Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swept up tons of awards at The Game Awards and beyond, and has been regarded as a huge success. However, one award at the Indie Game Awards was taken away from them after the use of AI was revealed. Now, the director has spoken out.
AI is always a controversial topic in games. Recently, Larian Studios came under fire for revealing their plans to use generative AI in the upcoming Divinity game, to which the Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 director spoke out to defend the company after backlash.
Well, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also found itself facing some controversy, after their award for Best Debut Game and Game of the Year in The Indie Game Awards were rescinded following the award show’s “hard stance on the use of gen AI.” Now, the director of Expedition 33 has spoken out, revealing that they’ll never use AI.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 director will avoid AI in future
Speaking to YouTuber Sushi in their developer Q&A, Director Guillaume Brioche explained that “When AI first came out in 2022, we’d already started on the game. It was just a new tool, we tried it, and we didn’t like it at all; it felt wrong.”
He continued by explaining that “We had originally used it as a placeholder for the textures we missed, but we took it out as soon as we found it,” referring to the textures of posters found by fans, which have similar misjoined letters and fake words as seen in a lot of AI.
The devs did take this down “within five days,” explaining that they were “missed during the Quality Assurance process” and weren’t intended to be in the final game.
“Everything is human-made,” continued Brioche, who revealed the intention to avoid AI in the future: “It’s pretty hard to predict what the future will look like, but everything will be made by humans from us.”
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