As a small indie dev, I haven't been paying much heed to your regular comments advocating for AI over our hand-drawn assets on our devlogs, as I respect everyone's hustle. I did, however, want to highlight a few points that you might or might not have considered.

Other than the pending legal and ethical implications that I won't go into– it's been argued to death, and an internet opinion about whether it's right or wrong isn't going to sway anyone. The simple answer is, "We just don't know what's going to happen yet."

If I were going to invest the next three to five years of my life to develop a game, I would do it right the first time. It would suck to invest that time and effort only for the courts to definitively decide two years in that the use of 3rd party AI tools does infringe on Intellectual Property rights. They might end up doing so. They might not. Large stores like Steam are playing it safe by proactively pulling a large majority of games from their catalogue that were made with the help of AI tools. Is it fair? Depends on who you ask, but it doesn't matter. The core issue is, as an indie dev who hopefully has some business sense, would you gamble the next five years of your time and energy to develop a game with AI tools?

"But my time is free! If I lose the next five years, it didn't cost me anything as I used free AI tools." I hope you don't think like this, but if you do, there is an economic concept called "opportunity cost." Think of it like this: your time might be 'free', but if you had two options, one where you create a game that ends up being a flop due to AI assets, and another where you create a game with terrible hand-drawn scribbles that lead to $1,000 in sales, even though your time is still 'free', pursuing the first option effectively 'costs' you $1,000 in losses, as had you chosen the second option, you would have made $1,000. It's oversimplified, but you get the idea.

Secondly, AI art is very easy to spot. It has a certain 'look and feel'. It's the same with RPG Maker shovelware games. They all look the same, and people associate that with "low effort" or "terrible quality". Is it fair? Probably not. I can pour my heart and soul into the best-ever RPG Maker game, worthy of being the next moonshot, but potential players will barely glance at it before clicking away. Making a game is hard, but it's the easiest part of making a successful game. Marketing your game and getting people to play what you've made is infinitely harder, as I'm sure you've noticed with your own released games.

AI is great, but it's not "there" yet. You can't create nuanced and deliberate art or stories with it. It will improve over the next few years, and it will become more usable, but it won't ever be "intentional." Not until it advanced to a truly sentient and self-aware program. Until then, it's just algorithms throwing splotches of paint on a canvas until it resembles something that matches your prompt by referencing the data it was trained on.

Lastly, and I hesitate to mention this. I look for the best in people, and I ascribe your regular comments about AI on our devlogs to you just being very excited about AI, which is great. I have a tech background, and my day job is in tech, and AI also excites me. I can't wait to see what the future holds, but we need to be sensitive to those around us.

I hope you have a lovely weekend, and I hope you take my words to heart. You probably won't, but the optimist in me chooses to believe that you will. <3