It can be hard to find an artist who wants to draw a character getting railed by some mythological beast.
Internet is full of such artists and their art, to be honest.
Also, the issue isn't the AI stuff itself specifically. Its that replaced some of the better or okay scenes as well. And, of course, that it has objective troubles with quality. Scroll the thread up a bit and you will see absolutely horrendous tentacle AI scene that has glaring mistakes. Its not just a question of preference, its a question of quality.
As for the size of the dev team - they had financial support to hire actual artists. In the light of this fact it gets extremely hard to justify them on any level.
Especially because we are not talking new art - I could've somewhat understood if they'd corners there. We are talking already existing art that in some cases was better or simply not worse than the replacement. Meaning they spent their time and effort, as little as it was considering the AI generation, to improve little to nothing, if not make things worse.
Such actions reek not of small dev team but of greedy, lazy or uncaring dev team that couldn't bother to do their job.
That was paid for!
I wouldn't raise the alarm if we were talking some small project made by newbie. If someone wanted to make game ASAP and had no time or money to bother with hiring artists, I can get behind the decision to use AI. As a stop-gap, hopefully (cause at this point AI art kinda sucks still), but better make the game than languish in wait. Besides, if writing of game mechanics were good, it could compensate for lacking artwork.
But Roundscape is not small and it has financial backing from many patrons, not to mention they've had some 2 years to finalize their game. The money or time, or lack of experience shouldn't have been the issue so using AI would be justified.
They most likely had money and time, and definitely they had the experience needed. Yet they still cut corners like they were some unpaid newbie enthusiasts who couldn't wait to release their first game.
That doesn't feel right.