Clair Obscur having its Indie Game Game Of The Year award stripped due to AI use

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Use of AI in Clair Obscur & Rule Violation

  • The game used generative AI for a few placeholder textures (notably a newspaper poster) during development; these were supposed to be replaced and were patched out shortly after release.
  • The Indie Game Awards had a blanket rule: any game developed using generative AI is ineligible.
  • Debate centers on whether the studio “lied” on the AI declaration form (since AI was used in development at all) versus making a reasonable good‑faith interpretation (“no AI in the shipped assets”).
  • Some say disqualification is straightforward rule enforcement; others see it as pedantic “regulations nitpicking” over a trivial oversight.

Double Standard: AI Art vs AI Code

  • Many commenters argue there’s a cultural double standard: AI art is treated as theft and disqualifying, while AI‑assisted coding (Copilot, IDE autocompletion) is widely tolerated.
  • Others respond that in both cases models are trained on others’ work (including GPL code and copyrighted art), so either both are problematic or both are “learning.”
  • Some emphasize that AI image models more directly threaten working artists (concept art, textures, ads) than current code models threaten programmers, so the backlash is stronger on the art side.

What Counts as “Generative AI”?

  • The rule’s wording (“developed using generative AI”) is seen as vague:
    – Does AI autocomplete in editors count?
    – Do denoisers, upscalers, procedural generation, lip‑sync, GAN upscaling, DLSS, etc. count?
  • Several note that taken literally, many modern tools (Photoshop features, Blender denoising, RTX pipelines) would disqualify almost every game.

Indie Status, Awards, and Ethics

  • Some see the decision as principled protection of human craft in a small, developer‑focused award; others think it’s performative, especially given the game’s strong reception.
  • There’s friction over calling Clair Obscur “indie” given its budget and team size.
  • Broader threads debate whether generative AI is inevitable progress and a powerful tool for small teams, or primarily an exploitative, job‑eroding technology whose use should be resisted categorically.