A recent interview session between Twitch streamers and content creators saw Sandfall Interactive's Guillaume Broche clarifying the studio's AI usage

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.

  • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
    41·
    11 hours ago

    yeah i don’t even think the dishonesty was necessarily dishonesty… i just think perhaps the marketing team wasn’t fully informed. i can absolutely see dev teams saying no to “AI use” not having been told that the question applied to the whole dev process, and marketing not understanding that that information was important

    i have no problem with AI placeholders. i think that’s the right way to use AI… and dishonesty is a problem… miscommunication is really not a problem

    but i also think that rescinding the award is the right call! but that shouldn’t tarnish the studios reputation in the future if they apologise and explain what happened

    • Echo Dot@feddit.ukEnglish
      4·
      11 hours ago

      The problem with using AI textures is that at a glance they look like the real thing. So it’s not always easy for QA to spot that a texture hasn’t been swapped out. The thing is it’s also super easy to deal with that, you just put all the AI textures in a temporary folder and then when you think you already to ship the game, delete that folder and see if you get any bright purple broken textures showing up.

      Most game engines will let you set the missing texture to be something truly awful and very obvious.

      • SkunkWorkz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        9 hours ago

        Don’t even need to do that. With a visual spot check there is still a chance some things fall trough the cracks. Even a bright pink asset. Better to tag assets as a placeholder in the metadata and then let an automated validation process find the placeholders in the levels. And you can even configure it to run the validation process during a build so it will halt the build when it finds placeholders.

      • Pup Biru@aussie.zoneEnglish
        2·
        8 hours ago

        that’s absolutely true, and i’m sure that as tooling and workflow gets better these solutions will become standard. for the moment it’s all pretty haphazard, and i just don’t think it’s necessarily malicious intent or lying exactly… i think it could have easily been just miscommunication and/or legitimate mistake

        afaik there were 2 issues here: there was a placeholder asset left in the game upon release, and the rules of the award were no AI assets during development either. i think the first can be easily explained by it being accidental (they replaced the texture very quickly) and the second can easily be explained by miscommunication between teams