The AI witch hunt claims its first victim, apparently over some placeholder textures.
https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-c...
> Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative AI-created assets in the game. When the first AI tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process.
From the submitted article:
> "When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination."
Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.
I can understand the Indie Game Awards preferring to act now. Had they done nothing, they would have been criticised too by other people for not enforcing their own rules. They no doubt would’ve preferred to not have to deal with the controversy. Surely this wasn’t an easy decision for them, as it ruined their ceremony.
We’re all bystanders here with very little information, so I’d refrain from using unserious expressions like “witch hunt”, especially considering their more recent connotations (i.e. in modern times, “witch hunt” is most often used by bad actors attempting to discredit legitimate investigations).
> Whatever placeholder you use is part of your development process, whether it ships or not. Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.
If it was malicious they wouldn't say a word. They probably interpreted the rule as "nothing in shipped game is AI" (which is reasonable interpreteation IMO), they implemented policy to replace any asset made by AI and just missed some texture.
Also the term was pretty vague, like, is using automatic lipsync forbidden ? That's pretty much generative AI, just the result is not picture but a sequence of movements.
> If it was malicious they wouldn't say a word.
They didn’t have a choice, it was obvious it was AI. They might still have other places where they used it but it’s harder to notice.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46344279
Malicious or not, they didn't follow the rules, and admitted as much. So why is it a problem they lose the award?
> Saying they used none when they did is not cool and rightfully makes one wonder what other uses they may be hiding (or “forgetting”). Especially when apparently they only clarified it when it was too late.
The article where Meurisse admitted to using AI in the pipeline is from April. You're implying a level of dishonesty that clearly isn't there.
Conceding our vocabulary to bad actors is Orwellian.
> “witch hunt” is most often used by bad actors attempting to discredit legitimate investigations).
By that logic, "fake news" is now unusable because Trump weaponized it, despite the term accurately describing a real phenomenon that existed before and after his usage. "Gaslighting" would be suspect because it got picked up by people dramatizing ordinary disagreements. Every useful term for describing social dynamics gets captured by someone with an agenda eventually.
Hitler liked chocolate, doesn't mean you shouldn't eat chocolate. "You used a word that bad people also use" is not interesting - it's a way of avoiding the object-level debate while still claiming moral high ground.
> "Gaslighting" would be suspect
Gaslighting would be simply incorrect, since gaslighting refers to an elaborate scheme of making somebody doubt their own perception/sanity. It a a severe form of abuse, requires an ongoing relationship with power dynamics (it cannot happen from a single instance of interaction), and typically results in long-term PTSD for the victim(s).
Agree on the capturing. Watering down terms is highly unfortunate for everyone.
> Every useful term for describing social dynamics gets captured by someone with an agenda eventually.
So, in essence, you’re agreeing.
> Hitler liked chocolate, doesn't mean you shouldn't eat chocolate.
Arguments have nothing to do with dietary preferences, that comparison makes no sense.
That’s incredibly harsh. A blanket ban on AI generated assets is dumb as hell. Generating placeholder assets is completely acceptable.
I don’t care if the whole game from end to end is generative AI if it’s an incredible game. Having a moral stance against a specific use of floating point numbers and algorithms in a medium filled with floating point numbers and algorithms is strange.
Describing something so incredibly poorly, that it can be used to describe computing as a whole, only to avoid needing to take a moral stance is strange.
I think that they were taking a moral stance, just not one you agree with.
it's even worse then that
there is a whole basked of technologies which you can label as "gen AI" but which have non of the problems why people hate "gen AI"
as a very dump example, some pretty decent "line smoothing" algorithm are technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues
Is this actually a problem? Is there anybody actually arguing against line smoothing algorithms?
That’s the point. No one cares about line smoothing algorithms but they lose their mind if it’s background textures or throwaway voice lines.
They're not equivalent...
> technically gen AI but have non of the ethical issues
No artists were previously smoothing lines for a living but they were painting textures and voice acting
Artists were previously drawing lines that didn't need to be smoothed for a living.
they ban any for of gen AI no matter the context
so as an extrema example if you artists used that line smoothing algorithm you game isn't qualified anymore
Who bans line smoothing algorithms? Do you have a link?
you are failing to get the point
it's an (maybe the most) extreme example of something which is "gen AI" but not problematic and as such a naive "rule" saying "no gen AI at all" is a pretty bad competition rule design
I get your point. I don't get who you're arguing with.
You're saying banning line smoothing algorithms for ethical reasons make no sense. I totally agree!
I'm wondering if this actually happens.
Reductio ad absurdum is a form of logic which takes an argument to its logical conclusion in order to demonstrate that it is absurd if it were to be taken on its face. Whether or not anyone applies it that way in reality is irrelevant.
I don't know! I guess we'll have to wait for next year's Indie Game awards to see which prizes they retract that time and why. This is dumb.
Generating a brick wall texture using an AI should be acceptable as well, even when it's not a placeholder.
Yeah I'm fine with replacing generic stuff with generic AI stuff. Or cutting out the boring part, nobody needs to spend hours manually lip-syncing character or generating thousands of intermediate movement animation steps.
When genAI started making waves my first thought literally was how awesome it would be to flesh out NPC dialog.
It’s immersion breaking to try and talk to a random character only to hit a loop of one or two sentences.
How awesome would it be for every character to be able to have believable small talk, with only a small prompt? And it wouldn’t affect the overall game at all, because obviously the designers never cared to put in that work themselves
GenAI doing chore work is IMO the best use case
I agree, even though I'm not in favour of gen ai. It was a terrible mistake letting placeholder assets get out in the final release, but it shouldn't actually count as shipping AI-generated content in your product.
> representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Even if all the AI-generated content had been replaced before release, this would still be a lie.
That's a dumb requirement for something purporting to be a general indie game award.
They should rename to the Digital Amish game awards or something.
I wholeheartedly agree, but it's their award so they get to make up the rules.
Even if a developer had used an AI tool to ask a question about a library, it would have been a lie.
The question is stupid and I think Sandfall should be given the benefit of doubt that they interpreted the question not literally, but in a way which actually makes sense.
not really. the spirit of the (dumb) rule is that AI was not involved anywhere in the creative process. placeholder textures don't even come close
it's like having doping rules in sports and then disqualifying someone for using caffeine in their gym plants.
It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product.
> It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product.
When someone goes three miles per hour over the speed limit they are literally breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean they should get a serious fine for it. Sometimes shit happens.
Countries with sane laws include a tolerance limit to take into account flaws in speedometers and radars. Here in Brazil, the tolerance is 10%, so tickets clearly state "driving at speed 10% above limit".
and the rules of the contest did not include any sane boundaries.
Like, using automatic lipsync is "generative AI", should that be banned ? Do we really want to fight with that purely work-saving feature ?
Apparently not. Because creatives haven't instigated a moral crusade against that type of automated work.
All AI features are purely work saving
That is not sane, it is dumb. With such a system, you have signs that say "100" but the actual speed limit is "110" and everyone knows the actual speed limit is "110" but they all have to do mental math to reach that conclusion. Just make the sign say the real speed limit instead of lying to you. It's like Spinal Tap wrote your laws.
It’s not dumb, it’s accounting for real world variance in car speedometer accuracy and possible inaccuracies in the measurement process, just because your car is telling you you went 98 or the speed camera is telling you you went 101 doesn’t mean that was the actual speed of your car at the moment.
Speed limits are limits, not targets. That's why they're called speed *limits*. You account for variance in the speedometer and the reading device by staying under the limit, not treating it as a target.
I hope this does not come across as antagonistic but isn’t this then another form of mental math again? "I’m actually not allowed to drive the number on the sign but I’m also not allowed to drive a speed within the margin of error so I could be falsely accused of speeding."
The other way around seems more clear in a legal sense to me because we want to prove with as little doubt as possible that the person actually went above the speed limit. Innocent until proven guilty and all that. So we accept people speeding a little to not falsely convict someone.
So your speedo reads 100 km/h in a 100km/h hour zone. The intention is that you just treat that as a sign that you're at the limit and don't go faster.
Yes, you _could_ do some mental math and figure out that your speedometer is probably calibrated with some buffer room on the side of overreporting your speed, so you're probably actually doing 96km/h and you know you probably won't get dinged if you're dong 105km/h so you "know" you can probably do 110km/h per your speedometer when the sign is 100km/h.
Or you could just not. And that's the intention. The buffers are in there to give people space for mistakes, not as something to rely on to eke 10% more speed out of. And if you start to rely on that buffer and get caught on it, that's on you.
As a driver, I control my speed for a variety of factors, but I assume no responsibility for the variance in the speed checking device. That’s on the people deploying them to ensure they’ve done their job (and is part of the reason tickets aren’t issued for 1kph/1mph over in most jurisdictions).
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> That is not sane, it is dumb.
I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s perfectly sane if your legal system recognizes and accepts that speed detection methodologies have a defined margin of error; every ticket issued for speeding within that MoE would likely be (correctly) rejected by a court if challenged.
The buffer means, among other things, that you don’t have to bog down your traffic courts with thousands of cases that will be immediately thrown out.
So the sign says "100", the police read your speed at "112" but the device has a 5% MoE and in this case your actual speed was 107. Seems like you have exactly the same problem because the laws state the actual speed limit was "110" which you are under, despite being over the posted limit and the police reading you as over both the real and posted limits.
Why does the sign say 100 when the actual limit was 110?
You will literally get a fine for going three miles per hour over the speed limit in many countries.
True, however the penalty depends on the amount by which the threshold was crossed; in the country I live in at least.
I think the metaphor here would be more like getting your license permanently suspended for going 3 mph over. Whether that happens anywhere or not in reality, the point is, it would be an absurd overreaction.
Not getting the "didn't go over the speed limit" award when you did in fact go over the speed limit shouldn't be a big deal to anyone.
Nobody is preventing the studio from working, or from continuing to make (ostensibly) tons of money from their acclaimed game. Their game didn't meet the requirements for one particular GOTY award, boo hoo
Sure, but maybe you you shouldn't be surprised to be disqualified from that "Best Drive of the Year" award as you do.
"Sometimes shit happens" should be viable in a courtroom sometimes, but by nature competition rules leave less room for interpretation.
> Sometimes shit happens.
But you’re also not supposed to drive as close to the speed limit as possible. That number is not a target to hit, it’s a wall you should stay within a good margin of.
I understand analogies are seldom flawless, but the speed limit one in particular I feel does not apply because you can get a fine proportional to your infraction (go over the limit a little bit, small fine; go over it a lot, big fine) but you can’t partially retract an award, it’s all or nothing.
No, everybody treats speed limit as expected speed as long as conditions allows it.
Whether “everyone does it” has no bearing on it being what should be done. Most people also speed up on yellow lights, but you should be doing the exact opposite.
This depends on the country. In certain countries, speed limits are set by civil engineers as a true upper limit that one is not supposed to exceed. In others, speed limits are set slightly above the average speed one is expected to drive at.
In the former sort of country, drivers are expected to use their judgement and often drive slower than the limit. In the latter sort of country, driving at the speed limit is rather... limiting, thus it is common to see drivers slightly exceeding the speed limit.
(I have a theory in my head that – in general – the former sort of country has far stricter licensing laws than the latter. I am not sure if this is true.)
The problem I have with the whole "licensing standards" thing is that, for everyday activities for most of the population, it's not realistic to regulate to the point that there are really substantial barriers to entry to the degree there are for flying in general. And experience probably counts for more than making people shell out a couple thousand more for courses.
The usual argument in favor of stricter licensing is coupled with improvement in public transit.
Which is really going to help me living 50 miles outside a major city. (Which is considered urban according to the US Census.)
I believe in giving someone a reasonable amount of time to correct their mistakes. Yes, it was a terrible mistake to release the game in that state, but I think correcting it within days is sufficient.
It's not a "terrible mistake" to accidentally ship placeholder textures. Let's tone it down just a wee bit, maybe.
Anyway, I don't agree with banning generative AI, but if the award show wants to do so, go ahead. What has caused me to lose any respect for them is that they're doing this for such a silly reason. There's a huge difference between using AI to generate your actual textures and ship those, and.... accidentally shipping placeholder textures.
It really illustrates that this is more ideological than anything.
How could a gen AI ban be anything but ideological?
If you ever make a typo on an official document, would you like that to be not correctable and you forever be responsible for the results? Yeah, that's about that level of silly.
How is "an award show with specific rules" similar to official documents you are forever responsible for? This thread is full of wild analogies as if 1. this random game award group shouldn't be able to write their own rules and 2. winning it or not winning it is somehow like the government permanently punishing an individual forever.
You dont need to like their rules. Make your own and do better if you want to. Saying they shouldn't enforce their own rules because you don't like them sounds ridiculous. Saying they shouldn't enforce their own rules because it's somehow unfair is literal nonsense.
Would love to see more "I don't like these rules" and a lot less "these rules are fascist!".
I don't find it that surprising. The creatives that are against generative AI aren't against it only because it produces slop. They are against it because it uses past human creative labor, without permission or compensation, to generate profit for the companies building the models which they do not redistribute to the authors of that creative labor. They are also against it due to environmental impact.
In that view, it doesn't matter whether you use it for placeholder or final assets. You paying your ChatGPT membership makes you complicit with the exploitation of that human creative output, and use of resources.
They are also against it because they believe it will compete with them and they will get paid less.
That’s also a valid reason to be against it!
I disagree, this is the worst reason to be against it. It's choosing horses over trains. Manual labor over engines, mail over e-mail. It's basically purely egotistical, placing something as fleeting as your current job over the progress of humanity.
That's a much easier stance to take for people who are not facing loss of income. If we had wealth redistribution mechanisms in place, I think more people would be pro ai.
It’s incredibly naive to believe that all technological advancement contributes to the progress of humanity.
And where did this this straw man come from? I'm only saying AI, engines and the internet contributed/will contribute to the the progress of humanity. I never said anything about all technological advancement.
I wish we could just land on a remedy for this, specifically. "Everyone who'd ever posted to deviantArt, ArtStation, etc., before they were scraped gets a dividend in perpetuity." And force MANGAF to pay. Finally, a way for their outsize profits to flow to the people who've been getting the shit end of the compensation stick since online art platforms and social media became a thing.
It'll never happen because the grift is the point.
That should be the crux of the issue, and stated plainly.
This is just another scheme where those at the top are appropriating the labor of many to enrich themselves. This will have so many negative consequences that I don't think any reactions against it are excessive.
It is irrelevant whether AI has "soul" or not. It literally does not matter, and it is a bad argument that dillutes what is really going on.
There is still human intentionality in picking an AI generated resource for surface texture, landscape, concept art, whatever. Doubly so if it is someone that create art themselves using it.
This is just another scheme where those at the top are appropriating the labor of many to enrich themselves. This will have so many negative consequences that I don't think any reactions against it are excessive.
When's the last time someone with your opinion turned out to be right in the long run?
If you tried reading a history book you would find numerous examples.
Of course, I am presuming you can read. I lean on optimism.
It takes only three words to say, "I got nothin'." Try some Strunk & White.
My optimism was unfounded, I see.
Expect the worst and you will never be disappointed.
Except it uses existing art transformatively, which means that even under our absurd, dystopian IP laws, it’s not exploitation. There isn’t a single artist out there who wouldn’t be running afoul of copyright law if that wasn’t the case.
It’s been insane to me to watch the “creative class”, long styled as the renegade and anti-authoritarian heart of society, transform into hardline IP law cheerleaders overnight as soon as generative law burst onto the scene.
And the environmental concerns are equally disingenuous, particularly coming from the video game industry. Please explain to me how running a bunch of GPUs in a data center to serve peoples LLM requests is significantly more wasteful than distributing those GPUs among the population and running people’s video games?
At the end of the day, the only coherent criticism of AI is that it stands to eliminate the livelihood of a large number of people, which is perfectly valid concern. But that’s not a flaw of AI, it’s a flaw of the IP laws and capitalistic system we have created. That is what needs addressing. Trying to uphold that system by stifling AI as a technology is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Spot on! All the more, it irks me that the reasons they give against it are, essentially, pretexts. I wish they could just outright say they're against it because it threatens their livelyhoods. I guess the optics aren't as good but maybe we could then address the actual problem.
The creatives that are the loudest voices against AI for art asset generation in my experience are technically competent but lacking any real pizzazz or uniqueness that would set them apart from generated art, so they feel extremely threatened.
There's also been an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the major entertainment industry players to get creatives to come out against AI vocally. I'd like to see what percentage of those artists made the statement to try and curry favor with the money suits.
Without making a judgment call on quality, it is definitely established artists who rely largely on their technical ability for a living (and their hangers-on) who are most vocal. And they focus on the dual indignities of their style being easily-reproducible in aggregate, but also each individual work having glaring mistakes that they'd never make, while ignoring the actual point of theft - when model builders scraped their work specifically for use in a commercial product.
>There's also been an extremely effective propaganda campaign by the major entertainment industry players to get creatives to come out against AI vocally.
Where can I find out more about this?
Several of the major voices were Disney employees iirc. Disney's goal has always been to have a monopoly on "their" IP, AI applications included.
Blanket ban on AI generated assets, but nobody cares about AI generated code apparently. lol
Vibe coded games definitely seem like a lot more of an issue in my books than a few minor textures having been generated.
An issue for who?
The problem of allowing "placeholder AI assets" is that any shipped asset found to be AI is going to be explained away as being "just a placeholder". How are we supposed to confirm that they never meant to ship the game like this? All we know is that they shipped the game with AI assets.
Adding to that: 'it was a placeholder' has been used to excuse direct (flagrant) plagiarism from other sources, such as what happened with Bungie and their game Marathon
Shouldn't there be an argument for best effort? If the issue has been removed as soon as it has been detected, doesn't it count for something?
Because they can most likely prove the actual assets were on their version control years ago but weren’t applied to the models.
How? We don't have access to their version control. How do you validate an external version control to be accurate and reflective of the state years ago? Git histories can be rewritten as one pleases.
A forensic auditor would find that out, unless they do a full company wide purge of all local and remote Git histories.
But I'm kinda thinking this isn't THAT serious =)
Blanket ban on generative AI? Games have been using some form or another every since the days of RTS map generation and perlin noise
That is not the sort of thing people are referring to when they use the term “generative AI”. It’s basically a completely different technology and the ethical concerns around data sourcing and energy usage are not the same at all.
It's extremely tiring how people pretend like there's no difference between these technologies. The comments on the article are the epitome - "oh they used a computer to make a computer game, the horror"
Just a cudgel to shut down discussion
There is no difference. What about a dungeon hack game that uses generated mazes? Random level generators put level designers out of work, but you never saw anyone carrying signs and carrying on about those.
When did random level generators advance to the stage of generating rich background art in the style of long term DeviantArt contributors simply by rolling a few PRNGs ?
Was that before or after real people had their work scraped w/out permission or acknowledgement?
Describing these things as having no difference appears delibrately obtuse.
>Was that before or after real people had their work scraped w/out permission or acknowledgement?
Well after. Ever notice how a good game was made and then suddenly 50 like it appeared? Everyone scraped id soft's ideas and tech. Everyone followed Blizzard's ideas. The amazing thing that happened IMO is when companies started putting up patents so that such scraping couldn't be done.
One that comes to mind is the Shadow of Mordor nemesis system. Great idea, would've been neat to see in other games. Nope not allowed for 11 years. If things like this were around at the start of gaming it would likely be in a very sorry state.
Describing these things as having no difference appears delibrately obtuse.
And pulling entirely-new classes of IP rights out of thin air doesn't?
But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist. Now they're automated off the back of somebody else's work. And here we have an admission, but how many artists are being sidestepped in major games developers now? It won't be long before the EAs and Ubisofts of the world fire theirs. Then it'll be developers. Then it'll just be a committee of dolphins picking balls to feed into a black box that pumps out games.
It doesn't seem strange that an industry award protects the workers in the industry. I agree, it seems harsh, but remember this is just a shiny award. It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.
> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.
Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist.
I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift it off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.
> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.
True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.
> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria
And up to us to decide whether The Indie Game Awards has impaired their credibility by choosing such a ridiculous criterion.
Do you think AAA game development teams pass on AI despite the fact that it produces better results at a fraction of the cost. I think not. Why would you cripple Indie developers by imposing such a standard on indie developers?
It seems completely out of touch with what's going on in the world of software development.
> The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.
Maybe, some sort of a temporary asset management system is required?
> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist
Realistically, no.
> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.
This argument in this industry is problematic. The entire purpose of computers is to automate processes that are labor intensive. Along the way, the automation process went from doing what was literally impossible with human labor to capturing ever deeper levels of skill of the practitioners. Contrast early computer graphics, which involved intensive human intervention, to modern tools. Since HN almost certainly has more developers than graphics artists, contrast early computer programming (where programmers didn't even have the assistance of assemblers and where they needed a deep knowledge of the computer architecture) to modern computer programming (high level languages, with libraries abstracting away most of the algorithmic complexity).
I don't know what the future of indie development looks like. In a way, indie development that uses third-party tools that captures the skills of developers and graphics artists traditionally found in major studios doesn't feel very indie. On the other hand, they are already doing that through the use of game engines and graphics design/modelling software. But I do know that a segment of the industry that utterly ignores those tools will be quickly left behind.
It's bad because it takes someone's job? However, that job was mundane petty work that seniors didn't want to bother with. Were cars terrible for taking all of those stableboy jobs? Is Excel or data engineering terrible for the obliteration of data entry and low level bookkeeping jobs? Or is it not just a slippery slope argument, when what's happening is IMO evolution of tech? IMO People will adapt. While it's up to any event organizers to decide their rules, AI witch-hunts are a Luddite response. AI/LLM can be major tools in the belt of indies to dethrone AAA. I'd like to be clear that I'm arguing in favor of tooling such as the example of placeholder usage and a pipeline to remove it. I wouldn't defend a scumbag leveraging AI to ripoff another game, artist, or dev. It just seems like the lines are being blurred to justify AI witchhunts.
The game industry, especially AAA, is actually having major identity crisis right now as technology evolves and jobs adapt around the new tool of AI/LLMs. The game awards (not indie) should demonstrate this dolphin committee you fear already exists because the limiting factor in all industries are major resources: time, capital, experience. AI/LLMs will enable far more high skill work to be accomplished with less experience, time, and possibly capital (sidestepping ethics/practicality of data centers).
The award category is essentially racist. Nobody should who care created it. A man, a woman, a H1B worker, an AI, an animal.
It's not about the asset it's about them first claiming that they did not use gen ai during production. One is an oopsie and the other a blatant lie. If the award requirements say you can't participate if you used generative AI and you lie about it it's a pretty clear cut case. Either be certain you don't ship AI placeholders or just don't lie. The outrage in this thread and hyper focusing on the asset instead of the lie is the problem.