It kind of does though because they aren't destroying the environment, depriving people of water and electricity,, and directly contributing to fascism to make their game.

(If the comment is in good faith then we all know they aren't using a local AI model run on solar panels for the work)

Why would I pay them for something they didn’t do?

What happened to CC0 assets?? Any problem """solved""" by generative AI already had solutions before.

...so it's okay if they steal that work from others who did?

meanwhile, asset packs:

also, the problem you describe is part of the reason why hyper realistic games are a problem and expecting all games to fit that mold is bad. your bookshelf is a background detail, it’s fine if all books are just flat colors. using ai for this is the worst of both worlds: it looks unimpressive (half the reason people like hyper realism in games is that they can go "whoa look at all the effort they put in!"), and it takes a massive amount of space on people’s hard drives for no reason!

Gen-AI use is fine

It's really not. There's already enough procedurally generated GACHA crap. Plus the games that are barely more than T&A Simulator. Hooking this up to the AI pipeline and blasting it into Steam or some similar digital games marketplace is bordering on an act of violence.

It doesn’t make a gamedev any holier or respectable if they torture themselves by hand drawing 1000 unique titles and textures for bookspines for some NPCs bookshelf.

I mean, this is what really separates the Men from the Boys when it comes to game development. You come at this thinking "Aha, what kind of dumbshit would have 1000 unique ideas for tiles and textures? How could that possible add to a player's experience?" And yet this is exactly what makes a FromSoft game or a Hideo Kojima title or a top tier FF title or old school Blizzard or Bioware or Ubisoft or Nintendo game stand out from the pack.

The loving attention to detail. The craftsmanship and creativity and invention, when translating an idea into a digital asset. The fact that it isn't just a reskinned cracker box CTRL+C, CTRL+V'd a thousand times across a janky looking brick wall.

You begin to see a game's age and lack of care when an expansion comes out and people are saying "X is just a reskin of Y" in the reviews. You see its strength when you're on your 100th hour of Eldin Ring or your eighth Resident Evil game, in a location you've never been getting blindsided by a creature you've never seen before.

With how controversial genAI is, you may as well stick with the free asset store for that stuff

Counterpoint: procedural generation in computer games existed at least since Rogue (1980) and is accepted as a well defined way to efficiently make randomized assets and asset combinations via set rules. It aces the tasks with trivial variation like said bookspines, but can go as complex as you set it up. Not everything can be supplemented by proc gen, but it's usually the answer when you have troubles with quantity of pieces as a priority rather than quality/uniqueness of individual ones. Examples range from Borderlands guns constructor set and Diablo maps, to Minecraft-alike sandbox worlds, to overcomplicated life sims like Dwarf Fortress where multiple systems of algorhytms shape every playthrough in a different way while also reacting to player's input.

Building such systems needs planning and thinking, but it is a potentionally endless source of intentionally designed stuff, that returns a piece on command.

GenAI though is unpredictable, unintentional and, as long as you don't build it into the game itself, consists of fixed resources you bake in.

The niche it primarily threatens is not background props, but high effort pieces like visual novel scenes, loading screens art, character's likeness, strings of dialogs and lore books that couldn't be proc gened and are created piece by piece by an artist. Making LLM create bookspines is a waste of tokens, and a waste of hard drive space too to pregen them all, it only makes sense if used in place of unique assets. And, these are the things most would prefer handcrafted for they form the face of the game more than anything else.