I think a big part of the issue is the wild variances on electric stove quality.
The landlord specials are dogshit and what most people have experience with. Even a bad gas stove is 10x better than those.
But once you get to quality electric ranges, and then induction options, they are superior to gas in basically every way. But very few people have experience with these, or the money to afford upgrading to them when their existing stoves breakdown unexpectedly. So most are stuck with the cheap crappy electric options.
They won't. They won't pay to completely recreate things like Silicon Valley and Hollywood elsewhere.
Just like they're not leaving New York despite saying they would. All the Finance infrastructure is there, they won't recreate it from scratch elsewhere.
Most of the major software development tools have some form of AI-based assistance features now. And the room those, be nearly all have those assistance and completion features enabled by default.
If you want absolutely no AI in your games, then you need to verify all of those functions were disabled for the entire development time. And you have no way to verify that.
I want to know who fucked with the monkey's paw. That's the only explanation for all of this shit. What the hell did they want that we all have to suffer the consequences?
We're also dealing with language differences. English is not the developer's first language. What may seem a clear sentence to a native speaker, could be easily misinterpreted/mistranslated to something similar, but different enough that the answer changes.
It seems that the AI use was early in development, and limited to temporary placeholders that were going to be replaced. Since they were patched out within days of release, that seems to imply they already had replacement assets on hand, they were just missed during final checks before release.
The answer from the devs also changed prior to the awards show that implies that they may have had an updated interpretation of the qualification question or answer. If they thought the question was about AI use in the final product, then accidentally missing a placeholder swap shouldn't be disqualifying. Likewise, early experimentation with the tech and then deciding not to use it probably should not disqualify either. But if the qualification is a hard yes/no with absolutely no context or consideration whatsoever, then that's a different outcome, and hence them clarifying for the awards team.
Personally I think the hard limit without any room for consideration or interpretation is a shit qualification. Especially considering that isn't really the case for most awards. Look at the definition of "indie" for example. There's a half dozen different interpretations people have ranging from having to be self published, avoiding just large publishers, or just the publisher not having creative influence. That's a lot of interpretation comparatively.
We're not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.
I don't know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I'm willing to bet we're talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn't exactly damning
Literally removing work from a human(concept artist)
It's not really "removing" work from a human, it's utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn't replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.
It was released with the original placeholder AI assets, but patched out within 5 days. It's pretty clear that they just missed replacing those assets prior to release.
I don't know exactly which assets, or exactly how many... but from several article it seems one of them was a newspaper only used in the prologue, that no one would notice without directly looking at it up close, which 99.9% of people would never do, and could easily be overlooked doing final testing for game breaking issues prior to release.
And the failure to properly disclose could easily be explained by them messing around. Early in development, deciding not to use AI, and then forgetting about it. Which also explains it being left in for release accidentally. Updated assets were clearly made, just never replaced.
The disqualification had nothing to do with the assets being there for the release, it was solely about development as mentioned in every statement from the awards. Meaning even if it hadn't been there at release, they still would have been disqualified. Hard criteria like that which disqualifies any sort of context or consideration is not fair. Especially when we're talking about cutting edge technologies that teams will obviously be experimenting with before making decisions.
A lot of the "cuts" were for programs that had already been funded... the money was already spent. Agreements and contracts were cancelled. Some of those surely had penalties involved. Some were for things they actually needed, and so they've had to renegotiate again with worse terms because the government just proved it can't be trusted.
Trump 1.0 he was actually there still, easily manipulated but still there. Now he's just a puppet with dementia.