Clair Obscur won multiple awards but used generative AI art as placeholders during production.
The Indie Game Awards revoked Clair Obscur’s Debut and Game of the Year after the AI disclosure.
IGAs reassigned the awards (Blue Prince, Sorry We’re Closed) and reignited debate on gen-AI use.
People keep saying the problem ‘wasnt that they used AI placeholder assets, it’s that they lied on the disclosure’, but boy does that still seem like a reach
When you have dozens of people working on a huge creative project, it would take an almost omniscient creative director to know where every asset in every scene came from with certainty. It isn’t hard to imagine a designer somewhere on the team sneaking an AI asset into a pre-release build and forgetting about it. The fact that it was later disclosed suggests that whoever was applying for the award wasn’t aware of that asset being used and then replaced at the time of submission.
I dont mind having some awards dedicated to genAI-free works, but people really need to stop getting their pitchforks out at every mention, otherwise they risk turning into a lynch mob. This doesnt sound like an intentional omission to me.