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After a bumper year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is ending on a bit of a sour note as we learned Sandfall Entertainment used some generative AI during development of the huge RPG. Director Guillaume Brioche has since clarified how the technology was utilized by the team.
"Everything in the game is human made," he tells YouTuber Sushi. "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. We had originally used it as a placeholder for the textures we missed, but we took it out as soon as we found it."
He reiterates that "everything is human made," particularly noting the concept art and voice work, two areas that have been discussed as avenues of incorporating AI to handle smaller jobs. Brioche then makes it clear Sandfall will not be using any such tools in the future.
"It's pretty hard to predict what the future will look like," he says, "but everything will be made by humans from us."
These comments come as the discovery of AI in Sandfall's pipeline put a small dampener on the team's accomplishments. Two awards, including Game of the Year, from the Indie Game Awards were taken back due to the awarding body's strict no-AI policies, and the reveal that the game used any kind of generative tech was met with a degree of disappointment.
Some of the cynicism comes from the fact several big games this year, including both Battlefield 6 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, have come under fire for using apparent AI assets in various forms. For the time-being, the only thing these tools are useful for is getting negative feedback.
