Describing something so incredibly poorly, that it can be used to describe computing as a whole, only to avoid needing to take a moral stance is strange.

Is this actually a problem? Is there anybody actually arguing against line smoothing algorithms?

Yeah I'm fine with replacing generic stuff with generic AI stuff. Or cutting out the boring part, nobody needs to spend hours manually lip-syncing character or generating thousands of intermediate movement animation steps.

They are also against it because they believe it will compete with them and they will get paid less.

I wish we could just land on a remedy for this, specifically. "Everyone who'd ever posted to deviantArt, ArtStation, etc., before they were scraped gets a dividend in perpetuity." And force MANGAF to pay. Finally, a way for their outsize profits to flow to the people who've been getting the shit end of the compensation stick since online art platforms and social media became a thing.

It'll never happen because the grift is the point.

Except it uses existing art transformatively, which means that even under our absurd, dystopian IP laws, it’s not exploitation. There isn’t a single artist out there who wouldn’t be running afoul of copyright law if that wasn’t the case.

It’s been insane to me to watch the “creative class”, long styled as the renegade and anti-authoritarian heart of society, transform into hardline IP law cheerleaders overnight as soon as generative law burst onto the scene.

And the environmental concerns are equally disingenuous, particularly coming from the video game industry. Please explain to me how running a bunch of GPUs in a data center to serve peoples LLM requests is significantly more wasteful than distributing those GPUs among the population and running people’s video games?

At the end of the day, the only coherent criticism of AI is that it stands to eliminate the livelihood of a large number of people, which is perfectly valid concern. But that’s not a flaw of AI, it’s a flaw of the IP laws and capitalistic system we have created. That is what needs addressing. Trying to uphold that system by stifling AI as a technology is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

That should be the crux of the issue, and stated plainly.

This is just another scheme where those at the top are appropriating the labor of many to enrich themselves. This will have so many negative consequences that I don't think any reactions against it are excessive.

It is irrelevant whether AI has "soul" or not. It literally does not matter, and it is a bad argument that dillutes what is really going on.

There is still human intentionality in picking an AI generated resource for surface texture, landscape, concept art, whatever. Doubly so if it is someone that create art themselves using it.

The creatives that are the loudest voices against AI for art asset generation in my experience are technically competent but lacking any real pizzazz or uniqueness that would set them apart from generated art, so they feel extremely threatened.

There's also been an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the major entertainment industry players to get creatives to come out against AI vocally. I'd like to see what percentage of those artists made the statement to try and curry favor with the money suits.

> representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Even if all the AI-generated content had been replaced before release, this would still be a lie.

It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product.

Adding to that: 'it was a placeholder' has been used to excuse direct (flagrant) plagiarism from other sources, such as what happened with Bungie and their game Marathon

Shouldn't there be an argument for best effort? If the issue has been removed as soon as it has been detected, doesn't it count for something?

Because they can most likely prove the actual assets were on their version control years ago but weren’t applied to the models.

Vibe coded games definitely seem like a lot more of an issue in my books than a few minor textures having been generated.

That is not the sort of thing people are referring to when they use the term “generative AI”. It’s basically a completely different technology and the ethical concerns around data sourcing and energy usage are not the same at all.

> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.

Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist.

I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift it off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.

> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.

True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.

> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist

Realistically, no.

> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.

This argument in this industry is problematic. The entire purpose of computers is to automate processes that are labor intensive. Along the way, the automation process went from doing what was literally impossible with human labor to capturing ever deeper levels of skill of the practitioners. Contrast early computer graphics, which involved intensive human intervention, to modern tools. Since HN almost certainly has more developers than graphics artists, contrast early computer programming (where programmers didn't even have the assistance of assemblers and where they needed a deep knowledge of the computer architecture) to modern computer programming (high level languages, with libraries abstracting away most of the algorithmic complexity).

I don't know what the future of indie development looks like. In a way, indie development that uses third-party tools that captures the skills of developers and graphics artists traditionally found in major studios doesn't feel very indie. On the other hand, they are already doing that through the use of game engines and graphics design/modelling software. But I do know that a segment of the industry that utterly ignores those tools will be quickly left behind.

It's bad because it takes someone's job? However, that job was mundane petty work that seniors didn't want to bother with. Were cars terrible for taking all of those stableboy jobs? Is Excel or data engineering terrible for the obliteration of data entry and low level bookkeeping jobs? Or is it not just a slippery slope argument, when what's happening is IMO evolution of tech? IMO People will adapt. While it's up to any event organizers to decide their rules, AI witch-hunts are a Luddite response. AI/LLM can be major tools in the belt of indies to dethrone AAA. I'd like to be clear that I'm arguing in favor of tooling such as the example of placeholder usage and a pipeline to remove it. I wouldn't defend a scumbag leveraging AI to ripoff another game, artist, or dev. It just seems like the lines are being blurred to justify AI witchhunts.

The game industry, especially AAA, is actually having major identity crisis right now as technology evolves and jobs adapt around the new tool of AI/LLMs. The game awards (not indie) should demonstrate this dolphin committee you fear already exists because the limiting factor in all industries are major resources: time, capital, experience. AI/LLMs will enable far more high skill work to be accomplished with less experience, time, and possibly capital (sidestepping ethics/practicality of data centers).