There’s two primary prongs to the problem that I care about, which haven’t been directly addressed.
The first is that generated images present an impossibly high barrier of entry into drawing for anyone wanting to get into art as a career. Professional-grade art has a skill-set gathered over decades, not months. Despite the potential for more creation than an unthinking plagiarism machine, people that would otherwise commission them for smaller things (the sort a junior artist might be able to do while learning) don’t necessarily see all that. Why bother becoming good if you can’t make a living being ok at it?
Without demand for mediocre art, great artists will dwindle over time, with a smaller pool of professional artists that predate the advent of LLMs. That impact is one that actually matters for the scale that this community is at.
I, personally, used to enjoy text-based adventure games but thanks to the proliferation of LLM images, there seems to be an unrealistic expectation amongst the young’uns that every narrative-based game needs visuals, solo devs be damned. There was a whole tradition of games being made in groups of three on platforms like Newgrounds that has been forgotten and abandoned thanks to individualist notions of doing everything solo, even if the end product is worse.
The second is that the people with means to use LLMs and profit off the use of LLMs are inherently wealthier due to the cost of the equipment, production, etc. Any argument attempting to use ‘culture war’ language to obfuscate a class-tinged issue is inherently going to get push-back. You can’t use one privilege to shit on another, that’s not solidarity. Does that mean I support brigading? No, but that’s why this justification is almost laser-guided to make artists and their friends mad. Especially since art has been and remains today a haven for queer, non-white, poor folk that are pushed out of other careers. One anecdotal example is not going to erase the hundreds of artists (yes, some of whom are indeed trans and disabled, join the club lol) I’ve been in community with as a writer.
The whole issue of ‘is AI bad/good/tolerable’ is a red herring from my perspective in the sense that I think there’s enough disdain for it that developers have an incentive to use non-generative art. The actual problem IMHO is having enough community outreach and social cohesion for those with art skills to want to work with developers that need their skillsets.
That’s partly the server platform being unsuited to community-building (see earlier complaints about Discourse) and partly the lack of strategic vision for the site beyond ‘try to make our own itch-adjacent monetisation platform in the background’.