I think this is, because the accusations make it seem like Clair Obscur is completely AI generated, when in reality it was used for a few placeholder assets. Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included. In particular if Clair Obscur embodies the opposite of AI slop for me, incredible world building and story, not generated, but created by people with a vision and passion. Music which is completely original composition, recorded by an orchestra. I share a lot of the anti AI sentiment, in regards to stuff like blog Spam, cheap n8n prompt to fully generated YouTube video Pipelines, and companies shoving AI into everything where it doesn't need to be, but purists are harming their own cause if they go after stuff like Clair Obscur, because it's the furthest thing from AI slop imaginable.
> Stuff like the Indie Awards disqualifying Clair Obscur not on merit but on this teeny tiny usage of AI just sits wrong with a lot of people, me included.
From the "What are the criteria for eligibility and nomination?" section of the "Game Eligibility" tab of the Indie Game Awards' FAQ: [0]
> Games developed using generative AI are strictly ineligible for nomination.
It's not about a "teeny tiny usage of AI", it's about the fact that the organizer of the awards ceremony excluded games that used any generative AI. The Clair Obscur used generative AI in their game. That disqualifies their game from consideration.
You could argue that generative AI usage shouldn't be disqualifying... but the folks who made the rules decided that it was. So, the folks who broke those rules were disqualified. Simple as.
Yeah sure they're free to set the rule for their award show however they like, but I think going with a name like the "Indie Awards", kinda signals to the outside, that they wanna be taken seriously and like an authority on indie games. In my opinion, by adding clearly ideologically motivated rules (because let's be honest, something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI), they'll just achieve, that they won't be taken seriously in the future. I know I won't take their award seriously, and I don't think I'm the only one.
They're free to define their rules however they want, I'm free to disagree on the validity of those rules, and the broader community sentiment will decide whether these awards are worth anything.
> something like E33 isn't a worse game due to their very small usage of AI
A gorgeous otherwise-monochrome painting that happens to use a little bit of mauve isn't a worse painting because of the mauve. If that painting is nominated for inclusion to a contest that requires the use of only one color, it is correct to reject that painting from consideration. This rejection would only be a problem if the requirement wasn't clearly disclosed up-front.
As for the rest of your commentary; you're free to gather likeminded buddies and start the "Robot-Generated-Art-Inclusive Indie Awards". As a bonus, I expect the fuckoff-huge studios would be quite excited to quietly help fund the project through cutouts.
Yea as I said, the award can reject them, I still think that this award doesn't actually represent the best indie games then, and therefore it will fade into obscurity. Funnily enough, this year's game Awards (the actual game Awards), were basically swept by small studios with tiny budgets compared to AAA studios. That's because these Studios had a coherent vision for their game, people that really cared about making it good, corporate AAA games are bad not because of usage of AI, but because monetization is more important than the gameplay.
To play devil's advocate, AI helps small studios with a limited budget actually way more, because they can bring a game to market, that maybe would've needed 10 people before, but needs only 3 people now. I'm not saying this is good or bad, just that that's the new reality, whether we like it or not. As I said, I'm against GenAI in many fields, e.g. I absolutely despise AI generated "Music", cancelled my Spotify subscription because of it (they insist on putting it into playlists and you can't disable it), but that doesn't mean, anything which was produced with 0.1% AI is bad, unethical, etc.
Well if you wanna contribute (at least as a proxy) to OSS, you need to deal with people and make them want to deal with you. If you don't do that, no PR, regardless of how perfect it is, will ever be accepted.
If you're so sure that your strategy for the future of development is correct, then prove it by building your own project, where you can fully decide which contributions are accepted, even those which are 100% ai generated. This should be easy, right? Once your project gains wide spread adoption, you can show everybody that you've been right all along. Until then, it's just empty talk.
I did a lot of these when I was around 15-16 and it solidified for me my interest in CS but in general abstract thinking and problem solving. Great site.
One thing I haven't seen talked about at all is the local development setup. I was thinking of putting node/js projects fully into docker containers (and mounting the project directory as a volume for hot reloading). While this doesn't fix the CI attack vector, it should mitigate risk for personal/work machines.
I'd be interested in hearing the setup other people have for their dev envs, also are you using separate browsers for Dev/Internet?
I use this on all my front end projects and it protects my "host" machine from malicious packages, it's not a silver bullet though; other practices, e.g. good secret management, will help harden your dev environment from these attacks
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