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Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
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this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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People are saying "it's fine because it was used in the early stages of the game for placeholder art" but that's kind of missing the point
The problem is that they used AI and didn't disclose it, as well as releasing the game with AI textures still in it. Yes, these textures were quickly replaced, but it's still very concerning they weren't upfront on how they were using it in the game making process
Edit: there isn't even a disclosure on their steam page
I'm OK with that tbh. If we normalise disclosures for any use of AI, ever, the some AI vibe-code slop gets declared the same way as a meticulously crafted game (but the devs used AI for research/brainstorming), or even 'devs used Google and they may have been inspired by the search AI' etc
I think AI as a tech is pretty cool. I think using AI is less cool, since it is using far more resources than we can afford to give it, so I avoid using AI at all, even if I think the tech itself is morally neutral.
And I think the way we're using AI is horrifying. Not just how companies push it, but the common use, too. People are outsourcing their thinking and comprehension to AI, and their own personal development is stagnating. This is particularly terrifying in children and college students. Would I rather have a doctor/social worker/financial advisor that gained a degree through AI and couldn't adapt to real world exceptions? Or none at all? Hmm.
I think there is a space for devs to use AI and not have it undermine what they're doing, is what I mean. And so I don't want to label those people the same as the ones who'll get AI to do everything. Otherwise, with how much AI is used on our behalf even without consent, the AI label will become the norm... at which point, it ceases to mean anything.
People want to know if AI was used at all. No matter which part of the process its used in, its replacing human labor. You could argue that AI generated art will have an impact on the human-created art that replaces it as well.
I would rather Steam tag games as AI and then the game can add a section in the description explaining exactly how it was used. You can decide if they were ethical about it or not at that point.
I don't exactly disagree, it's just that bad faith AI games will inevitably use this possible interpretation to excuse using AI much more extensively. If you want to flag AI use for like... googling stuff, then we should differentiate it from those who use AI assets in their final product.
I dunno…
If I make a mock up of a cake using toxic ingredients, then throw that out and make my cake from scratch using food safe ingredients, do I need to disclose that “toxic material was used when making this cake”? I don’t think so.
Of course this kinda falls apart when they shipped with quickly replaced textures. But I also wouldn’t expect them to disclose the game as unfinished if they forgot to replace blank textures with the proper assets until just after release.
If you're applying for an award that asks "were toxic ingredients used at any point while making this cake" because part of the culture of the award is not using toxic ingredients, then yeah, you need to disclose that you used toxic ingredients.
This is less like making a new cake from scratch after disposing of the previous one, and more like making a new cake using the same unwashed cake tin and utensils
No matter what, the AI replacements would have affected how the artists made the final products as, whether they liked it or not, they had a point of reference in the form of the AI texture
Not necessarily. If I use an anthropomorphic cat as an asset for a character who in the end is a robot, can you really say it took inspiration?
Granted, I haven’t seen any of the assets. But placeholders aren’t inherently inspiration. They can easily just be random things to look at before proper assets are made.
And even if they did take inspiration, that isn’t the complaint. Would there be a need to disclose if they used a generative AI to generate a picture, and they used that as inspiration? What if they saw an gen AI image someone else posted and used that as inspiration? Inspiration isn’t the problem, it’s the “use of AI in development” which seems silly when these could have potentially been wire frames and result in the exact same final product.
And yet, as we seem to be skirting around my original point of, this wasn't disclosed when sold
I'm against AI in video games, but what I dislike here is the action of deceit. Of not allowing buyers to make an informed choice
It's is still their own artistic sensibility that made the art, not the AI. You will always be inspired by other things while doing anything requiring creativity.
Would being inspired by Picasso suddenly make one art worthless? Of course not. So why would being inspired by an AI generated example make it any different ?
To compare using AI to getting inspired by Picasso is wild
They want to argue for AI, they just don't know how. Says it all.
It'd be on brand then - if they asked AI to write out an argument for them, they'd take credit for the whole essay & if found out, they'd claim it was what they wanted to convey anyway
The argument for it boils to "im lazy". Which is why they are struggling to come up with anything else that justifies the negatives.
I said "being inspired by", not "using". There is a difference.
At the end of the day, this is just an award. It’s not up to the award giver to define and micromanage what a “safe and acceptable, or appropriate amount of gen AI” can be used in the dev process.
When competing against other titles that haven’t, regardless of how it was used, an award show is going to draw a very hard line.
I’m sure they didn’t have to go the route of using gen AI, but they chose it, and did not disclose it.
It is fine, and why should there be a disclosure when it's not in the final product? Why would anyone real care? How does it affect anything?
Did you actually read the thing you replied to? They shipped the game with the AI placeholders, I know I saw them on the final product
They later patched them after people pointed it out
Yes, a few textures. And how is that different from a procedural texture, also made by computer algorithms? And seriously, who gives a fuck if some brick texture is not handmade? What about textures made with photos? Are those handmade?
If no one cares, why didn't they disclose they used AI?
What a nothing burger of an argument, keep moving the goalpost brochacho you don't even know which textures we are talking about
Photos are taken by people, procedural textures are made from algorithms made by people. AI generated textures are made using models fed with stolen work made by people, and don't even get me started on the energy consumption on every step of the way.
Notice the difference?
But seriously, why do you give a fuck about the topic if you are just going to dismiss everything?
Maybe because all AI generated assets got removed?
Honestly, as a programmer that uses extensively AI to debug, and do various tedious tasks like unit tests, I think the whole anti-AI craze of late is more bullshit than sane arguments.
It's an invaluable tool for many cases, and as soon is it is not used to replace someone, I don't see the problem. They where used by artists, to be used as placeholders while working on the gme, not by executives seeking to make some more bucks by not hiring anyone.
They forgot some of them in the final game? Shit happens. You cannot expect someone to go through every single texture in a game that probably got thousands, if not tenths of thousands, just to make sure none was forgotten.
Anyway, that's blown way out of propositions, and feels more like some people trying to get views by hating on something popular than having real concerns about it. Especially since Blue Prince does use AI assets in the final product, and strangely no one bats an eye.
This entire comment is baffling to me, in all honesty
Not before being unknowingly sold to the public
My problem with AI is its heavy usage of plagiarism and vast degree of power consumption, as well as the price hikes its caused for many computer parts
Whenever anything is attempting to make money, it should be put under the highest scrutiny. It does not matter who's pushing it. Similarly, I find it odd that we're assuming the inner workings of Clair Obscur's workplace
If you replaced AI here with anything defamatory, like pictures of penises placed by an enraged employee after being fired, then even having a few would be devastating on sales. The single fact that we're okay with a few means that, over time, that bar will likely be pushed further down the road "oh, it's just this one character that practically never shows up" "oh, it's just the skyboxes, they're basically not noticeable anyway" "who cares if the early access uses AI voices? They'll be replaced eventually!"
I assure you, AI is not popular. Studies have shown that AI is causing people more concern than excitement Not the most reputable source, but oh well
No it didn't
But guess what did? The Alters
Well, if that was truly forgotten in the game at release, and removed once discovered, I don't see any problem. The textures that are used now are 100% hand made by actual artist, to my knowledge.
I entirely agree with you there.
The plagiarism problem is in my opinion partly resolved by open datasets (OpenOrca, and the like), which means the user has the possibility of choosing to not rely on plagiarism. Problem is that the models trained with those dataset are rarely available on public platform, which is another reason why I use my own infrastructure.
Personally I use Mistal-7B-OpenOrca on a locally run Ollama, which reside in my homelab.
The power consumption is a problem, and the reason why I use my own dedicated hardware for anything related to AI (which has also the advantage of heating my home a little bit, so nothing is lost 😆).
I even invested in a laptop with dedicated AI hardware to be able to make it as efficient as possible. And of course got hit by the AI taxe, albeit I was lucky to get 32Go DDR5 at only twice the usual rate instead of five time the usual rate as it is currently the case.
You are partly right. But when machine replaced some of the human hard labor in industry, we welcomed it. Who would want to make a car with a hammer when an hydraulic press is available? AI is a tool that should be used to ease the burden of doing repetitive small task in order to focus on what's one want to do. Can I blame someone for using placeholder texture, being AI or from an asset store, instead of spending days making the rocks look just right when you aren't even sure the project will ever be funded?
But I don't think they the the kind of guys to seek wealth or fame. They put their energy in a project they believed in, can we blame them to have used the tools they had in hand to try making the most of their limited budget ?
You'd be surprised how often it happen for former angry employees to do that. We even had example in some Disney, with very explicit scenes even going all the way to customers.
I never said that they where OK with it, just that no one can be expected to check every little texture without being expected to miss some of them. Human are prone to fatigue, and I saw many bugs going in production due to such errors of judgement.
As for using AI during early access, IMO it depends on the size of the project. And one man project ? Totally fine, even after launch. A full 400 men project from a big publisher? Not so much, they have to mean to do it by hand. Especially considering how expensive they sell it afterward.
Clair Obscur being a mostly 30 men project (plus some occasional extras), I, personally, don't see AI usage as a problem as soon as it is sparsely used.
I'm speaking about Clair Obscur, not AI. Don't you feel surprised that as soon as they get a big boost from the game award, you see people left and right creating dramas for whatever reason they find? Some forgotten AI texture in the final game? Really?
My apology for jumping on that bandwagon. I'm unfortunately not totally immune to that either 😅
On the other hand, IGA did forbid AI on the whole project pipeline, and if I find it a bit overblown, it is their choice, and I'll respect that.
What baffles me is all the hate Clair Obscur got because of that. The vast majority was made by hand, and the game is good. If the story was AI gen, or the music, I'd agree, but a fucking texture? In which way would it suddenly make a multiple year project shit like some pretends?
The problem was that it was sold to consumers at all without consent. You don't get off scot free when you accidently leave some cocaine for the inlaws to find. There was malicious intent just by not disclosing its usage
You bring this up and imply we're agreeing here, but I find it odd that you immediately backtrack and say that AI usage in general, not OpenOrca usage, is a-okay. It's entirely irrelevant what AI tool you use if this company didn't
Yes. A placeholder texture should be made to be obvious that it's a placeholder. As soon as it doesn't do that, it's failed at its job. By using AI like this, you're effectively making the QA's job 10 times harder, as now they have to stare at every texture to make sure it's not AI generated
Yes. Because information came out on a large platform that allowed more people to hear about it compared to when it was initially released.
I actually played through Clair Obscur about two months ago and gave it a very hearty review on steam, but as soon as I heard that they used AI without disclosing it that changed into a very charged negative thumbs down. It's very easy to pretend that people just hate things because they're popular, you see it all the time with youtubers and movies after all. Unfortunately, there's usually a very good reason that irks these people
You seem to have missed my main point, and it's not just here, either. You eluded to this frame of mind multiple times when writing these past two comments. My entire argument is that it was incredibly scummy to not disclose the usage of AI, robbing the buyer of any agency in the matter
Me responding to your other points is really just entertaining their idea, rather than engaging in a thoughtful discussion, as the only response you had for this main point was mainly along the lines of the above quote I'm responding to, which is really just moving goalposts
By acting like it doesn't matter because everything else is good, you're kind of weirdly conceding the point, as if it didn't matter if they did it, then why shouldn't they disclose it?