I’m not entirely sure what you’re asking, but the main difficulty here is that using AI, even just for temp assets, is a virtue signal that demonstrates bad virtues. That’s why it’s socially repulsive. It’s like inviting someone into your home and watching them stick their fingers in the soup.

It’s not that using an AI asset for exactly 5 minutes only before swapping it out, and never even committing it to your git history—it’s not that this disqualifies your work from being meaningful in other ways, it’s just that being weak on this front, morally, makes you seem like kind of a dipshit. It’s a failure to reject the siren’s song that leads sailors to their death, you know?

And for what it’s worth, I love seeing passionate work. As a proper art enjoyer, a professional liker of things, cubes and cylinders do nothing to dissuade me.

Stats.

Does anyone else think that the old refrain of letting nerds run the world was actually incredibly misguided because nearly all of them lack the social skills necessary to not be sociopaths?

Nope. AI is a black box that gives you what it gives you: you lose the creative direction of whatever decisions you leave up to it.

You think my problem with AI is that it costs money?

Well, you’re not putting it to very good use.

By feeding people’s collective cynicism, lack of social skills, general paranoia, lack of trust in each other, waning hope for the future, etc.

Do have a humanities background? All tech people should have one.

In a year it’s going to be nearly impossible to say no game can have any AI used at all,

Damn, that sucks. I guess I’ll have to find a new hobby.

That is procedural generation using an algorithm you can not only look up but even modify.