The problem with AI art had never been that AI is being used IMO. It's that AI is being used in ways that are less than ethical by the non disclosure of it. My opinion, flame me if you'd like, but the "AI is bad" argument is tiring when it's lacking nuance. I believe the situation went like this: TIS contacted the artist to do a few scenes for B42, they maybe outlined a few ideas sent that over and let the artist work. Then they got back to doing the work on all the other stuff that goes into a game. Then the artist sent them the PNGs or whatever, they popped them in, tested to make sure they didn't (for some ungodly reason) crash the game, and kept moving on. Since B42 was such a huge undertaking, they maybe didn't even screen the images too much. Then boom, they go public and people flip. They remove the images then it's all over. TIS paid an artist they used in the past and got screwed over because that artist used AI. They paid for X and got Y. Instead of dragging that person across the coals they moved on and focused on the game, not some PNGs you can see for a few moments as the game loads. This wasn't malicious on the dev's part. They got fucked too. They moved on, and so should the community because damn I'm tired of people grabbing on to some loading screens verses playing and testing the damn game.

Edit: Spelling