The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French studio was probed about recent AI controversies. Game director Guillaume Broche clarified some of the misinformation surrounding the studio and reiterated what other Sandfall developers have said about generative AI usage during interviews held earlier in the year.
Transcription of the Q&A comes courtesy of gaming content creator Sushi, who was one of the handful of influencers who were present at the session. Twitch streamer crizco prefaced his question by recounting the storm surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios’ admission about using generative AI during game development.
No artist gets paid to create placeholder art during development. They get paid for the final art pieces that are used in the game itself. No actual AI art was used in the final game except for a few accidentally included bits that were not correctly replaced with the final art and that issue was corrected. No artists were harmed in the making of this game.
I guess I’ll just take your word for it then.
Any projects i have been on, if i need quick placeholder i take it from some existing library that is filled with free to use textures or i create some bullshit texture name temp.png or removethis_brown.jpg and some real artist comes and makes the final one somewhere down the line, 10-1000 hours later.
I have hard time understanding how creating the temporary texture that is never meant to be seen by end user is different when using generative tool versus paint. Especially when no artist looses their pay check or their spot in the credits.
However I do take offence if somebody uses ai to replace writer, designer, voice actor, or artist of any kind in the final product.
If it doesnt matter then dont use AI for placeholders. What’s the argument here for them?
If its nicer and faster why would somebody not use it?
Because the people they want to sell their game to have overwhelmingly stated they don’t want this new generation of AI technologies used when creating art. Its sorta like arguing that using corn syrup is cheaper and quicker than sugar or honey, so why not use it? Things aren’t so simple as “nicer” and “faster”, and only a small subset of people seem in favor of AI technologies used creatively.
Of course if you are making art for yourself, by yourself, then who cares what you use for anything.
Your analogy is not fitting.
Placeholders are never meant to be part of the meal. They are there in the development stage when there needs to be something on the screen. They dont go trough the art department. Visual director wont review them. They are not representing the finalized game. They are there just as placeholders so people can see things work and not to need to look at wireframes when they work on the project. Often at parts of the game that has no quarantee to even be at the finalized game.
Generally graphics are one of the last things that is finalized in games. There is no point to use artists time for making placeholders, when they can spend that time doing something meaningfull.
In the end it does not matter if the placeholder is done by artists hand, is photoscanned from the doodles janitor made on toilet paper or if its done by AI. Hell, it could be pictures of spongebob fan art stolen from google search. It does not matter what people feel like is best and fastest way to get the texture, because its not representting the game and its not meant to be part if the finished product.
If you want to keep the food analogy, placeholders are the toothpicks holding your meatrolls in shape while they are in the oven. They wont end to your plate and if they do, somebody somewhere did a mistake.
Also i want to point out that not you nor i can say anything about overwhelming opinions. Clair Obscur for example has sold over 5 million copies. How big procentual part of those 5 million people you think has even read about the whole dispute, or put any meaningfull tough for the matter? Places like lemmy, steam reviews and comments on youtube videos are mostly from loud minorities that generally wont represent the whole fandom at all.
So why are we calling assets that made it to release placeholders? Where’s the line there?
Why there are bugs in the release? Mistakes happen.