Idk if anybody cares, but here is my opinion on A.I. art in games:
It can be both great and horrible. Bad examples of it are games where the art looks really good and you get the game and all you get is a hot pile of garbage that either doesnt work or has writing that seems like a 5 year old wrote it or it was machine-translated by ChatGPT 1.0.
But great examples are single-man developers who are good competent writers and/or programmers/gamedevs that are not capable of producing good art, but have a vivid imagination of what the art should look like. Artists are high in question everywhere already. You pay big bucks for a single picture of a good artist, let along colored versions, pose variants, etc. Many good artists are able to make a living off of that at this point. But the requests are so many that a lot of them are booked months in advance or only have certain windows of time where they take new commissions, and they request premium for longer commitments (such as providing art for a game, because they would make more money taking single commissions over and over).
A.I. can be a good avenue here for developers that know they have a talent (gameplay design, writing) but aren't good at art and can't afford to continuously pay an artist, esp. the same artist.
I have encountered a few games that actually are well written and well build up in scenario and pacing and justify someone using A.I. art, cause frankly not only will they be able to have the art WAY quicker (and cheaper, although you still have to pay for premium quality A.I. art), but they will also have a lower barrier of entry to actually develop a game.
Is it ideal? Probably not. Will it replace artists? I don't believe it will anytime soon, esp. since A.I. artstyle is still quite distinct from hand-drawn art. The imperfections and uniqueness in style of human made art is still part of its charm.
But ofc it also has the downside of flooding the market with a bunch of terrible low effort cash grabs. That being said, those have been present ever since engines like Unity or RPGMaker became a household thing. And that is not bad. Sure its annoying to have to filter out all of the shitty games, but at least in the process of that we also get some really well done games that would maybe never have seen the light of day because the developer is just not good at drawing when starting with their first game.
I also think especially those devs that rely on A.I. art to help them in the first projects and ARE good at the rest of the development process, many of them are interested in acquiring more artistic skills long term, but don't feel like their current level is presentable. I think its good people like that get a chance too.
So yea. I will always prefer human-made art, but I appreciate that A.I. art can help people who are not as artistically inclined when it comes to drawing but are maybe good at writing to shine, and also that it can help make it easier for people to establish themselves in the gaming space and then build on that. I also think A.I. art can be really good for supporting small developer teams by helping them create more quantity of backgrounds, scenes and NPC characters. That is a really good use of A.I. if you ask me.
