Seeing more and more games on Steam have their AI generation disclosures like ā€œdon’t worry it’s just backgrounds, voices…and so onā€.

If you can’t be bothered to make it, why should I be bothered to play it? Or write about it?

Inflammatory wording on my part, just to hammer the point home. The point still remains either way. Apologies if anyone is upset by the ā€œcan’t be bothered bitā€.

I get hundreds of emails per week, sometimes in a day - what am I gonna pick? AI, or one without? Easy choice.

And I see people are jumping on kitbashing and pre-made assets and stuff but - that is *entirely different*. Someone, an actual person, still put effort into it. Tons of games reuse assets all the time, there’s literally nothing wrong with that.

@gamingonlinux My 2 cents: AI assets should be only used as quick and dirty placeholder stuff, used exclusively to get to the prototyping phase faster, a player should never see them in the final game

Controversially(?), I hold this position for stock assets too (except for sound effects), as using them deprives the game itself for an opportunity of self-characterization and identity

@ItalianSkeletonGaming @gamingonlinux It's complicated: people may tend to keep the placeholders thinking "they are good enough". Reminds me of a small booklet I wrote: I'm no artist, so I used some AI (I guess it was Google's Imagen) for placeholder pictures and I sent to the rest of the team, which included professional illustrators. After some weeks they returned it for review: they didn't replace the placeholders! Of course, it didn't pass the review.
@ItalianSkeletonGaming @gamingonlinux I'm fine with stock assets for stuff like photo materials, where two different teams might make what are basically identical looking materials eitherway due to being copied directly from nature.