It makes me sad but it might be better that they abandoned Danball Denki before all this, too..

I agree that AI tools are bad and that the industry should be cut loose to die but I have no interest in witch hunting people who approached it with mild curiosity long before the current understanding of it was established, so I'm done arguing with a Lisa Frank backpack illustration

"ignoring that knowledge and culture around things changes over time" it ended up in the game because it was an AI tool introduced to UE5, they didn't go out of their way to prompt stuff on a website and throw it in the game.

I'm sure if E33 entered production today (or whatever their next Claire Obscur title is going to be for that matter) this wouldn't, and likely won't, happen again

Maybe, but you should remember that this was an occurrence in 2022 when AI tools were first being introduced and the drawbacks weren't widely known and publicly decried, you can't really hold actions from 4 years ago to your expectations today

By being a core team of like 30 people spread across a pretty big production and whoever was handling QA either didn't notice or forgot, humans just do that sometimes.

The crazy part to me is that a LOT of people screwed with AI image and voice generation stuff when it first came out because it was weird and interesting and often really funny, all this heat is from some goofing almost four years ago

It was a slip up but it was a result of people just messing around because there wasn't the same (admittedly warranted) stigma around it when it was just being introduced to public use, it's just not as big a deal as it's being treated

Profound levels of willful ignorance

Operative word being Was, if it happens again with Sandfall interactive's next game you can come back and rub my face in it but it was a >>mistake<< they owned up to and immediately addressed so it just feels petty to dog on them about it

That is just so profoundly not the point of that metaphor

Pointed out and addressed sound a lot like being pointed out by social media and being patched out nearly immediately, to me

If someone drew a dickbutt on a map for a game and accidentally shipped it, I wouldn't think it should be considered a M rated game

I don't think I agree because it wasn't ever a part of their dedicated development pipeline, with a small team, as most indie studios do, there's a very thin line between messing around and actual development.

article/interview links

gamepressure.com/newsroom/a-firm-no-to-artificial-intelligence-clair-obscur-expedition-33-d/z88a9f#

english.elpais.com/culture/2025...

"When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate placeholder textures"

Y'all are blowing a bit of short lived curiosity way the fuck out of proportion.

x.com/luscielia/st...