pro-AI post. haters don’t interact. thx.
Labor-saving technology should be the friend of labor. Obviously, the bosses will just use it to put people out of work, but anybody left in position to use such technology? They will be less wrecked by the job, less likely to be crippled in old age by the work they do. Any time jobs are lost, there’s an adjustment that has to be made, and it can hurt when the social safety net is bullshit, but that’s on the government, on our societies privileging the whims of the rich over the needs of the people – not on labor-saving technology itself.
The Game Awards recently awarded a heap of prizes to french “JRPG” style video game Expedition 33. I’m no gamer. I watched a few hours of someone playing it and thought the soundtrack was overbearing and the writing annoying. Still, there’s a difference between watching and playing. I’m sure there was something to recommend it highly. Gamers went hard for it.
Come The Indie Game Awards and Expedition 33 -which won “Best Indie Game” at the more mainstream ceremony- was disqualified for the use of “generative AI.” Call me what you will, but indie game studios are the last people in the fuckin world that should be joining the leftosphere groupthink moral panic about AI.
Video games take a ludicrous amount of labor to produce. Most of the webcomics of the world flame out and die because just making a comic strip is too much effort for the creator to sustain. Most of the blogs in the sidebar on FtB are defunct because just knocking together a few words per year is too much effort for people to sustain. Multiply that effort by roughly a hundred, a thousand, or more, depending on the scope of your ambition. Now that you’re taking a decade to make a video game that can be played in two hours, be ready to rebuild every part of it because modern computers can’t run the engine you originally built for.
If you’re an art hobo chasing commission money, a grandma selling water color paintings at the craft fair, whatever, don’t use AI. That’s fine. If you’re in a field where the labor is prohibitive, and you want to finish more than one production in the course of your entire short life, maybe use labor-saving technology.
If you have problems with AI for the purposes of art, music, etc, write those problems out, consider how important these things are to you. Look at the counterpoints that have been offered by proponents of AI art. Consider if those answer your concerns, or if you think they’re arguing in bad faith. Consider what it will actually look like, to create your production from scratch with nothing but pure human effort – the time budget, the quality as well. There’s bad-looking AI art but there is a helluvalot of shitty human-crafted art as well. With what you have access to, will you be able to do better with one approach or the other?
What is it worth to you, being a purist? The biggest downside to using AI on a video game right now is literally nothing more than the prejudice of the fickle masses. They might feel completely different in three years. Even if they don’t, wouldn’t you rather make art, than fuss about the opinions of a horde of screaming shitbirds?
Do your art, however you can. That might work better with AI assistance. Look at Expedition 33. That was a coherent work of art, every part of it contributing to the whole, painting the picture the creators wanted to paint. Where was the AI even used? I couldn’t tell. If generated images are part of your production pipeline, but it’s building to your own personal artistic expression, how bad is it?
Original sin! Fruit of the poison tree! Roll back the clock! Uninvent the wheel! Burn the witches!
Fuck off.
–
A rather arbitrary rule indeed. BTW, ‘gg’ is short for ‘good game’ and is used to concede a loss.
https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq sez “Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.”
That’s it. That’s the rule.
Where was the AI even used?
“The Indie Game Awards have a hard stance on the use of gen AI throughout the nomination process and during the ceremony itself. When it was submitted for consideration, a representative of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of a resurfaced interview with Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production being brought to our attention on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination. While the assets in question were patched out and it is a wonderful game, it does go against the regulations we have in place. As a result, the IGAs nomination committee has agreed to officially retract both the Debut Game and Game of the Year awards.”
Specific article about it:
https://www.ign.com/articles/indie-game-awards-strips-clair-obscur-expedition-33-of-game-of-the-year-over-gen-ai-dev-says-placeholder-textures-were-patched-out-after-slipping-through-qa-process
one, they probably just did it and either didn’t read the rules or didn’t care about them, then did all the performative contrition required of the political moment.
not the most ethical behavior, but why should this rule exist in the first place? it’s political theater to appease this popular movement, not unlike when star wars capitulated to popular racism and sexism by reducing the character of rose tico in their last movie. it’s just caving to the other side of the aisle.
two, i did end up seeing a screenshot of this texture. it was a wall covered with newspaper pages, which had the telltale nonsense of ai upon them. if anything, that texture showed how absurd ai outrage is.
who was the artist whose sacred IP was violated by this? was the “original” image written in gibberish? no, whatever images were used for training had been altered much more than an actual plagiarist would have done – well beyond any legal threshold that had existed before.
the labor argument – should they, as an indie studio with a smaller staff, have added several hours per image to the time it took to produce the game? or hired more people, stretching their limited budget? this was the crux of my article – indies should be using the hell out of ai.
It somewhat amuses me that, in this case, they still ‘won’ so that retracting it on that basis is not likely to sway the people who are (heh) swayed by awards.
I know, I know… it’s the principle, principally.
the anti crowd are loving this, as an object demonstration of their political clout.
Maybe.
But I reckon it’s fraught: the idea here is that using AI tools is somehow cheating (akin to performance enhancers in sport), so it is not allowed in those comps.
That sends an inadvertent message, no? 🙂
It’s that tension between [AI is inferior and useless] vs [AI is a cheat code].
It’s a difficult situation because there are not good definitions for having AI in a game yet.
At the base level it’s easy to include some AI by accident because you bought a pack of standard game assets like grass, bush, plates, signs and such. In the same way code libraries in your game might have AI coding embedded in them somewhere. I really don’t care if your game includes something trivial by accident.
At the same time I don’t want to support somebody who just types “make me a platform game like Celeste” in a code generator and ships it off. No system could do that yet but eventually it will get close. Part of what interests me in those games is supporting the artists and designers behind them.
There are also some practical matters. I wouldn’t want a puzzle game with puzzles created by AI without extensive testing. Too much risk that there is some solution that breaks the game. On the other hand, a well structured LLM would make for an interesting opponent in games like Civilization or other strategy games that can have a lot of opponents.
At the code level I don’t want programmers just running everything through a LLM code generator and using that. However, using an LLM error detector or tool for finding security flaws makes sense.
All of which is a mess because there isn’t a defined way for explaining how much AI and what type of AI was used in creating a game yet.
JM – if you breathed two syllables into C3PO’s ear and it magically produced the best game ever, how might that change the math for you? keep in mind, best game ever now exists, and C3PO couldn’t have done it without your breath, in this hypothetical.
i’d prefer to support artists by paying them for what they did however they chose to do it, if the results are good. i’m not paying somebody to break their mind and body doing unnecessary labor and this conversation has been made silly by the reaction against ai art.
I have no problem with AI in writing games. I just want it labeled correctly and I don’t think we even have the right labels currently. I agree the current gamer reaction to the least AI in games is an over reaction.
I don’t want to buy a book by Stephen King and discover the company built an LLM based on King’s writings and are using it to create stories.
It’s worse than that. Books, too.
https://lithub.com/two-books-with-ai-generated-covers-have-been-disqualified-from-new-zealands-top-book-prize/
↓
Somewhere on the goofy/sad spectrum in AI slop news, today two novels up for the prestigious Ockham New Zealand Book Award were disqualified on the basis of their AI cover art.
Obligate Carnivore, a story collection by Stephanie Johnson, and Angel Train, four linked novellas by Elizabeth Smither, have been judged by their covers and subsequently eliminated from competition. A trusty bookseller raised the flag.
The authors claimed to have no knowledge of their mutual publisher’s use of AI design tools. And in an O’Henry twist, the contest recently changed its policies to reflect our changing hellscape. (Sorry, landscape.)
Ockham Award administrations altered their regulations around generative AI use in August. As Nicola Legat, the chair of the book awards’ trust, told The Guardian, the prize now takes a “firm stance on the use of AI in books.” That’s inside and out.
JM – for what it’s worth my husband is somewhat in agreement with you, however he makes an exception for worse writers. like, if it’s between king and kingbot, he says king. if it’s between koontz and koontzbot, all things being equal, he’s ok with koontzbot.
i’m interested in why people feel the way they feel on these topics. acknowledging that if the tech was perfected and equal quality possible from the bot, that in this circumstance you’d prefer the human, suggests there’s something in the human presence that appeals. like, as the reader, you’re interested in what that guy, as a writer, is thinking, is creating. that’s legit.
from my point of view, i think this tech throws serious question on where the magic of art happens. i can envision a true death of the artist, because it seems to me the eye of the beholder is a lot more important than the ego of the author. maybe very few people are interested in that. i’m kinda interested in it, which should count for something, because it’s against my self-interest.
morales – literally judging books by covers, fantastic. i’m amused.