Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
lepinkainen@lemmy.world 3 days agoThey used AI for placeholder art.
It could’ve been literally Mickey Mouse downloaded from google images and still be fine. None of it was supposed to be shipped.
Big AAA studios have a person or team whose only job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Smaller studios don’t.
mrmaplebar@fedia.io 3 days ago
Sure, they could have used Mickey Mouse, a gray box, or a low poly model whipped in Blender in 5 minutes... After all, that's what people have been doing for like 30 years. None of those things would have required the mass industrialized exploitation of millions of people's work and culture. None of those things would add value to some tech bros business.
As a side note, something tells me that if they had used Mickey for their placeholder art it wouldn't have "accidentally" found its way into the final game.
Plus... how do I know they didn't use AI as the basis for all of the art in their game? For all I know, AI was central to setting the aesthetic of this game due to being at the very front end of their production pipeline. Hard to know, especially when they are so sketchy about it. (At least Larian were bold/stupid enough to admit that the concepts for their game start with AI.)
It cheapens the game and undermines whatever work they actually did.
Calling your game "indie" when you're actively exploiting artists to make it is like calling your Etsy store "diy" despite knowing that it's a bunch of Chinese dropped shipped junk made by children in a sweatshop. It's disingenuous at best.