I'm like 90% through the game and I can tell that it's definitely NOT AI. The art is much better than what current models can produce and it's very consistent in all possible poses and animations.
People are so used to what popular AI models generate that they fail to understand that all AI models were trained on a large amount of original art. Therefore there must be people who actually draw with the same style the style that AI tries to reproduce.
My brother in Christ, you can make your own models, which is what a lot of AI """"artists"""" do, take the whole portfolio of a popular artist and then create a model. Just go to any AI art gallery (like aibooru.online) and you'll see hundreds of models trained to mimic specific artists.
If it's AI then the devs have a really well trained model, on the other hand it could also have been reworked by an artist because the scenes are really good for 2D animations. Have you looked at them ingame or just the "sketches"?
I did, after a short playthrough using cheat mode, I extracted the assets from the game and checked em, and yes, even the 2D animations are AI.
Here's an example of how you can animate a picture with no layers (like an Ai generated one) using Spine (Unity and Live2D can also work).
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The example above is legit and the picture was drawn by an artist, BUT I'll give the dev some credit tho, even if he used AI art, cutting the art into pieces and then animating it using Unity is a pain in the ass, so credit where credit is due.
A. If the artist did redraw the scenes, it's not at all odd that they would adjust proportions or some minor things like hand positions in the updated drawing.
B. Even if it is AI, if it looks consistent and good, what's the problem? "AI Slop" should refer to sloppy garbage that looks uncanny or has mistakes. If the art looks good, then it looks good.
A. That usually just changes the proportion and rotation, it is the same hand, it doesn't go i.e. from an open palm to a fist, specially not after you started the rendering process, that would be less weird in the sketching or lineart phase, like that's the fucking purpose of the sketch, but in the "exampled that it's not AI" just shows two different hands after the rendering process already started.
I collect a lot of time-lapses or speed paints from different artists, because I enjoy the creative process, so I know how it goes. Here are some examples from my collection:
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B. I'll call it AI slop just because the dev is trying to pass it off as man-made art, if he was honest from the beginning I wouldn't mind, many devs use the "AI use" or "Partial AI use" tags on their games on DLsite, but he simply didn't use them while also providing no "artist" in the store page or credits. It's disingenuous and that's what I have a problem with.
In conclusion:
Unless the dev and/or artist can show their "layers", which is the one thing AI can't do yet (yes, as of a few months they can do time-lapses too, easy to spot tho), I can, without a shadow of a doubt say that it is an AI game, and deserves the "ai cg" tag. I can share the assets if anyone wants to double check.