I would be willing to bet that the people who were previously doing human made slop like you described are now the ones making the AI slop. They were already doing minimal effort; it makes sense they'd do even less when presented the option.

You're overestimating both how good AI is and how little effort a lot of these developers want to put in.

Generally, AI tools struggle with any type of specialized work and the same extends to game development. From my own testing, AI tends to butcher all but the simplest game coding tasks as a result of the larger and often very disjointed programming involved, and in terms of asset creation, it can create a lot of more generalized assets, but if you need a repeating texture or a texture for a 3d model, things immediately fall apart. That not to say it can't be done, but its a suprising amount of work for what is supposed to be an automation tool, and when compared to the old solution, is it really much better than just buying a premade game, and maybe swapping one or two things?

That said, my question is more that AI is ugly, soulless, and samey, but human art (and """art""") can be too. Do equivalent human works receive similarly lower reviews, or do the additional consequences of AI use actually factor in to people's perceptions, and if so, how much? For example, is a asset flip designed to rip people off going to be reviewed just as badly as a particularly soulless AI game, or AI going to be worse? Similarly, if you have a game with good programming and design, but AI assets, would it preform the same as something ugly in a human way like Cruelty Squad, or would it perform worse? Basically, how much of the negativity is because AI use has a bunch of negative effects, and how much of it is because the results of AI use are bad?

Don't Stop Girlypop is such a vibe wym ugly

I'd imagine people care more about a cohesive visual direction than they care about "pretty". A lot of AI art already captures what an average jane would probably consider pretty, in a shallow sense. It just isn't cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick

It just isn't cohesive and its morally bankrupt beyond that so it gives people the big ick

But that lack of cohesion is exactly what makes it ugly, esspecially when split between a number of seperate assets. That said, I'm not convinced that that doesn't have a huge impact on sales/perception, esspecially compared to an indirect factor like the resource waste and political influences of AI companies. Think of how little impact things like EA and Tencent's immorality and anti-consumer behavior have on sales. Is AI really that much worse in perception than a company like that, or is it just down to the fact that the games look worse? Thats what I want measured.