That gets to something I’ve often thought. AI is like reinventing the wheel constantly. If there’s 20 games using AI placeholders for a tree they’ll generate 20 different placeholders. Like let’s just say we are letting them use AI in this scenario. Why would you not simply use AI to generate placeholder textures for any object you could think of, and then publish those and everyone use the same ones? Generating new ones for every person is so insanely wasteful if all it needs to do is be a placeholder.

royalty free textures, materials songs and sounds you can use nowadays

For my own game I’m using stuff from kenney.nl as placeholders, and the thing is I don’t think anybody would rake me over the coals if some of those ended up in the final product - wheras if we take these companies at their word that AI keeps ending up in their games by accident then the risk of letting an AI asset into your process is massive. People really, really don’t like to see it.

Early in AI image generators, before the consensus developed, I made a game using AI for placeholders. It was faster than programmer art, and covered a wider range of stuff than royalty free art. It could’ve been a good workflow if the zeitgeist around AI image generation settled on “replacing AI images with real art is a new kind of job for a contract artist.”

But the “advancement” in AI image gen has been laser-focused on replicating production-quality commercial art in a narrow range of the most common commercial styles (Warcraft, dark fantasy, anime waifu), the reification of the desires of creatively bankrupt rich people who want interchangeable cogs rather than art. People who would be better served by ripping the models from Warcraft, but can’t because they respect copyright as much as they disrespect artists. It’s absolutely tainted with a radioactive garbage ideology at this point, you can’t just ask an artist to ignore that and replace it.

it takes time to go through library assets and presumably you can generate something more specific in one or two tries.

i’m grey box pilled so i don’t care too much about placeholder textures and would never use gen ai for that, but on the other hand if you’re showing your game to the public, everyone is a dumbass and will look at a pre-alpha and complain that it doesn’t look like red dead