Sandfall Interactive and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been stripped of its wins at The Indie Game Awards due to use of generative AI.
fonix232
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4013h

AI wasn’t used to “replace human-made art”, though.

To me it sounds like the team needed generic textures in big batches, and instead of spending precious designer time on hand crafting them, AI was utilised to allow the designers to focus on actual art they enjoy. I’m a software engineer, not a designer, but if I were given the option to write 8000 classes that are almost the same, or write 5 classes that will take the same effort as the 8000, but actually require using my creative skills… I’d choose the latter, and offload the 8000 boilerplates to AI.

The fact that it was replaced with human made art so quickly suggests that the AI generated ones were meant to be placeholders only anyway.

@[email protected]
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1912h

That’s exactly the takeaway I got from it as well.

It seems most likely that those were placeholders that were supposed to be replaced before release but were missed. Once they realized that some were missing, they got them replaced and pushed the update.

GenAI being used for placeholder stuff is arguably the perfect use case, especially for small studios without massive art teams.

warm
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-1012h

So instead of buying the textures they didnt want to create, they paid for AI to generate derived versions from stolen art??

Whats the point? Just give the artists the money directly.

fonix232
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22h

No. Instead of making designers work on Brick Texture #7298, they allowed them to work on actually interesting design bits while the necessary textures were placeholdered by AI.

Also, stolen art… The same argument comes up here as with piracy. If I take something you created, BUT you’re not deprived of said thing, then it’s not theft. It is a breach of licence but not theft.

I do agree that some genAI models have very questionable copyrighting issues due to source dataset usage, but, just by creating a model you haven’t deprived anyone of ownership of their property. You haven’t actually done any financial damage to them.

So please stop overblowing the issue and instead begin by pushing for support of artists’ rights to decide if their art can be used by third parties for the purpose of AI training, which is the core issue here. And even go and push for artists’ rights to reserve their art’s training data usage to themselves, thus allowing artists to create their own specialised models with their own style that they can use to offer cheaper art, or even license the use of the model out for money, thereby allowing artists to directly benefit from AI instead of being fervently against it.

You’re also forgetting that most companies like Sandfall Interactive, that work on a budget, have their own designers so they don’t just shop around for artists, even without AI. But without AI it would’ve meant that those hundreds of brick etc. textured would’ve gotten a placeholder that was unsightly. See e.g. Valve’s Source Engine pink-black checkerboard placeholder. Would you have preferred that?

warm
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02h

Did you even read my short comment? They can buy a brick texture from one of many marketplaces. Giving an artist money directly. Instead of giving money to use stolen assets. So that argument doesnt hold up.

fonix232
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11h

Did you read MY comment at all?

When you have in-house designers you won’t go shopping around for textures, especially not placeholder ones.

warm
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117m

Why are you being obtuse? If the in-house designers didn’t want to make some placeholder textures, they could have used a marketplace instead of AI. Are you just going to keep going in circles?

@[email protected]
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33h

But these aren’t textures that are intended for use. They’re filler for development purposes.

It’s like putting a gray box in and fixing it later or putting a TODO in code.

warm
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11h

Yes, so they can buy some cheap marketplace textures instead of paying to use stolen content. What are we not understanding here?

@[email protected]
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126m

But, why for placeholders that aren’t meant for anything? No one will ever see these (intentionally).

I’m very anti AI in games for art but this feels like an arbitrary line in the sand for “support artists”. This feels like the stupid busywork that AI can alleviate. If there’s a large market for placeholder stuff maybe but most of the stuff in stores you’re paying to ship in production normally.

Why purchase stock things that may not be the dimensions you need or need tweaking to make work when you can just have something craft a placeholder?

warm
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114m

Why go through the effort of AI then for them? It’s the same amount of work, well less even, you’ll get a full pack of textures at different resolutions with UV maps and all, versus AI where you then have to check it and potentially do more.

It says it all, when purchasing a texture is now “stupid busywork”. You literally type in what you want, get hundreds of results, buy one, put in the game. They used UE5, Epic Games literally own Fab and integrate it into the engine, they even give away lots of free assets there.

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