Tony BarkIndie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
brucethemooseSeems excessive.
There’s AI slop games, the new breed of lazy asset flips. There’s replacing employees with slop machines.
And then there’s “a few of our textures were computer generated.” In a game that is clearly passionately crafted art.
I get it’s about principle, but still.
Also what about AI code tools? Like if they use cursor to help write some code does that disqualify them?
seathruIf you do that and proceed to say “No we didn’t use any AI tools”. Then yes, that should be a disqualification.
“When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.”
That’s fair.
But the Game Awards should reconsider that label next year. The connotation is clearly “AI Slop,” and that just doesn’t fit for stuff like cursor code completion, or the few textures E33 used.
Otherwise studios are just going to lie. If they don’t, GA will be completely devoid of bigger projects.
…I don’t know what the threshold for an “AI Slop” game should be through. It’s clearly not E33. But you don’t want a sloppy, heavily marketed game worming its way in, either.
You have to draw the line somewhere, saying any game cant use AI is much simpler than an arbitrary definition of what slop is. Also means we reward real artistry everytime.
Then you’re going to get almost no games.
Or just get devs lying about using cursor or whatever when they code.
If that’s the culture of the Game Awards, if they have to lie just to get on, that… doesn’t seem healthy.
How have we all forgotten that games were made perfectly fine for decades without AI? Better games even.
I'd rather give an award to a "worse" game that didnt use AI, than to a game that did.
Devs can lie, but the truth always comes out eventually.
Games were made by a single person not sleeping for a week.
But people expect more now and one person can’t do it fueled just by passion. The other people want to get paid now, not when the game is released.
Limiting the tools people can use to make games is ableist, elitist and just stupid.
Theyre not limiting their tools, they’re limiting some awards they could win when they created real art.
No no. The rules didn’t say “art” it was ALL AI use for the whole duration of the project. Planning, emails, research everything.
Not a single drop of AI is allowed.
This time yes. But the rule ban any and all AI use during development. It doesn’t matter if it’s in the final product or not.
Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
You arent developing a game when you sennd Emails to someone. Same as you’re not a developer when you do the finances.
What about AI based autocomplete in an IDE, would that disqualify a game from this specific award?
It’s a weird gray area. Nobody really knows where the limit is. The current consensus is that for a fact the “AI” can’t own a copyright to anything.
How smart can an autocomplete be before it takes away your copyright? Does using snippets count? How smart can the snippet engine be at filling the template?
If I ask AI how to solve something but write the exact same code myself, is it mine?
It If I grab code from stack overflow, does it make it mine?
It’s a weird gray area. Nobody really knows where the limit is.
This is a “no.” If you can’t just say yes, that’s a no, buddy.
If I ask AI how to solve something but write the exact same code myself, is it mine?
You know, colleges figured this one out: it’s called “plagiarism.”
It’s not me saying it, it’s the lawyers. The jury is quite literally out own where the copyright lies on AI generated content. The only definite verdict has been that the AI itself isn’t it.
But whether it’s the one who created the model, prompted the model or the ones whose data was used to teach the model 🤷🏻♂️ Wibbly wobbly timey wimey
I get regular briefings about this at work, because we have really good lawyers who actually read contracts of the services we use. And have banned multiple ones due to … creative copyright clauses in their contracts.
As for your “generated code is plagiarism” argument, do you have any precedents on that because I’d be interested in reading the verdicts? If true it’s a massive game changer for many industries and open so fucking many companies to lawsuits.
Mate, you were asked if code that was written for you was in fact your code and you’re talking about copyright. You’re off in the woods. You are so deep in the poisonous bog, I don’t think it’s possible to pull you out.
I think you get regular briefings at work on how to be, like, a business narcissist. Much like Tommy Tallarico, the inventor of music in video games.
But what is “my code”?
If I solve a problem but it turns out later I had read a solution to this problem somewhere and inadvertently copied it. Is it my code?
If I use a Jetbrains provided built in template for a function and just fill in the variables, is it my code?
What if I just accept it as is, still my code?
If I copy a solution verbatim from Stack Overflow or a book, is it my code?
If I iplement a well known algorithm, is it my code if it looks exactly the same as a billion other implementations of the same thing? Can you tell whether I wrote it or just copied someone elses code?
What if Intellisense autocompletes a full function, is it my code?
What if the autocomplete is powered by a LLM, is it my code?
Can anything except a full clean-room implementation on a computer with no internet access be “my code”?
Please tell me, as you seem to have this thing nailed down. I work with this stuff every day and I’m mostly in the dark about where the line between “my code” and “too much autogenerated, no copyright or even copyright ifringement” goes.
… but it turns out later I had read a solution to this problem somewhere and inadvertently copied it.
Plagiarism covers this.
If I use a Jetbrains provided built in template …
Are you claiming you wrote the template? I think plagiarism might cover that.
What if I just accept it as is, still my code?
Absolutely not.
If I copy a solution verbatim from Stack Overflow or a book,
If you… saw a solution somewhere. And then you copied it letter for letter. And then you told people, “this is mine, I wrote this,” … is that plagiarism?
This is for sure a difficult one, super hard, but I will give you a chance to think about it. It’s good to consider all the possibilities.
So it’s plagiarism all the way down? All software ever is uncopyrightable?
I’m going to be a little less mean considering some things I’ve seen you say elsewhere.
What I’m talking about here is attribution. Colleges have their own system, I don’t believe that it’s law, for identifying and dealing with plagiarism, and that’s because where an idea came from is very important to academia. Something that trips a lot of people up because they tend to think of plagiarism as thought-stealing from other people: you can be found to have plagiarized your own work from years prior. You have to call out where your information comes from.
Software, even though chunks of code are copywrightable, as a culture, does not care about this nearly as much. Are you stealing if you borrow something from stack overflow? In a way, yeah, kinda. But nobody cares. Lawyers do care about the selected licenses on libraries and github pages, though.
But this is where talking exclusively about copywright gets in the way: if a coworker of mine borrowed a solution from a free-as-in-libre github repository, that would be fine. And the law wouldn’t care. But if they then said, “I wrote this,” maybe because they’re anxious about proving to their manager that they’re worth keeping around, I would think that was really fucking weird of them.
Attribution is not strictly a legal concept. It may or may not be possible to get my coworker there in legal trouble, but that’s really besides the point, I think they’re being anti-social. The dishonesty about where those ideas came from make me nervous about continuing to associate with them at all.
So if you ever copied an answer from Stack Overflow, you always put full attribution to that segment of code giving full credit to whoever wrote it?
I’m going to go back to being mean to you if you’re just going to rules-lawyer carve a path toward your AI special interest.
Secondly, I don’t copy answers from Stack Overflow. I have skill. It’s beneath me.
I have zero special interest in AI, what pisses me off are weird vague rules.
If all copied code ever is plagiarism and must be reported, the whole world would grind to a halt as we need to lawyer up and rewrite everything with verified clean room protocols.
There are finite ways to solve problems with code, how can anyone prove a piece of code is actually written by them and not AI generated or copied from SO or a blog if they all look the same? There is no audit trail, nobody recorded their coding sessions with cryptographic signatures to prevent tampering.
What I’m getting at here is the complete impossibility of proving a piece of code is man-made and not plagiarised, copied or otherwise generated.
And if it’s impossible to prove something is man-made without a doubt, why have vague rules against code that is not?
I have zero special interest in AI
C’mon, man. Don’t lie.
There are finite ways to solve problems with code, how can anyone prove a piece of code is actually written by them …
You and I are going to end up reinventing the US patent system, and while cool, I just do not have time for it. I have way too many autumn leaves to blow into my neighbor’s yard.