I never said that I didn't believe it would eventually be good enough, I said that it isn't good enough. As in, now. I'm actually pretty positive on AI and I think it'll be a net positive and that the "AI art is theft" crowd are talking through their asses. But as it stands currently at the time of posting, AI art can only really reach "good" with a lot of work and hundreds of generations to get the perfect seed. Most of the time when AI is used it's used by an amateur and with little time investment, and so barely manages mediocre even when it's doing well.
It doesn't compare to hand-drawn art by someone with actual talent like the one doing this project, not at the current time. It'll take quite a bit more advancement to get the same level of consistency and the incremental boosts to quality needed to do that. Even then, the actual user will need to sit down and actually try some to get good results, and you and I both know there's plenty of people who will never do that.
I really hate to repeat myself, but you're just again expressing how ignorant you are about the advancement of AI and are yet ignoring that this was from startups without any software or hardware support from tech giants... their recent involvement has already quadrupled advancements in less than a year, ala Microsoft partnering with OpenAI. Apple only this month announced they are making their own AI, etc. It's not going to take "some time," Sora is already mind-blowing. Within a year, we will probably advance more than we have in the last
six years. Some of the non-public showcases out there are insane.
And as much as I love this game's art, let's be real. AI is already quite capable of surpassing this game (in quality, his art style has its own particular allure that would be much harder to replicate). Also, art that used to take some amount of effort with prompts and negatives is now the default and you get even better results when you bother to actually put effort. It can get pretty technical, but in a logical and mechanical way which for a lot of people is far easier than drawing, shading, coloring, and animating.
I do think traditional art will always have its place and good on ero devs who use it, but the real "you and I both know" here is that 90% of ero games look like crap or use models from other games or preexisting programs, including some of the top VNs and games here. Like, brah, come on, stop being crazy.
One more year,
at most, + the open sourcing of Sora animation and it'll already surpass 90% of the indie ero games. Maybe another year for the support industry to make streamlined programs to help things along, and you really won't know whether someone used AI or not and most won't even care because the quality isn't good.
And once again, it really, really doesn't matter. These are ero
games. We already have a problem with glorified gallery dispensers. I'm more interested in seeing a talented writer and/or coder with a good imagination more easily make entertaining games and not have to worry about either also being an artist or finding one willing to do their specific kind of smut.
And as consumers, we only benefit.
tl;dr is this a stupid argument being repeated every year yet every year the goal posts inch forward while I cross my arms and roll my eyes as AI advances as ridiculously fast as said it would.
And apparently I'm a prophet for seeing the obvious trajectory here given, I don't know, all of human history, but whatever. Opinions won't change reality. Ping me in 3 years and let's talk lol.