The gaming world appeared ablaze after the Indie Game Awards announced that it was rescinding the top honors awarded to RPG darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 due to the use of generative AI during development. Sandfall Interactive recently sat down with a group of influencers for a private interview session, where the French studio was probed about recent AI controversies. Game director Guillaume Broche clarified some of the misinformation surrounding the studio and reiterated what other Sandfall developers have said about generative AI usage during interviews held earlier in the year.
Transcription of the Q&A comes courtesy of gaming content creator Sushi, who was one of the handful of influencers who were present at the session. Twitch streamer crizco prefaced his question by recounting the storm surrounding Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios’ admission about using generative AI during game development.
Except that they used the placeholder AI textures so that they would have a functional build to test on. They didn’t just try it and decide it didn’t work. They literally used it produce part of the rough draft and even shipped the game with some of those placeholder textures accidentally still in there. It was actively used in this instance to “do work”.
It wasn’t “well let me see what this looks like… No that’s all wrong… Nevermind”. It was “well let’s get this AI to make some placeholders so we can continue working on this and we’ll slap the real textures in later”. Literally removing work from a human(concept artist), which is the complaint of anti-AI people. Funny enough, I’m pro-AI and even I’m agreeing with the anti-AI people here. You want a “no AI was used” award? Then don’t ever use AI. Simple.
That’s not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person’s job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.
We’re not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.
I don’t know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I’m willing to bet we’re talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn’t exactly damning
It’s not really “removing” work from a human, it’s utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn’t replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.