Clair Obscur won multiple awards but used generative AI art as placeholders during production.
The Indie Game Awards revoked Clair Obscur’s Debut and Game of the Year after the AI disclosure.
IGAs reassigned the awards (Blue Prince, Sorry We’re Closed) and reignited debate on gen-AI use.
It means AI was used to replace work hours from humans. That’s kind of the whole point of anti AI.
Also, to go a bit extreme on an extrapolation of this: ai makes game and all assets. Humans then replace everything with non AI things that look pretty much the same and then say it isn’t an AI game.
I loooove how divided people are on this and hopefully people come to realize it isn’t black and white. Replacing work hours from humans is precisely why we have tools, why we have technology in general. I don’t buy that angle as a valid criticism of AI at all.
I mean, ai is definitely costing people their jobs, trashing the environment, increasing electricity costs, causing stupid high silicone costs, and will be used to create misinformation and push narratives like nothing else before it. But there’s also pretty much zero chance of stopping any of it. The ultra wealthy control the world. It’s a tool to make them money and gain control of information and agendas.
It was placeholder art. They didn’t reduce the artist hire because they weren’t going to have the artist make orange boxes and MSpaint character icons.
The reductio ad absurdum is equally silly the other way. “Does the seeded algorithmic generation of a cloud texture disqualify anything that uses it as AI???” This is a debate stage level talking point, and is unconvincing in reality.
It was placeholder art that needed to be there. It shaved off work hours. If it didn’t, then why would they have used it in the first place?
Because 30 seconds with an image generator looks nicer than 30 seconds in MS paint, the deeper point being the deciding factor is that it took 30 seconds of time.
I think this only makes sense in some abstract of a net aggregate of artistic labor hours. The reality though is that this work was never done by the artists, never given significant time allocation, and would never lead to hiring more artists.