ago
          You will literally get a fine for going three miles per hour over the speed limit in many countries.
          • LadyCailin 10mo ago
            I think the metaphor here would be more like getting your license permanently suspended for going 3 mph over. Whether that happens anywhere or not in reality, the point is, it would be an absurd overreaction.
            • queenkjuul 10mo ago
              Not getting the "didn't go over the speed limit" award when you did in fact go over the speed limit shouldn't be a big deal to anyone. Nobody is preventing the studio from working, or from continuing to make (ostensibly) tons of money from their acclaimed game. Their game didn't meet the requirements for one particular GOTY award, boo hoo
          • af78 10mo ago
            True, however the penalty depends on the amount by which the threshold was crossed; in the country I live in at least.
        • Anarch157a 10mo ago
          Countries with sane laws include a tolerance limit to take into account flaws in speedometers and radars. Here in Brazil, the tolerance is 10%, so tickets clearly state "driving at speed 10% above limit".
          • craftkiller 10mo ago
            That is not sane, it is dumb. With such a system, you have signs that say "100" but the actual speed limit is "110" and everyone knows the actual speed limit is "110" but they all have to do mental math to reach that conclusion. Just make the sign say the real speed limit instead of lying to you. It's like Spinal Tap wrote your laws.
      • oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
        I believe in giving someone a reasonable amount of time to correct their mistakes. Yes, it was a terrible mistake to release the game in that state, but I think correcting it within days is sufficient.
        • squigz 10mo ago
          It's not a "terrible mistake" to accidentally ship placeholder textures. Let's tone it down just a wee bit, maybe. Anyway, I don't agree with banning generative AI, but if the award show wants to do so, go ahead. What has caused me to lose any respect for them is that they're doing this for such a silly reason. There's a huge difference between using AI to generate your actual textures and ship those, and.... accidentally shipping placeholder textures. It really illustrates that this is more ideological than anything.
          • queenkjuul 10mo ago
            How could a gen AI ban be anything but ideological?
      • viraptor 10mo ago
        If you ever make a typo on an official document, would you like that to be not correctable and you forever be responsible for the results? Yeah, that's about that level of silly.
        • collingreen 10mo ago
          How is "an award show with specific rules" similar to official documents you are forever responsible for? This thread is full of wild analogies as if 1. this random game award group shouldn't be able to write their own rules and 2. winning it or not winning it is somehow like the government permanently punishing an individual forever. You dont need to like their rules. Make your own and do better if you want to. Saying they shouldn't enforce their own rules because you don't like them sounds ridiculous. Saying they shouldn't enforce their own rules because it's somehow unfair is literal nonsense. Would love to see more "I don't like these rules" and a lot less "these rules are fascist!".
    • matt_kantor 10mo ago
      > representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Even if all the AI-generated content had been replaced before release, this would still be a lie.
      • margalabargala 10mo ago
        That's a dumb requirement for something purporting to be a general indie game award. They should rename to the Digital Amish game awards or something.
        • matt_kantor 10mo ago
          I wholeheartedly agree, but it's their award so they get to make up the rules.
      • tpoacher 10mo ago
        not really. the spirit of the (dumb) rule is that AI was not involved anywhere in the creative process. placeholder textures don't even come close it's like having doping rules in sports and then disqualifying someone for using caffeine in their gym plants.
      • constantcrying 10mo ago
        Even if a developer had used an AI tool to ask a question about a library, it would have been a lie. The question is stupid and I think Sandfall should be given the benefit of doubt that they interpreted the question not literally, but in a way which actually makes sense.
  • Hamuko 10mo 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.
    • dwroberts 10mo ago
      Adding to that: 'it was a placeholder' has been used to excuse direct (flagrant) plagiarism from other sources, such as what happened with Bungie and their game Marathon
    • theshrike79 10mo ago
      Because they can most likely prove the actual assets were on their version control years ago but weren’t applied to the models.
      • Hamuko 10mo ago
        How? We don't have access to their version control. How do you validate an external version control to be accurate and reflective of the state years ago? Git histories can be rewritten as one pleases.
        • theshrike79 10mo ago
          A forensic auditor would find that out, unless they do a full company wide purge of all local and remote Git histories. But I'm kinda thinking this isn't THAT serious =)
    • suspended_state 10mo ago
      Shouldn't there be an argument for best effort? If the issue has been removed as soon as it has been detected, doesn't it count for something?
  • huhtenberg 10mo ago
    Generating a brick wall texture using an AI should be acceptable as well, even when it's not a placeholder.
    • PunchyHamster 10mo ago
      Yeah I'm fine with replacing generic stuff with generic AI stuff. Or cutting out the boring part, nobody needs to spend hours manually lip-syncing character or generating thousands of intermediate movement animation steps.
      • mingus88 10mo ago
        When genAI started making waves my first thought literally was how awesome it would be to flesh out NPC dialog. It’s immersion breaking to try and talk to a random character only to hit a loop of one or two sentences. How awesome would it be for every character to be able to have believable small talk, with only a small prompt? And it wouldn’t affect the overall game at all, because obviously the designers never cared to put in that work themselves GenAI doing chore work is IMO the best use case
  • gyomu 10mo 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.
    • RealityVoid 10mo ago
      They are also against it because they believe it will compete with them and they will get paid less.
      • MattRix 10mo ago
        That’s also a valid reason to be against it!
        • rowanG077 10mo ago
          I disagree, this is the worst reason to be against it. It's choosing horses over trains. Manual labor over engines, mail over e-mail. It's basically purely egotistical, placing something as fleeting as your current job over the progress of humanity.
          • JohnnyMarcone 10mo ago
            That's a much easier stance to take for people who are not facing loss of income. If we had wealth redistribution mechanisms in place, I think more people would be pro ai.
          • MattRix 10mo ago
            It’s incredibly naive to believe that all technological advancement contributes to the progress of humanity.
  • oliwarner 10mo 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.
    • thiht 10mo ago
      > But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist Realistically, no.
    • yallpendantools 10mo ago
      > But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist. I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift it off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product. > It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria. True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.
      • VortexLain 10mo ago
        > The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product. Maybe, some sort of a temporary asset management system is required?
      • rerdavies 10mo ago
  • dathinab 10mo 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
    • itishappy 10mo ago
      Is this actually a problem? Is there anybody actually arguing against line smoothing algorithms?
      • baobabKoodaa 10mo ago
        I don't know! I guess we'll have to wait for next year's Indie Game awards to see which prizes they retract that time and why. This is dumb.
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      • NeutralCrane 10mo ago
        That’s the point. No one cares about line smoothing algorithms but they lose their mind if it’s background textures or throwaway voice lines.
        • itishappy 10mo ago
          They're not equivalent... > technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues
        • queenkjuul 10mo ago
          No artists were previously smoothing lines for a living but they were painting textures and voice acting
          • rerdavies 10mo ago
  • throwaway613745 10mo ago
    Blanket ban on AI generated assets, but nobody cares about AI generated code apparently. lol
    • miladyincontrol 10mo ago
      Vibe coded games definitely seem like a lot more of an issue in my books than a few minor textures having been generated.
      • kcb 10mo ago
        An issue for who?
  • morkalork 10mo 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
    • MattRix 10mo ago
      That is not the sort of thing people are referring to when they use the term “generative AI”. It’s basically a completely different technology and the ethical concerns around data sourcing and energy usage are not the same at all.
      • queenkjuul 10mo ago
        It's extremely tiring how people pretend like there's no difference between these technologies. The comments on the article are the epitome - "oh they used a computer to make a computer game, the horror" Just a cudgel to shut down discussion
        • CamperBob2 10mo ago
          There is no difference. What about a dungeon hack game that uses generated mazes? Random level generators put level designers out of work, but you never saw anyone carrying signs and carrying on about those.
          • defrost 10mo ago
            When did random level generators advance to the stage of generating rich background art in the style of long term DeviantArt contributors simply by rolling a few PRNGs ? Was that before or after real people had their work scraped w/out permission or acknowledgement? Describing these things as having no difference appears delibrately obtuse.
            • CamperBob2 10mo ago
              Describing these things as having no difference appears delibrately obtuse. And pulling entirely-new classes of IP rights out of thin air doesn't?
  • kcb 10mo 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.
    • lieability 10mo ago
      Describing something so incredibly poorly, that it can be used to describe computing as a whole, only to avoid needing to take a moral stance is strange.
      • Eisenstein 10mo ago
        I think that they were taking a moral stance, just not one you agree with.
• latexr 10mo 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).
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  • PunchyHamster 10mo 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.
• BoredPositron 10mo 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 10mo ago
  The award category is essentially racist. Nobody should who care created it. A man, a woman, a H1B worker, an AI, an animal.