Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched with what some suspected to be AI-generated textures that, as it clarified to El País, were then replaced with custom assets in a swift patch five days after release.
Fuck using Gen AI to replace human-made art, and fair enough for pulling the award, but I do think it’s worth making it clear exactly how much of the art is/was AI. And the answer is, very little at launch and none currently.
AI wasn’t used to “replace human-made art”, though.
To me it sounds like the team needed generic textures in big batches, and instead of spending precious designer time on hand crafting them, AI was utilised to allow the designers to focus on actual art they enjoy. I’m a software engineer, not a designer, but if I were given the option to write 8000 classes that are almost the same, or write 5 classes that will take the same effort as the 8000, but actually require using my creative skills… I’d choose the latter, and offload the 8000 boilerplates to AI.
The fact that it was replaced with human made art so quickly suggests that the AI generated ones were meant to be placeholders only anyway.
That’s exactly the takeaway I got from it as well.
It seems most likely that those were placeholders that were supposed to be replaced before release but were missed. Once they realized that some were missing, they got them replaced and pushed the update.
GenAI being used for placeholder stuff is arguably the perfect use case, especially for small studios without massive art teams.
But, why for placeholders that aren’t meant for anything? No one will ever see these (intentionally).
I’m very anti AI in games for art but this feels like an arbitrary line in the sand for “support artists”. This feels like the stupid busywork that AI can alleviate. If there’s a large market for placeholder stuff maybe but most of the stuff in stores you’re paying to ship in production normally.
Why purchase stock things that may not be the dimensions you need or need tweaking to make work when you can just have something craft a placeholder?
Why go through the effort of AI then for them? It’s the same amount of work, well less even, you’ll get a full pack of textures at different resolutions with UV maps and all, versus AI where you then have to check it and potentially do more.
It says it all, when purchasing a texture is now “stupid busywork”. You literally type in what you want, get hundreds of results, buy one, put in the game. They used UE5, Epic Games have Fab and it’s integrated into the engine, they even give away lots of free assets there (granted that is probably going to fill with AI slop soon). There’s loads of other options out there too.
This argument of “its placeholder textures” is null.
The major rub of Gen AI art is profiting off of others work. If you’re never displaying it and don’t ever want it shown then who cares?
I don’t know the red tape around them purchasing packs. They also may not have wanted to do that if they wanted to check for a specific aesthetic. I don’t know and quite frankly I don’t think this is the hill to die on for Gen AI usage.
I’d rather fight the slop or production use of it vs stuff that will never see the light of day.
The major rub of Gen AI art is profiting off of others work. If you’re never displaying it and don’t ever want it shown then who cares?
This doesnt even make sense, you just answered your own question. The major rub is exactly why we care.
There’s no red tape. From the site I provided, the license allows them to use it privately or commercially.
It’s placeholder and from all the options out there they could have found something.
There’s also all the environmental problems with AI.
No. Instead of making designers work on Brick Texture #7298, they allowed them to work on actually interesting design bits while the necessary textures were placeholdered by AI.
Also, stolen art… The same argument comes up here as with piracy. If I take something you created, BUT you’re not deprived of said thing, then it’s not theft. It is a breach of licence but not theft.
I do agree that some genAI models have very questionable copyrighting issues due to source dataset usage, but, just by creating a model you haven’t deprived anyone of ownership of their property. You haven’t actually done any financial damage to them.
So please stop overblowing the issue and instead begin by pushing for support of artists’ rights to decide if their art can be used by third parties for the purpose of AI training, which is the core issue here. And even go and push for artists’ rights to reserve their art’s training data usage to themselves, thus allowing artists to create their own specialised models with their own style that they can use to offer cheaper art, or even license the use of the model out for money, thereby allowing artists to directly benefit from AI instead of being fervently against it.
You’re also forgetting that most companies like Sandfall Interactive, that work on a budget, have their own designers so they don’t just shop around for artists, even without AI. But without AI it would’ve meant that those hundreds of brick etc. textured would’ve gotten a placeholder that was unsightly. See e.g. Valve’s Source Engine pink-black checkerboard placeholder. Would you have preferred that?
Did you even read my short comment? They can buy a brick texture from one of many marketplaces. Giving an artist money directly. Instead of giving money to use stolen assets. So that argument doesnt hold up.
Why are you being obtuse? If the in-house designers didn’t want to make some placeholder textures, they could have used a marketplace instead of AI. Are you just going to keep going in circles?
No company with an in-house design team will start trawling marketplaces to spend money on PLACEHOLDERS.
And it’s not like the designers “didn’t want” to make the textures, you donut - it’s that resources need to be allocated, and making minor textures falls on very tail end of the priority list.
At which point they probably had one designer generate the needed placeholders using AI, to ensure they’re good enough for placeholders, and called it a day.
I’ll ask you one better - why are you trying to force companies to go out of their way to spend money? When digital design tools hit the market, would you have been standing in line telling companies to instead hire out actual manual art instead of working with digital tools, if they didn’t have the required in-house resources?
Also based on development timelines, these couple of textures were likely from the DallE-Mini era, long before anyone was even talking about ethical concerns with the tech and before fuckass Altman was a known name.
There’s another article going around where they say they use a “little bit” of AI but they’re very obviously referring to Unreal tools and regular old machine learning.
This whole thing is dramatically overblown. Absolutely fuck genAI and every data center should be bulldozed over. But this is a huge case over literally nothing.
E33 should be disqualified for all these awards for not being an indie game (the devs themselves have called it “AA” if I recall, and they had a sizeable budget to burn). Should genAI be tolerated in any part of the development process? Absolutely not. Should a game and studio be completely brought down because of 2022-ish placeholders from before the ethical issues of the tech were common knowledge, which were also quickly patched out in less than a week? Absolutely not.
Fuck using Gen AI to replace human-made art, and fair enough for pulling the award, but I do think it’s worth making it clear exactly how much of the art is/was AI. And the answer is, very little at launch and none currently.
AI wasn’t used to “replace human-made art”, though.
To me it sounds like the team needed generic textures in big batches, and instead of spending precious designer time on hand crafting them, AI was utilised to allow the designers to focus on actual art they enjoy. I’m a software engineer, not a designer, but if I were given the option to write 8000 classes that are almost the same, or write 5 classes that will take the same effort as the 8000, but actually require using my creative skills… I’d choose the latter, and offload the 8000 boilerplates to AI.
The fact that it was replaced with human made art so quickly suggests that the AI generated ones were meant to be placeholders only anyway.
That’s exactly the takeaway I got from it as well.
It seems most likely that those were placeholders that were supposed to be replaced before release but were missed. Once they realized that some were missing, they got them replaced and pushed the update.
GenAI being used for placeholder stuff is arguably the perfect use case, especially for small studios without massive art teams.
So instead of buying the textures they didnt want to create, they paid for AI to generate derived versions from stolen art??
Whats the point? Just give the artists the money directly.
But these aren’t textures that are intended for use. They’re filler for development purposes.
It’s like putting a gray box in and fixing it later or putting a TODO in code.
Yes, so they can buy some cheap marketplace textures instead of paying to use stolen content. What are we not understanding here?
But, why for placeholders that aren’t meant for anything? No one will ever see these (intentionally).
I’m very anti AI in games for art but this feels like an arbitrary line in the sand for “support artists”. This feels like the stupid busywork that AI can alleviate. If there’s a large market for placeholder stuff maybe but most of the stuff in stores you’re paying to ship in production normally.
Why purchase stock things that may not be the dimensions you need or need tweaking to make work when you can just have something craft a placeholder?
Why go through the effort of AI then for them? It’s the same amount of work, well less even, you’ll get a full pack of textures at different resolutions with UV maps and all, versus AI where you then have to check it and potentially do more.
It says it all, when purchasing a texture is now “stupid busywork”. You literally type in what you want, get hundreds of results, buy one, put in the game. They used UE5, Epic Games have Fab and it’s integrated into the engine, they even give away lots of free assets there (granted that is probably going to fill with AI slop soon). There’s loads of other options out there too.
This argument of “its placeholder textures” is null.
How is the argument null?
The major rub of Gen AI art is profiting off of others work. If you’re never displaying it and don’t ever want it shown then who cares?
I don’t know the red tape around them purchasing packs. They also may not have wanted to do that if they wanted to check for a specific aesthetic. I don’t know and quite frankly I don’t think this is the hill to die on for Gen AI usage.
I’d rather fight the slop or production use of it vs stuff that will never see the light of day.
This doesnt even make sense, you just answered your own question. The major rub is exactly why we care.
There’s no red tape. From the site I provided, the license allows them to use it privately or commercially. It’s placeholder and from all the options out there they could have found something.
There’s also all the environmental problems with AI.
No. Instead of making designers work on Brick Texture #7298, they allowed them to work on actually interesting design bits while the necessary textures were placeholdered by AI.
Also, stolen art… The same argument comes up here as with piracy. If I take something you created, BUT you’re not deprived of said thing, then it’s not theft. It is a breach of licence but not theft.
I do agree that some genAI models have very questionable copyrighting issues due to source dataset usage, but, just by creating a model you haven’t deprived anyone of ownership of their property. You haven’t actually done any financial damage to them.
So please stop overblowing the issue and instead begin by pushing for support of artists’ rights to decide if their art can be used by third parties for the purpose of AI training, which is the core issue here. And even go and push for artists’ rights to reserve their art’s training data usage to themselves, thus allowing artists to create their own specialised models with their own style that they can use to offer cheaper art, or even license the use of the model out for money, thereby allowing artists to directly benefit from AI instead of being fervently against it.
You’re also forgetting that most companies like Sandfall Interactive, that work on a budget, have their own designers so they don’t just shop around for artists, even without AI. But without AI it would’ve meant that those hundreds of brick etc. textured would’ve gotten a placeholder that was unsightly. See e.g. Valve’s Source Engine pink-black checkerboard placeholder. Would you have preferred that?
Did you even read my short comment? They can buy a brick texture from one of many marketplaces. Giving an artist money directly. Instead of giving money to use stolen assets. So that argument doesnt hold up.
Did you read MY comment at all?
When you have in-house designers you won’t go shopping around for textures, especially not placeholder ones.
Why are you being obtuse? If the in-house designers didn’t want to make some placeholder textures, they could have used a marketplace instead of AI. Are you just going to keep going in circles?
Why are YOU being obtuse here?
No company with an in-house design team will start trawling marketplaces to spend money on PLACEHOLDERS.
And it’s not like the designers “didn’t want” to make the textures, you donut - it’s that resources need to be allocated, and making minor textures falls on very tail end of the priority list.
At which point they probably had one designer generate the needed placeholders using AI, to ensure they’re good enough for placeholders, and called it a day.
I’ll ask you one better - why are you trying to force companies to go out of their way to spend money? When digital design tools hit the market, would you have been standing in line telling companies to instead hire out actual manual art instead of working with digital tools, if they didn’t have the required in-house resources?
Predictable deflection and going in circles again.
They are spending money on AI, more than the cost of a texture :^)
Also based on development timelines, these couple of textures were likely from the DallE-Mini era, long before anyone was even talking about ethical concerns with the tech and before fuckass Altman was a known name.
There’s another article going around where they say they use a “little bit” of AI but they’re very obviously referring to Unreal tools and regular old machine learning.
This whole thing is dramatically overblown. Absolutely fuck genAI and every data center should be bulldozed over. But this is a huge case over literally nothing.
E33 should be disqualified for all these awards for not being an indie game (the devs themselves have called it “AA” if I recall, and they had a sizeable budget to burn). Should genAI be tolerated in any part of the development process? Absolutely not. Should a game and studio be completely brought down because of 2022-ish placeholders from before the ethical issues of the tech were common knowledge, which were also quickly patched out in less than a week? Absolutely not.