For your first part, i agree dev art has its charms. I don’t necessarily think that charm is lost if AI is introduced with a light touch to help them out. For sure if they just prompt and use slop then yeah, thats way worse. Curious, what if a dev hires an artist, and that artist uses AI tools in some form or another? Assuming they provide what the dev wants for the project at good quality, is there still an issue here?

I do agree with some of the copyright issues and computation issues in your second part. I don’t know what the solutions and future hold for this. I honestly just cede those points to the anti-ai crowd. It doesn’t stop me from being a supporter of these tools overall, but im mostly just interested from the technology side itself. And i really only use local models to tinker with them as a hobbiest, not posting anything.

Also side note, steam is already flooded with asset flips, functionally no different, haha.