There is a small irony that the Indie Game Awards rejects nominations of games using AI but The Game Awards does not. It is independent teams of developers who are less likely to be able to afford to pay an artists who may be able to produce something of value with AI assets that they otherwise would not have the resources for. On the other side, it is big studios with a good track record and more investment who are more likely to be able to pay artists and benefit from their artistry.
To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer. Maybe if it's successful, the programmer can afford to pay an artist to help create their next game. If we want to encourage human made art, I think we should focus on rewarding the big game studios who do this and not being so strict on the 2 or 3 person teams who might not exist without the help of AI.
(I say this knowing Clair Obscur was made by a large well respected team so if they used AI assets I think it's fair their award was stripped. I just wish The Game Awards would also consider using such a standard.)
I agree that this holds in theory, but in practice? All the overhyping of AI I've heard from the gaming sector has come from the big studios, not indies. And, as you point out, Clair Obscur isn't the 'most indie' of indies anyway.
> 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.
If a fraction of the AI money would go into innovative digital content creation tools and workflows I'm not sure AI would be all that useful to artists. Just look at all those Siggraph papers throughout the years that are filled with good ideas but lacked the funding and expertise to put a really good ui on top.
Is anyone else detecting a phase shift in LLM criticism?
Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this.
No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's fascinating
Just as they were told to like them in the first place. A lot of this is driven that way because most of the public only has a surface-level understanding of the issues.
Just like feminism when it was starting, back then millions of women believed it was silly for them to vote, and those who believed otherwise had to get loud to get more on their side, and that's one example, similar things have happened with hundreds other things that we now take for granted, so it's value as judgment measure it's very low by itself alone.
It feels like a similar trend to the one that NFTs followed: huge initial hype, stoked up by tech bros and swallowed by a general public lacking a deep understanding, tempered over time as that public learns more of the problematic aspects that detractors publicise.
I bet if they'd only used AI assisted coding would be a complete non-event, but oh no, some inconsequential assets were generated, grab the pitchforks!
The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.
The quality suffers in both cases and I would personally criticise generative AI in source code as well, but the ethical argument is only against profiting from artists' work eithout their consent.
> rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers
The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.
IMO, this is key to the issue, learning != stealing. I think it should be acceptable for AI to learn and produce, but not to learn and copy. If end assets infringe on copyright, that should be dealt with the same whether human- or AI-produced. The quality of the results is another issue.
That's a fun framing. Let me try using it to define art.
Art is an abstract way of manipulating aesthetics so that the person feels or thinks a thing.
Doesn't sound very elusive nor wrong to me, while remaining remarkably similar to your coding definition.
> while asking questions about what it means to be human
I'd argue that's more Philosophy's territory. Art only really goes there to the extent coding does with creativity, which is to say
> the machine does a thing
to the extent a programmer has to first invent this thing. It's a bit like saying my body is a machine that exists to consume water and expel piss. It's not wrong, just you know, proportions and timing.
This isn't to say I classify coding and art as the same thing either. I think one can even say that it is because art speaks to the person while code speaks to the machine, that people are so much more uppity about it. Doesn't really hit the same as the way you framed this though, does it?
I love that in these discussions every piece of art is always high art and some comment on the human condition, never just grunt-work filler, or some crappy display ad.
Code can be artisanal and beautiful, or it can be plumbing. The same is true for art assets.
Exactly! Europa Universalis is a work of art, and I couldn't care less if the horse that you can get as one of your rulers is aigen or not. The art is in the fact that you can get a horse as your ruler.
I really don't agree with this argument because copying and learning are so distinct. If I write in a famous author's style style and try to pass my work off as theirs, everyone agrees that's unethical. But if I just read a lot of their work and get a sense of what works and doesn't in fiction, then use that learning to write fiction in the same genre, everyone agrees that my learning from a better author is fair game. Pretty sure that's the case even if my work cuts into their sales despite being inferior.
The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.
If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.
> Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.
As far as I'm concerned, not at all. FOSS code that I have written is not intended to enrich LLM companies and make developers of closed source competition more effective. The legal situation is not clear yet.
FOSS code is the backbone of many closed source for-profit companies. The license allows you to use FOSS tools and Linux, for instance, to build fully proprietary software.
"Mostly" is doing some heavy lifting there. Even if you don't see a problem with reams of copyleft code being ingested, you're not seeing the connection? Trusting the companies that happily pirated as many books as they could pull from Anna's Archive and as much art as they could slurp from DeviantArt, pixiv, and imageboards? The GP had the insight that this doesn't get called out when it's hidden, but that's the whole point. Laundering of other people's work at such a scale that it feels inevitable or impossible to stop is the tacit goal of the AI industry. We don't need to trip over ourselves glorifying the 'business model' of rampant illegality in the name of monopoly before regulations can catch up.
I'm not sure how valid it is to view artwork differently than source code for this purpose.
1. There is tons of public domain or similarly licensed artwork to learn from, so there's no reason a generative AI for art needs to have been trained on disallowed content anymore than a code generating one.
2. I have no doubt that there exist both source code AIs that have been trained on code that had licenses disallowing such use and art AIs have that been trained only on art that allows such use. So, it feels flawed to just assume that AI code generation is in the clear and AI art is in the wrong.
I'm not sure about licenses that explicitly forbid LLM use -- although you could always modify a license to require this! -- but GPL licensed projects require that you also make the software you create open source.
I'm not sure that LLMs respect that restriction (since they generally don't attibute their code).
I'm not even really sure if that clause would apply to LLM generated code, though I'd imagine that it should.
True. Especially indie game awards. That have the least resources available and most like would benefit most from some use of AI. At that scale often even reasonably paid game developers are expensive.
I wonder what definition of AI they're using? If you go by the definition in some textbooks (e.g., the definition given in the widely used Russell and Norvig text), basically any code with branches in it counts as AI, and thus nearly any game with any procedurally generated content would run afoul of this AI art rule.
It's not meant to be clever. They have a rule that says, in its entirety, "Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination."
Do they count procedural level generation as generative AI? Am I crazy that this doesn't seem clear to me?
After the huge impact on the PC gaming community, it's logical to despise AI and ban it from any awards. First cryptocurrencies pumped huge price raises on GPUs, then prices won't return to normal due to AI and now it's impacting RAM prices.
Next year a lot of families will struggle to buy a needed computer for their kids' school due to some multibillion techs going all-in.
It’s interesting, because we have examples of other sects in the past that also opposed human progress through technology. History is repeating itself.
I think it's more the fact that they lied before nomination than the AI usage itself. Any institution is bound to disqualify a candidate if it discovers it was admitted on false grounds.
I wonder if the game directors had actually made their case beforehand, they would have perhaps been let to keep the award.
That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?
> That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?
AI OK: Code
AI Bad: Art, Music.
It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative. They still think of us as monkeys banging on keyboards.
> It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative.
It's more like the code is the scaffolding and support, the art and experience is the core product. When you're watching a play you don't generally give a thought to the technical expertise that went into building the stage and the hall and its logistics, you are only there to appreciate the performance itself - even if said performance would have been impossible to deliver without the aforementioned factors.
To me, art is a form of expression from one human being to another. An indie game with interesting gameplay but AI generated assets still has value as a form of expression from the programmer. Maybe if it's successful, the programmer can afford to pay an artist to help create their next game. If we want to encourage human made art, I think we should focus on rewarding the big game studios who do this and not being so strict on the 2 or 3 person teams who might not exist without the help of AI.
(I say this knowing Clair Obscur was made by a large well respected team so if they used AI assets I think it's fair their award was stripped. I just wish The Game Awards would also consider using such a standard.)
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c...
> 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.
Of course you could always find opinion pieces, blogs and nerdy forum comments that disliked AI; but it appears to me that hate for AI gen content is now hitting mainstream contexts, normie contexts. Feels like my grandma may soon have an opinion on this.
No idea what the implications are or even if this is actually something that's happening, but I think it's fascinating
This is not a winning PR move when most normal people are already pretty pro-artist and anti tech bro
The use of generative AI for art is being rightfully criticised because it steals from artists. Generative AI for source code learns from developers - who mostly publish their source with licenses that allow this.
The quality suffers in both cases and I would personally criticise generative AI in source code as well, but the ethical argument is only against profiting from artists' work eithout their consent.
The double standard here is too much. Notice how one is stealing while the other is learning from? How are diffusion models not "learning from all the previous art"? It's literally the same concept. The art generated is not a 1-1 copy in any way.
Code is an abstract way of soldering cables in the correct way so the machine does a thing.
Art eludes definition while asking questions about what it means to be human.
Art is an abstract way of manipulating aesthetics so that the person feels or thinks a thing.
Doesn't sound very elusive nor wrong to me, while remaining remarkably similar to your coding definition.
> while asking questions about what it means to be human
I'd argue that's more Philosophy's territory. Art only really goes there to the extent coding does with creativity, which is to say
> the machine does a thing
to the extent a programmer has to first invent this thing. It's a bit like saying my body is a machine that exists to consume water and expel piss. It's not wrong, just you know, proportions and timing.
This isn't to say I classify coding and art as the same thing either. I think one can even say that it is because art speaks to the person while code speaks to the machine, that people are so much more uppity about it. Doesn't really hit the same as the way you framed this though, does it?
Code can be artisanal and beautiful, or it can be plumbing. The same is true for art assets.
The game is art according to that definition while the individual assets in it are not.
I consider some code I write art.
The argument seems to be that it's different when the learner is a machine rather than a human, and I can sort of see the 'if everyone did it' argument for making that distinction. But even if we take for granted that a human should be allowed to learn from prior art and a machine shouldn't, this just guarantees an arms race for machines better impersonating humans, and that also ends in a terrible place if everyone does it.
If there's an aspect I haven't considered here I'd certainly welcome some food for thought. I am getting seriously exasperated at the ratio of pathos to logos and ethos on this subject and would really welcome seeing some appeals to logic or ethics, even if they disagree with my position.
As far as I'm concerned, not at all. FOSS code that I have written is not intended to enrich LLM companies and make developers of closed source competition more effective. The legal situation is not clear yet.
1. There is tons of public domain or similarly licensed artwork to learn from, so there's no reason a generative AI for art needs to have been trained on disallowed content anymore than a code generating one.
2. I have no doubt that there exist both source code AIs that have been trained on code that had licenses disallowing such use and art AIs have that been trained only on art that allows such use. So, it feels flawed to just assume that AI code generation is in the clear and AI art is in the wrong.
I'm not sure that LLMs respect that restriction (since they generally don't attibute their code).
I'm not even really sure if that clause would apply to LLM generated code, though I'd imagine that it should.
According to your omnivision?
Few care about the mainstream game review sites or oddball game award shows as their track record is terrible (Concord reviews).
Most go by player reviews, word of mouth, and social media.
Do they count procedural level generation as generative AI? Am I crazy that this doesn't seem clear to me?
These awards are behind the times and risk irrelevance.
What software in 2025 is written without AI help?
Every game released recently would have AI help.
For indie games in particular, that is very much not true. In fact, Steam has a 'made with AI' label, so it's not even true on that platform.
Next year a lot of families will struggle to buy a needed computer for their kids' school due to some multibillion techs going all-in.
Awards that focus on quality is too desired to not be a thing.
I expect generative AI to become a competitive advantage taken up by the vast majority.
For instance, see Luddites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
I wonder if the game directors had actually made their case beforehand, they would have perhaps been let to keep the award.
That said, the AI restriction itself is hilarious. Almost all games currently being made would have programmers using copilot, would they all be disqualified for it? Where does this arbitrary line start from?
I think that is almost certainly untrue, especially among indie games developers, who are often the most stringent critics of gen ai.
Which LLM told you that?
AI OK: Code
AI Bad: Art, Music.
It's a double standard because people don't think of code as creative. They still think of us as monkeys banging on keyboards.
Fuck 'em. We can replace artists.
It's more like the code is the scaffolding and support, the art and experience is the core product. When you're watching a play you don't generally give a thought to the technical expertise that went into building the stage and the hall and its logistics, you are only there to appreciate the performance itself - even if said performance would have been impossible to deliver without the aforementioned factors.