Sorry dude, I don't believe you. Largely for the same reasons that I wouldn't trust any excuse given if I was a teacher who caught my student plagiarizing their work; even if it was something as 'trivial' as the source page of a report. Once you've crossed the mental line and justified to yourself why you are the special little snowflake, that you deserve special exception, and it's okay for you personally to profit from the stolen work of countless other artists? At that point, I have zero reason to trust anything you say, let alone buy any self-serving justification you might offer. You're already using the magic plagiarism box, I have ZERO reason to trust when you claim that you coded it, or wrote the script, or only trained the model from your own work. Yeah, I don't buy it; and anyone's who does suffers from a crippling lack of skepticism.
Yeah, game dev is hard; same as anything else worth doing tends to be. But I have 1,000% more respect for the person raw-dogging MS Paint doodles for art assets than I am anyone phoning it in with Gen-AI. The MS Paint doodles might look like shit, but there is a level of honesty, ownership, pride, and authenticity to putting that work out there and owning it for what it is. It represents a level of artistic integrity that hacks taking the easy way out with Gen-AI will never understand. But grifters don't want to use the MS Paint doodles, because they're more interested in having something they can sell to horney normies with undiscerning tastes, rather than any desire to put real effort into something original or of their own volition. If you genuinely cared about 'your work', then you would make sure it is actually your work, and wouldn't risk poisoning the well by introducing the doubt fostered with Gen-AI.
But you didn't, and that tells me really all I needed to know...