I'm not saying the AI art is superior. It's not. Art has no superiority, it's subjective.
Subjectively, I prefer the AI. But it's perfectly valid to prefer Akabur's. It's silly to act like one has more value than the other because it happens to match your personal preference. The only non-subjective value a work of art can have is how often it's subjectively liked by a large segment of the population. Anyone with a niche kink will tell you exactly how much that particular metric matters too; sometimes, great things come in niche packages.
As far as I'm concerned, the AI art here is just to supplement the dev's art skills and make development easier. I'm no more offended by him using AI to create the initial sketch than I would be to find ChatGPT had been used to make the initial code skeleton for the game, or hunt for syntactic bugs. Both of those being things ChatGPT is extremely useful for.