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Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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Seems excessive.
There’s AI slop games, the new breed of lazy asset flips. There’s replacing employees with slop machines.
And then there’s “a few of our textures were computer generated.” In a game that is clearly passionately crafted art.
I get it’s about principle, but still.
For stuff like dirt/stone/brick/etc textures I'm less strict for the use of generative stuff. I even think having an artist make the "core" texture and then using an AI to fill out the texture across the various surfaces to make it less repetitive over a large area isn't a problem for me.
Like, I agree that these things gernally are ethically questionable with how they are trained, but you can train them on ethically sourced data and doing so could open up the ability to fill out a game world without spending a ton of time, leaving the actual artists more time to work on the important set pieces than the dirt road connecting them.
And little tools like that give studios like this an edge over AAAs. It’s the start of negating their massive manpower advantage.
In other words, the anti-corpo angle seems well worth the “cost” of a few generations. That’s the whole point of AI protest, right? It really against the corps enshittifying stuff.
And little niche extensions in workflows is how machine learning is supposed to be used, like it was well before it got all the hype.
Most AAA studios at this point have in-house AIs and training, I'm not sure it's the equalizing factor people think it is.
An OpenAI subscription does not count.
Otherwise, yeah… but it helps them less, proportionally. AAAs still have the fundamental Issue of targeting huge audiences with bland games. Making them even more gigantic isn’t going to help much.
AAs and below can get closer to that “AAA” feel with their more focused project.
100% agree. I'm glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art.
That’s precisely not what happened with E33.
The implication here is that you can gain manpower without hiring more men, no?
More that an existing smaller studio doesn’t have to sell their soul to a publisher (or get lucky) to survive. They can more safely make a “big” game without going AAA.
My observation is that there’s a “sweet spot” for developers somewhere around the Satisfactory (Coffee Stain) size, with E33 at the upper end of that, but that limits their audience and scope. If they can cut expensive mocap rigs, a bunch of outsourced bulk art, stuff like that with specific automation, so long as they don’t tether themselves to Big Tech AI, that takes away the advantage AAAs have over them.
A few computer generated textures is the first tiny step in that direction.
So no. AI is shit at replacing artists. Especially in E33 tier games. But it’s not a bad tool to add to their bucket, so they can do more.
Right, so the barrier was that they had to pay for this "outsourced bulk art", and now with AI they don't have to. It looks like we are in agreement when I say "I’m glad AI is democratizing the ability for the little guys like you and me to not pay artists for art"?
It takes less time for the actual in house artists to use GenAI with a dataset trained with the company’s own style to generate “bulk art” than it takes them to manage an outsourced company doing the same thing.
Sauce: work in gaming, just talked about this with our art producer.
The outsourcing work is literally “make this texture we made ourselves by hand look like it was snowing” type of shit. You can use GenAI and have it done in 30 minutes or spend 2 hours talking back and forth with the outsourcing partner in 10 minute intervals over a week - interrupting your flow every time.
I think AI is too dumb, and will always be too dumb, to replace good artists.
I think most game studios can’t afford full time art house across like 30 countries, nor should they want the kind of development abomination Ubisoft has set up. That’s what I’m referring to when I say “outsourced”; development that has just gotten too big, with too many people and too generic a target market. And yes, too many artists working on one game.
I think game artists should have a more intimate relationship with their studio, like they did with E33.
And it’d be nice for them have tools to make more art than they do now, so they can make bigger, richer games, quicker, with less stress and less financial risk. And no enshittification that happens when their studio gets too big.
One builder only uses hand tools, other uses power tools.
That’s the difference, nobody is hiring less people because the tools are better.
Oh fuck off with that sentiment. You're very well aware that that's not what happened here, nor is it what's happening in a majority of genAI usage cases. In fact in most cases it IS artists using genAI to speed up the design process.
What AI does here is allowing small teams to get art done what otherwise would eat up their budget, aka they literally couldn't afford. No artists were harmed in these cases because if AI didn't exist they simply wouldn't have been hired.
Yes, there IS a currently ongoing shift. Just like there was e.g. with the mechanic loom. Did that kill off handmade clothing? No - even today we still have artists making handmade clothing and in fact making tons more off of it, while the masses got access to cheap clothing. The initial sudden rush to the new tech is annoying and yes it exposes some people to hardships (which is why we should switch from capitalism, and start providing UBI), but it WILL balance out. Remember, the luddites were wrong at the end.
Language 😠.
Yes, I know I'm kinda strict on that, but there are no reason here to come to insults.
You got a good point here, and the message you answered to got downvoted to oblivion.
If you disagre, downvote away, don't feed the possible troll with your anger.
That excuse can be used by big publishers as well, no?
Oh, yes. Big publisher will try it on a huge scale. They cant help themselves.
And they’re going to get sloppy results back. If they wanna footgun themselves, it’s their foot to shoot.
Some mid sized devs may catch this “Tech Bro Syndrome” too, unfortunately.
Who made the textures or took the photos that them AI generated ones were derived from, do they get a cut? That justification is even more bizarre now, considering the tools we have to photoscan.
Also what about AI code tools? Like if they use cursor to help write some code does that disqualify them?
If you do that and proceed to say "No we didn't use any AI tools". Then yes, that should be a disqualification.
"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."
That’s fair.
But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.
Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.
…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.
You have to draw the line somewhere, saying any game cant use AI is much simpler than an arbitrary definition of what slop is. Also means we reward real artistry everytime.
Then you’re going to get almost no games.
Or just get devs lying about using cursor or whatever when they code.
If that’s the culture of the Game Awards, if they have to lie just to get on, that… doesn’t seem healthy.
How have we all forgotten that games were made perfectly fine for decades without AI? Better games even.
I'd rather give an award to a "worse" game that didnt use AI, than to a game that did.
Devs can lie, but the truth always comes out eventually.
"the truth" being that a few generated placeholder textures were accidentally left in and promptly replaced? crazy
Then most just won't go on the Game Awards, and devs will go on using Cursor or whatever they feel comfortable with in their IDE setup.
I’m all against AI slop, but you’re setting an unreasonably absolute standard. It’s like saying “I will never use any game that was developed in proximity to any closed source software.” That is possible, technically, but most people aren’t gonna do that. It’s basically impossible on a larger team. Give them some slack with the requirement; it’s okay to develop on Windows or on Steam, just open the game’s source.
Similarly, let devs use basic tools. Ban slop from the end product.
Awards like these are inherently subjective. You don't have to draw an objective line anywhere.
It's highly likely that EVERY video game dev team has at least one person who is using cursor, whether it violates their AI policy or not. It's massively popular, looks just like VSCode, and can be hard to detect.
You don't even need to use cursor. All the major IDEs are including LLMs nowadays to help with code completion and code generation. There's zero chance no gen ai code is in any project that has more than a few people nowadays.
^ The olympic steroids user telling me I can't prove they used steroids.
Yeah.
A lot of devs may do it personally, even if it’s not a company imperative (which it shouldn’t be).
People have made it excessive due to turning AI into a modern witch hunt. Maybe if people had a more nuanced take than "all AI bad" companies could be more open about how they use AI.
I can guarantee that if E33 came out with the AI disclaimer it would've been far more controversial and probably less successful. And technically they should have an AI label because they did use Gen AI in the development process even if none of it was supposed to end up in the final game.
But we can't have companies being honest because people can't be normal.
How do I put this.
AI isn't exactly the cause of the rise in the price of hardware. Only 1/6th of the purchased Nvidia cards are actually in data centers. Same for the memory.
We're not using it.
What's really drumming up all the prices is that the billionaires are convinced that AI is going to replace tons and tons of people. It's not. It's the insane corporate hype that's doing all the damage.
It will replace some, sure. The same way the electric drill replaced carpenters. One electric drill does not replace one carpenter. That's not how that works. Instead the carpenters can work a bit faster and their job is a bit easier. It's worth buying and it's worth using, but it doesn't really replace a person. Accountants didn't disappear as a profession when spreadsheets were invented.
There were books written in the 1980s about how household appliances raised the standard of cleanliness. Turns out people change clothes more when cleaning clothes doesn't involve a washing board. And I don't think Roombas replaced that many jobs either.
In particular, I think this is a thing that will happen for software development. I don't think it'll reduce the number of developers we need. I think the standards for development will just be higher. All the front end stuff in particular is going to get easier, and you won't need as many frameworks. We'll especially need just as many devs, if not more, in the short term. Someone's going to have to fix the mess all these companies are going to make after they've fired half their devs and tried to just vibe code everything.
that’s a lot if text to basically say it’s cause AI
I agree the current state of affairs makes people even more against AI and I think people have a good reason to be against AI, but don't you find it a bit contradictory how people are less antagonistic towards E33 AI use now that it has been revealed?
People are far more antagonistic towards games when the first thing they see is the AI label, to the point where they dismiss the entire game as AI slop, but it seems people are willing to be more lenient on AI usage when they first get to experience the game for what it is. This unreasonable reaction to the first impression is why companies would rather hide their AI usage rather than inform the customer.
Let them have their award with their own rules.
Although I wouldn't talk about integrity when someone still claims Clair Obscur is an indie.
I have the same feeling about Kojima's and Vincke's latest comments on AI. Am I supposed to get mad at every single person who said they used/plan to use AI for something? I'd be as outraged as the average Fox News viewer, and it would be impossible to be taken seriously. I still won't be using AI myself (fuck surveillance state AI) and I'd be making every effort to encourage others not to use it, but there's no point in burning bridges and falling for rage bait.
They're creative people who care about the craft and care about the teams in their employ, which gives their statements weight, where some Sony/Microsoft/EA executive making an identical statement has none.
I understand the principle. Even if E33 is not slop, people should fear a road that leads to dependence on “surveillance state AI” like OpenAI. That’s unacceptable.
That being said, I think a lot of people don’t realize how commoditized it’s getting. “AI” is not a monoculture, it’s not transcending to replace people, and it’s not limited to corporate APIs. This stuff is racing to the bottom to become a set of dumb tools, and dirt cheap. TBH that’s something that makes a lot of sense for a game studio lead to want.
And E33 is clearly not part of the “Tech Bro Evangalism” camp. They made a few textures, with a tool.
When I give myself the leeway to think of a less hardliner stance on AI, I come back to Joel Haver's video on his use of ebsynth:
Now my blood boils like everyone else's when it comes to being forced to use AI at work, or when I hear the AI Voice on Youtube, or the forced AI updates to Windows and VS Code, but it doesn't boil for Joel. He clearly has developed an iconic style for his comedy skits, and puts effort into those skits long before he puts it through an AI rotoscope filter. He chose his tool and he uses it sparingly. The same was apparently true for E33, and I have no reason not give Kojima and Larian the same benefit of the doubt.
On the other hand, Joel probably has no idea what I'm talking about when I say "surveillance state AI." People Make Games has a pretty good video exposing its use case. There's also...
Creatives may be aware of some, or all, or none of those things, which is why it's important to continue raising awareness of them. AI may be toothpaste that can't go back in the tube, but it's also a sunk cost fallacy, you don't have to brush your teeth with shit-flavored toothpaste.
You don’t hate AI. You hate Big Tech Evangelism. You hate corporate enshittification, AI oligarchs, and the death of the internet being shoved down your throat.
…I think people get way too focused on the tool, and not these awful entries wielding them while conning everyone. They’re the responsible party.
You’re using “AI” as a synonym for OpenAI, basically, but that’s not Joel Haver’s rotoscope filter at all. That’s niche machine learning.
As for the exponential cost, that’s another con. Sam Altman just wants people to give him money.
Look up what it takes to train (say) Z Image or GLM 4.6. It’s peanuts, and gets cheaper every month. And eventually everyone will realize this is all a race to the bottom, not the top… but it’s talking a little while :/