Not necessarily. If I use an anthropomorphic cat as an asset for a character who in the end is a robot, can you really say it took inspiration?

Granted, I haven’t seen any of the assets. But placeholders aren’t inherently inspiration. They can easily just be random things to look at before proper assets are made.

And even if they did take inspiration, that isn’t the complaint. Would there be a need to disclose if they used a generative AI to generate a picture, and they used that as inspiration? What if they saw an gen AI image someone else posted and used that as inspiration? Inspiration isn’t the problem, it’s the “use of AI in development” which seems silly when these could have potentially been wire frames and result in the exact same final product.