Hadn’t thought of it that way. Good point. That being said it’s not 100% that since it’s more akin to someone buying a tesla then getting rid of it soon after in this scenario. That or getting it, leaving it in the garage for 2 years having forgotten it exists, then finally getting rid of it once someone points it out. Still somewhat valid though.

Was not aware those two were trained fairly. Sadly I didn’t see anything on what AI tool they used so not sure how that would affect things.

Read the article. I understand.

It’s not an excuse. I just simply don’t support AI slop. AT. ALL. I don’t care that they used it for a placeholder texture. And that texture didn’t end up in final release. If I have anything to say about it, these companies will not get my money if they dipped their toes in AI. AT. ALL.

There are workers that could have made placeholder textures for fucks sake.

They didn’t use it for placeholders (which wouldn’t excuse them anyway, if you want a placeholder you can pay an artist to make it).

They got caught using it in production and came up with the placeholder excuse (which no one who’s ever seen a placeholder texture would fall for) on the spot, throwing the QA team under the bus to try to cover what is clearly a systemic problem with the company.

Considering the backlash, maybe it was silly of them to use it for placeholders.

They didn’t disclose it because there was no AI in the final product. The AI was for placeholder textures, which were replaced by real artists’ work as they were made. Some of the AI textures slipped through the cracks on release day, but a week 1 patch removed all traces of the AI before anyone even realized it was AI.

IMO this looks bad on the awards show, because the final product didn’t have any AI. And the production team was proactive in ensuring it didn’t have any AI before any kind of public backlash ever happened. Once they realized the issue, they issued a patch to fix it on their own, without needing to be pushed into it by public pressure. That’s what a company should do, and it shows that the devs really cared about their game.

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.

that’s how any “AI” being used in proper development environment is, too

Human workers could’ve made background assets.

FUCK AI

I still don’t like it. The models being built on non-consensually scraped artwork has been known from the very start. If they still thought these were ok to use, I don’t really want to get involved with their output…

It’s the same as when any other company quickly replaces the genAI art when busted, “oops we didn’t mean to include it” - then maybe don’t use it in the first place?

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.

It’s not a bubble though. That’s like waiting for the internet bubble to pop back in the 90s. AI will be around from now on, just not as such an in your face way. It will eventually become ubiquitous, just like many other pieces of tech.

Good. Burn both companies to the ground. Set them as an example.

Not quite. Larian also wants to use it for concept art, which is not the same thing as placeholder assets. To give you a bit of context, the standard for placeholder textures at the software development companies I worked so far has mostly been “vaguely fitting images you found on Google”.

I don’t like billion dollar corporations, and I’d be fine to stop and leave that be all the context, but I also don’t like them using technology to manufacture truth while polluting the earth to do it.

So tell your coders to give you a tune up, the damage control algorithm didn’t pan out.

When they understand the context behind this particular case, yes.

Not in general but for this at least? Maybe?

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

I’m not so much talking about machine learning being implemented in the final game, but rather used in the development process.

For example, if I were to attempt a naive implementation of procedurally generated terrains, I imagine I’d use noise functions to create variety (which I wouldn’t consider to be machine learning). However, I would expect that this would end up producing predictable results, so to avoid that, I could try chucking in a bunch of real world terrain data, and that starts getting into machine learning.

A different, less specific example I can imagine a workflow for is reinforcement learning. Like if the developer writes code that effectively says "give me terrain that is [a variety of different parameters], then when the system produces that for them, they go “hmm, not quite. Needs more [thing]”. This iterative process could, of course, be done without any machine learning, if the dev was tuning the parameters themselves at each stage, but it seems plausible to me that it could use machine learning (which would involve tuning model hyperparameters rather than parameters).

You make a good point about procedural generation at runtime, and I agree that this seems unlikely to be viable. However, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t used in the development process though in at least some cases. I’ll give a couple of hypothetical examples using real games, though I emphasise that I do not have grounds to believe that either of these games used machine learning during development, and that this is just a hypothetical pondering.

For instance, in Valheim, maps are procedurally generated. In the meadows biome, you can find raspberry bushes. Another feature of the meadows biome is that it occasionally has large clearings that are devoid of trees, and around the edges of these clearings, there is usually a higher rate of raspberry bushes. When I played, I wondered why this was the case — was it a deliberate design decision, or just an artifact of how the procedural generation works? Through machine learning, it could in theory, be both of these things — the devs could tune the hyperparameters a particular way, and then notice that the output results in raspberry bushes being more likely to occur in clusters on the edge of clearings, which they like. This kind of process would require any machine learning to be running at runtime

Another example game is Deep Rock Galactic. I really like the level generation it uses. The biomes are diverse and interesting, and despite having hundreds of hours in the game, there are very few instances that I can remember seeing the level generation being broken in some way — the vast majority of environments appear plausible and natural, which is impressive given the large number of game objects and terrain. The level generation code that runs each time a new map is generated has a heckton of different parameters and constraints that enable these varied and non-broken levels, and there’s certainly no machine learning being used at runtime here, but I can plausibly imagine machine learning being useful in the development process, for figuring out which parameters and constraints were the most important ones (especially because too many will cause excessive load times for players, so reducing that down would be useful).

Machine learning certainly wouldn’t be necessary in either of these examples, but it could be something that could make certain parts of development easier.

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

I agree with the ethical standpoint of banning Generative AI on the grounds that it’s trained on stolen artist data, but I’m not sure how tenable “trained on stolen artist data” is as a technical definition of what is not acceptable.

For example, if a model were trained exclusively on licensed works and data, would this be permissible? Intuitively, I’d still consider that to be Generative AI (though this might be a moot point, because the one thing I agree with the tech giants on is that it’s impractical to train Generative AI systems on licensed data because of the gargantuan amounts of training data required)

Perhaps it’s foolish of me to even attempt to pin down definitions in this way, but given how tech oligarchs often use terms in slippery and misleading ways, I’ve found it useful to try pin terms down where possible

It has to be more nuanced than “self-published”

It doesn’t need to. Definining it as “self-publishing” is enough.

otherwise everything EA craps out is “indie”.

And because of the above, EA games might very well fit the definition, yes.

This clearly shows that maybe we shouldn’t use “indie” to describe good games (or the lack of it to describe bad ones). It should just be used to define “means of publishing”.

Indie game

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,

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

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.