> Seems like the objection is to the process, not the result.

Right. The game is not eligible for the award. This is not a comment on the quality of the game.

The Indie Game Awards require zero AI content. The devs fully intended to ship without AI content but made a mistake, disqualifying themselves for the award. This is simply how competition rules work. I have a friend who plays competitive trading card games, and one day he showed up to a national event with an extra card in his box after playing with some friends late at night. It was an honest mistake, and the judges were quite sympathetic, but he was still disqualified!

BTW, the game is incredible.

> I think it's the artists, not the tools, that make the art.

I've never liked this argument. If AI is a tool, then having my own personal woodworker on staff makes me a woodworker too.

> If AI use produces obviously inferior work, how did it win in the first place?

they uses some AI placeholders during development as it can majorly speed up/unblock the dev loop while not really having any ethical issues (as you still hire artists to produce all the final assets) and in some corner case they forgot to replace the place holder

also some of the tooling they might have used might technically count as gen AI, e.g. way before LLM became big I had dabbled a bit in gen AI and there where some decent line work smoothing algorithms and similar with non of the ethical questions. Tools which help removing some dump annoying overhead for artists but don't replace "creative work". But which anyway are technical gen AI...

I think this mainly shows that a blank ban on "gen AI" instead of one of idk. "gen AI used in ways which replaces Artists" is kinda tone deaf/unproductive.