452
Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage
(insider-gaming.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
452 points (92.5% liked)
Games
44099 readers
449 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Rules
1. Submissions have to be related to games
Video games, tabletop, or otherwise. Posts not related to games will be deleted.
This community is focused on games, of all kinds. Any news item or discussion should be related to gaming in some way.
2. No bigotry or harassment, be civil
No bigotry, hardline stance. Try not to get too heated when entering into a discussion or debate.
We are here to talk and discuss about one of our passions, not fight or be exposed to hate. Posts or responses that are hateful will be deleted to keep the atmosphere good. If repeatedly violated, not only will the comment be deleted but a ban will be handed out as well. We judge each case individually.
3. No excessive self-promotion
Try to keep it to 10% self-promotion / 90% other stuff in your post history.
This is to prevent people from posting for the sole purpose of promoting their own website or social media account.
4. Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
This community is mostly for discussion and news. Remember to search for the thing you're submitting before posting to see if it's already been posted.
We want to keep the quality of posts high. Therefore, memes, funny videos, low-effort posts and reposts are not allowed. We prohibit giveaways because we cannot be sure that the person holding the giveaway will actually do what they promise.
5. Mark Spoilers and NSFW
Make sure to mark your stuff or it may be removed.
No one wants to be spoiled. Therefore, always mark spoilers. Similarly mark NSFW, in case anyone is browsing in a public space or at work.
6. No linking to piracy
Don't share it here, there are other places to find it. Discussion of piracy is fine.
We don't want us moderators or the admins of lemmy.world to get in trouble for linking to piracy. Therefore, any link to piracy will be removed. Discussion of it is of course allowed.
Authorized Regular Threads
Related communities
PM a mod to add your own
Video games
Generic
- !gaming@Lemmy.world: Our sister community, focused on PC and console gaming. Meme are allowed.
- !photomode@feddit.uk: For all your screenshots needs, to share your love for games graphics.
- !vgmusic@lemmy.world: A community to share your love for video games music
Help and suggestions
By platform
By type
- !AutomationGames@lemmy.zip
- !Incremental_Games@incremental.social
- !LifeSimulation@lemmy.world
- !CityBuilders@sh.itjust.works
- !CozyGames@Lemmy.world
- !CRPG@lemmy.world
- !OtomeGames@ani.social
- !Shmups@lemmus.org
- !VisualNovels@ani.social
By games
- !Baldurs_Gate_3@lemmy.world
- !Cities_Skylines@lemmy.world
- !CassetteBeasts@Lemmy.world
- !Fallout@lemmy.world
- !FinalFantasyXIV@lemmy.world
- !Minecraft@Lemmy.world
- !NoMansSky@lemmy.world
- !Palia@Lemmy.world
- !Pokemon@lemm.ee
- !Skyrim@lemmy.world
- !StardewValley@lemm.ee
- !Subnautica2@Lemmy.world
- !WorkersAndResources@lemmy.world
Language specific
- !JeuxVideo@jlai.lu: French
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If 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."
It's highly likely that EVERY video game dev team has at least one person who is using cursor, whether it violates their AI policy or not. It's massively popular, looks just like VSCode, and can be hard to detect.
You don't even need to use cursor. All the major IDEs are including LLMs nowadays to help with code completion and code generation. There's zero chance no gen ai code is in any project that has more than a few people nowadays.
The question is, if having better for-loop completion the same as "create this feature".
Doesn't matter, the rules ban all AI. The rules are stupid.
Edit: I mean the rules are so stupid it probably covers you googling an exception and reading the answer Google provides at the top which is gen ai as if the answer was used to help make the game even if you used nothing from the answer.
Edit: or Sentry even has AI insights into crashes in their default service.
^ The olympic steroids user telling me I can't prove they used steroids.
You can't reliably detect all steroids. The Olympics has a long history of under detecting novel steroids. A lot of sporting competitions below the Olympics level have a tendency to undertest as well and underdetect. You could have a long and successful career as an athlete from doping.
And more to the point, AI usage can be a factor of 100 harder to detect than steroids to a trained eye.
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.
"the truth" being that a few generated placeholder textures were accidentally left in and promptly replaced? crazy
A willingness to play with Sauron's One Ring is a signal that they're not all that bothered about playing with Sauron's One Ring.
Did you know that most domestic abuse cases don't actually start with some guy beating his future wife on their first date? That kind of behavior builds up over time.
A stance that is perfectly relatable in 2025, but not as much when Expedition 33 was in early development.
Why didnt they just buy placeholder textures?
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 by doing the art themselves.
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.
I'm pretty sure sending Emails isnt considered game development.
That Argument is moot though, because they were in fact banned for using AI Art, not some internal spreadsheet or Emails they sent.
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.
https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq
You arent developing a game when you sennd Emails to someone. Same as you're not a developer when you do the finances.
Thats part of the company that arent involved in game development.
Your argument is equal to me claiming piblishers are developers.
They might want to make it more clear for the purposefully ignorant people though.
If you're sending emails related to the development of the game you're developing to other people developing that same game, you're NOT developing the game? What kind of bullshit mental gymnastics is this?
Sending Emails related to development is still not development itself.
If youre washing your gymnastic dress, it's not considered doing gymnastics. You are even allowed to wash them while high. Still wouldn't get you disqualified from the Contest, just when you're actually high while doing gymnastics.
Bad analogy. Communication is part of team development. If you're pitching ideas, redefining requirements or requesting additional assets, you're developing the game...
You're clearly avoiding the spirit of what's being said here, but I don't mind biting the bullet anyway: Coworkers should not be using AI in their emails, either. Main reason being it's obnoxious and makes you look illiterate.
I'm not avoiding the spirit at all. I'm pointing out the ridiculousness of the no-AI-at-all brigrade slapping the AI label on a game that "uses AI during it's development even if it's not in the end product", because it would absolutely count this exact scenario.
Sure, man.
What about AI based autocomplete in an IDE, would that disqualify a game from this specific award?
Would you consider it your own code or Code that was generated by AI?
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?
This is a "no." If you can't just say yes, that's a no, buddy.
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.
Plagiarism covers this.
Are you claiming you wrote the template? I think plagiarism might cover that.
Absolutely not.
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?
C'mon, man. Don't lie.
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.
Then most just won't go on the Game Awards, and devs will go on using Cursor or whatever they feel comfortable with in their IDE setup.
I’m all against AI slop, but you’re setting an unreasonably absolute standard. It’s like saying “I will never use any game that was developed in proximity to any closed source software.” That is possible, technically, but most people aren’t gonna do that. It’s basically impossible on a larger team. Give them some slack with the requirement; it’s okay to develop on Windows or on Steam, just open the game’s source.
Similarly, let devs use basic tools. Ban slop from the end product.
Cool, dont accept awards then. Its not the be all and end all.
Awards like these are inherently subjective. You don't have to draw an objective line anywhere.
By this logic you could also ban Photoshop, tablets and any other software or hardware tool that has improved accessibility and workflow over the years.
AI is a tool, flat out banning it won't and can't work. It's too fucking useful.
People said that anyone who used Photoshop wasn't a real artist, people said computer graphics weren't real art.
At some point you DO have to draw an arbitrary line. Because that's all. Art is arbitrary all of it since the dawn of mankind making art. It's all arbitrary. If you only make hard lines that completely block tools, all you're doing is harming artists.
The entire point of drawing arbitrary lines is to allow for artists to keep making art. Why dissuading people from abusing others.
So do you want no one to be able to do anything or do you want things to actually have artistic expression which is arbitrary.
Ai has plenty of great usage in game development, generating LOD textures, random dirt or rock textures, creating automated systems of pallet replacements. There's plenty of tools that can cut down huge amounts of repetitive workload, so small teams can actually spend their limited resources on actual art that has direct major impact on their vision without wasting huge chunks of time and money on low end. Small parts that realistically wouldn't have had any artists hired or any actual real impact on the experience of those who consume the work, but would have huge negative impacts on those making it.
Just because companies abuse a tool does not make a tool bad. Every artistic tool throughout all of human history has been abused by someone to hurt others. Photography, movies, Photoshop, paints. You name it. It's been used and abused to hurt artists and every time artists adapt bring the new tool on to create new forms of expression. Even if that expression is too rebel against the tool.
You cannot ban a tool no matter what. You only cause more problems becoming worse than those who abuse the tools.
My arbitrary line is that AI is cringe.
No, that's not the same thing in the slightest.
I'd have no problem with the show that seems to want the awards be taken seriously remove all or most bigger projects.