Can someone help me to understand the difference between Generative AI and procedural generation (which isn’t something that’s relevant for Expedition 33, but I’m talking about in general).
Like, I tend to use the term “machine learning” for the legit stuff that has existed for years in various forms, and “AI” for the hype propelled slop machines. Most of the time, the distinction between these two terms is pretty clean, but this area seems to be a bit blurry.
I might be wrong, because I’ve only worked with machine learning in a biochemistry context, but it seems likely that modern procedural generation in games is probably going to use some amount of machine learning? In which case, would a developer need to declare usage of that? That feels to me like it’s not what the spirit of the rule is calling for, but I’m not sure
You can use statistics to estimate a child’s final height by their current height and their parents’ height.
People “train” models by writing a program to randomly make and modify equations, then keep them depending on if new accuracy is higher.
Generative AI can predict what first result on google search or first reply on whatsapp will look like for llms.
There are problems. Training from 94% to 95% accuracy takes exponentially more resources as it doesn’t have some “code” you can fix. Hallucinations will happen.
On the other side, procedural algorithms in games just refer to handwritten algorithms.
For example a programmer may go “well a maze is just multiple, smaller mazes combined.” Then write a program to generate mazes based on that concept.
It’s much cheaper, you don’t need GPU or internet connection to use the algorithm. And if it doesn’t work people can debug it on the spot.
Also it doesn’t require stealing from 100 million people to be usable
(I kinda oversimplified generative AI, modern models may do something entirely different)
generative ai is a subset of procedural generation algorithms. specifically it’s a procedural algorithm with a massive amount of weight parameters, on the order of hundreds of billions. you get the weights by training. for image generation (which i’m assuming is what was in use here), the term to look up is “latent diffusion”. basically you take all your training images and blur them step by step, then set your weights to mimic the blur operation. then when you want an image you run the model backwards.
Yeah, that was my understanding of things too. What I’m curious about is how the Indie Game awards define it. Because if games that use ((Procedural Generation) AND NOT (Generative AI)) are permitted, then that would surely require a way of cleanly delineating between Generative AI and the rest of procedural generation that exists beyond generative AI
most procedural algorithms don’t require training data, for one. they can just be given a seed and run. or rather, the number of weights is so minimal that you can set them by hand.
Because so many people are blowing up without reading the article I felt it was worth posting this. Based on the wording it sounds like they were not disqualified for having AI in the game, they were disqualified for not disclosing AI had been used in development.
“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself,” the statement reads. “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. “In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination.”
Additionally, here is another article where they are clarifying HOW it was used.
Following the publication of this article, Sandfall Interactive wishes to provide the following clarifications. The studio states that it was in contact with El País on April 25 - three months prior to this publication. During these exchanges, Sandfall Interactive indicated that it had used a limited number of pre-existing assets, notably 3D assets sourced from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. None of these assets were created using artificial intelligence. Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative Al-created assets in the game. When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.
TL;DR: They experimented with Generative AI when it first came out, used some of the results as temporary assets that were always intended to be temporary. They still got in to the final product because QA missed them, which was promptly fixed in a patch. Indie Game Awards disqualified them for failing to disclose this in the first place.
Key takeaways:
- AI didn’t steal anyone’s job in this instance. It was simply used as a tool to help make an artists job easier.
- It was never meant to be a part of the final product, and currently isn’t.
They used generative AI around when it when it first came out, probably before most people started realizing it was being trained off stolen artwork as well as a lot of the other problems with AI.u/Crazazy brings up a good point and this part is somewhat questionable
Make of that what you will. I personally think this is being blown out of proportion. They made a mistake and have openly corrected themselves. Good for them.
I don’t have much if an opinion on the rest of your argument but:
probably before most people started realizing it was being trained off stolen artwork as well as a lot of the other problems with AI.
This is the equivalent to those Tesla owners pasting “I bought this before Elon went crazy” stickers. Especially the creative industries were very quick to point out the problematic part of stuff like Dall-E and stable diffusion. Generative Graphical AI has never been approved of by the gamedevs I know.
Just a note, seems to just be in production. Possibly placeholders?
Reminds me of the old days, developers all the time put in copyrighted assets as placeholders. Rarely they get into the final release and cause trouble but it was fairly common practice.
GenAI shouldn’t be used in any part of the process, including concepts and placeholders.
That being said, the assets that slipped through in E33 were from 2022. The most powerful publicly available genAI tool at the time was fuckin DallE-Mini, which basically just spit out fuzzy messes. None of the ethical concerns were common knowledge yet, Altman and his ilk were basically nobodies at the time, this was far before any of the current tools and companies that are driving everything to hell.
On top of that, there’s a dogshit article going around where Sandfall says they “use a small bit of AI” internally, and elaborate that they’re referring to Unreal machine learning tools and such, not genAI.
Fuck genAI, fuck Altman, and fuck anyone who intentionally uses any of this shit today, but the E33 case is a literal non-issue. They had 2022 fuzzy garbage slip through the cracks, immediately removed it, and there’s absolutely nothing to indicate that they’re using the modern, problematic tech today.
The only issue here is that there’s no reason for it to be considered an indie game. That’s it.
So if you make a noise mesh texture is that hand crafted?
That is procedural generation using an algorithm you can not only look up but even modify.
that’s how any “AI” being used in proper development environment is, too
Nope. AI is a black box that gives you what it gives you: you lose the creative direction of whatever decisions you leave up to it.
I kinda feel like Clair Obscur is sort of stretching the definition of indie game.
I guess _technically _ it is.
I’m not saying every game needs to be made in someone’s garage and take 12 years to make, but it sounds like this game was completely funded by Kepler and parts of the game were outsourced to other companies. Sandfall is made up of experienced developers from places like Ubisoft. Kinda feels like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise made their own movie with funding from a lesser known subdivision of Warner Bros, outsourced SFX to 300 animators, and called it indie because they filmed it with 10 people.
I do think Clair Obscur is a fantastic game and deserves to be Game of the Year (aside from the AI use). Sandfall and Kepler did a great job with a reported budget of $10M(!) and I especially appreciate what Kepler is doing to support the gaming industry.
I guess I see the point of the award to inspire people to believe they shouldn’t give up on their dreams by recognizing small teams making games outside of the traditional industry. I just don’t feel like Sandfall qualifies.
In the end, it’s not my award and they can give it to whoever they want!
They were disqualified for failing to disclose the AI usage, not just for using AI at all.
To me, this is worse.
We are getting closer and closer to not being able to tell the difference between AI and reality. This lying about the use of it or hiding the use of it is a bad fucking idea.
The reason they didn’t disclose it as being used in the creation of the game is probably because no AI was used in the ultimate development. It’s an artist who uses AI to generate concepts and inspiration using AI in their artwork, even if everything in the end is hand crafted and doesn’t resemble any of the generated images?
One thing we need to take into account going forward too is that AI will inevitably be used for things like texture maps and environmental generation. Things that have been randomly generated with algorithms. In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all, unless you want the pool of potential to be incredibly small.
In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all,
Damn, that sucks. I guess I’ll have to find a new hobby.
Nah, just pirate the stuff.
If they don’t give a fuck about original creators, why should we give a fuck about paying them?
You think my problem with AI is that it costs money?
I loved the game.
I understand the use that was made did not in the least affect the final product.
I don’t think they should have a disclaimer on Steam.
I think they screwed up big time if the indie game awards rules could have been interpreted as requiring no use of AI at any stage in production.
Also, I dont really understand the point of saying it afterwards and I fear that may in itself mean that they are promoting the use of AI in game dev.
What I think is very good is that people are (over?)reacting like this: I would like to have devs perceiving the use of AI as fucking poison.
People are saying “it’s fine because it was used in the early stages of the game for placeholder art” but that’s kind of missing the point
The problem is that they used AI and didn’t disclose it, as well as releasing the game with AI textures still in it. Yes, these textures were quickly replaced, but it’s still very concerning they weren’t upfront on how they were using it in the game making process
Edit: there isn’t even a disclosure on their steam page
I’m OK with that tbh. If we normalise disclosures for any use of AI, ever, the some AI vibe-code slop gets declared the same way as a meticulously crafted game (but the devs used AI for research/brainstorming), or even ‘devs used Google and they may have been inspired by the search AI’ etc
I think AI as a tech is pretty cool. I think using AI is less cool, since it is using far more resources than we can afford to give it, so I avoid using AI at all, even if I think the tech itself is morally neutral.
And I think the way we’re using AI is horrifying. Not just how companies push it, but the common use, too. People are outsourcing their thinking and comprehension to AI, and their own personal development is stagnating. This is particularly terrifying in children and college students. Would I rather have a doctor/social worker/financial advisor that gained a degree through AI and couldn’t adapt to real world exceptions? Or none at all? Hmm.
I think there is a space for devs to use AI and not have it undermine what they’re doing, is what I mean. And so I don’t want to label those people the same as the ones who’ll get AI to do everything. Otherwise, with how much AI is used on our behalf even without consent, the AI label will become the norm… at which point, it ceases to mean anything.
I dunno…
If I make a mock up of a cake using toxic ingredients, then throw that out and make my cake from scratch using food safe ingredients, do I need to disclose that “toxic material was used when making this cake”? I don’t think so.
Of course this kinda falls apart when they shipped with quickly replaced textures. But I also wouldn’t expect them to disclose the game as unfinished if they forgot to replace blank textures with the proper assets until just after release.
This is less like making a new cake from scratch after disposing of the previous one, and more like making a new cake using the same unwashed cake tin and utensils
No matter what, the AI replacements would have affected how the artists made the final products as, whether they liked it or not, they had a point of reference in the form of the AI texture
It’s is still their own artistic sensibility that made the art, not the AI. You will always be inspired by other things while doing anything requiring creativity.
Would being inspired by Picasso suddenly make one art worthless? Of course not. So why would being inspired by an AI generated example make it any different ?To compare using AI to getting inspired by Picasso is wild
The only takeaway is that the Indie Game Awards’ rule is overly restrictive. Woops, one of your contracted artists used a GenAI model to generate a music playlist to set the mood while he was working on your game, you’re disqualified and the fact that you didn’t come forward with this information immediately makes you a liar. Obviously absurd. If they’re going to take a strong anti-AI stance, it should be more realistic. At some point, maybe even already, every single competitor should be disqualified but isn’t aware or forthcoming about it, so what’s the rule actually doing except rewarding dishonesty?
The GenAI asset was in the final release. It wasn’t that a subcontractor used GenAI to create a music playlist to listen to while they worked. That’s a very different thing.
Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process
Not exactly a massive AI slop problem, right?
Can we put our collective pitchforks away for this case at least?
Can we put our collective pitchforks away for this case at least?
NO.
My pitchfork stays sharpened and at the ready until this stupid bubble pops.
The AI was used for background assets that they failed to remove but patched quickly after. It’s not as egregious as the headline makes it out to be.
I think you misunderstood me. All AI is humanity-ending garbage that needs to be eliminated. I don’t give two figs how or where it’s used - I want it all gone.
Do you even have a tech background? How is a machine learning algorithm going to end humanity?
I was a network engineer at one of the biggest backbones on Earth before retiring. Before that, I designed and programmed industrial automation. So, no tech background at all.
Now that that’s out of the way: a blind squirrel could see that sucking up all the energy and wasting endless fresh water is a bad thing for the environment. The “bigger-than-2008” market crash that’s also coming won’t help.
By feeding people’s collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, etc.
Do have a humanities background? All tech people should have one.
I have both actually. There are many, many use cases for AI and again, they were used before people like you even knew it was a concept.
Well, you’re not putting it to very good use.
Brain rot, job destruction, increased inequality, massive acceleration in global warming, massive decrease in the quality of critical systems, societal and economic collapse…
AI that finds protein foldings or cures for cancer is humanity-ending? Careful with that stretching, you might hurt yourself.
You can list a thousand nifty end results of AI and it won’t change the impact it’s having on our environment right now.
How about this: we put all this nonsense on hold until we solve cold fusion first?
They replaced the art later, but shouldn’t the bar be high like this? Otherwise, the caution won’t be there. It also could be abused, like games only getting adjusted post-launch if a certain measure of success hits. Plus the final product is not the only part of matters in the was-AI-used discussion, it is also about the process. If AI is the product of stolen human artwork being fed into a machine, and then that machine is used during creation, then AI has been used in the process that led to the final product no less than the concept art that may not be seen in game but was important in steering the ship.
Maybe someone can share their thoughts though. I’m still formulating mine and this is where I am at the moment.
There is no use of Gen AI in an indie game that should be tolerated. Period.
That’s just not going to happen.
Nearly any game with more than a few people involved is going have someone use cursor code completion, or use one for reference or something. They could pull in libraries with a little AI code in them, or use an Adobe filter they didn’t realize is technically GenAI, or commission an artist that uses a tiny bit in their workflow.
If the next Game Awards could somehow audit game sources and enforce that, it’d probably be a few solo dev games, and nothing elsex
Not that AI Slop should be tolerated. But I’m not sure how it’s supposed to be enforced so strictly.
The fact that they were there in the first place is a problem.
Why does a game that has been published by some other company calls itself “indie”???
The term itself is becoming more and more meaningless with the passing time.
I think it’s a small studio and it’s their first game, no?
An indie video game or indie game is a video game created by individuals or smaller development teams, and typically without the financial and technical support of a large game publisher,
After inking a partnership with Kepler Interactive, which was officially announced in early 2023, and securing funding from said publisher, Sandfall grew into a studio of about thirty developers, three of whom—including Broche and Guillermin—were former Ubisoft employees.[38][39][40][29][27][30][excessive citations] The funding also allowed Sandfall to expand the manpower contributing to the project beyond this core team, having outsourced gameplay combat animation to a team of eight South Korean freelance animators and quality assurance (QA) to a few dozen QA testers from the firm QLOC, as well as receiving assistance from a half-dozen developers from Ebb Software to port the game to consoles. The studio also hired a couple of performance capture artists; brought in musicians for the soundtrack recording sessions; contracted with translators from Riotloc for language localization; and partnered with Side UK and Studio Anatole as to voice casting and production in English and French respectively.[39][41] Finally, the partnership with Kepler Interactive enabled Sandfall to pay for noted professional voice actors, including Charlie Cox, Andy Serkis and Ben Starr.[35][37]
With a team of 30 developers and dozens of consultants for things like QA, it doesn’t sound like a small development team. And they clearly had support from a game publisher.
Clair Obscur is not indie by any definition of the term. I don’t even know why it was considered at all.
Sandfall *interactive is independent from its publisher Kepler. Many of the other games Kepler produces are typically considered indie - why not Expedition 33? BG3 is “Indie” but this definition
While Hades, Hollow Knight, and Celeste being both owned and published by the same company are not indie.
So… idk what definition everyone is using. Seems to be whatever suits their agenda at the time of award.
While Hades, Hollow Knight, and Celeste being both owned and published by the same company are not indie.
if your definiton of inide exclude Hades, Hollow Knight and Celeste because they are independent i have to say that it is a very bad definiton of what an indie game is.
personally, if a game has enough budget to hire Charlie Cox or Andy Serkins, it probably should not be in an indie award ceremony
