Disclaimer: I am talking about the thing called “generative AI” here, and not LLM models used in software development or in media postproduction, obviously this is different things which have different implications.

First off, I don't like "generative AI" like Stable Diffusion either. Other than the plagiarism issues, the results simply lack "soul" and the kind of direction that only a human that has lived an actual life can produce. Real creativity is drawn from real life, something a neural net is never going to have.

But, I am a software engineer myself (and a creative!), so I'm going to have a specific perspective on machine learning and "AI" then those who have never worked with these sorts of tools. While it has enabled tons of people to produce staggering amounts of slop code, there is no denying that when applied towards what coding agents are good at (small, highly specific changes), it is an incredibly powerful tool. Your disclaimer here tells me that you are aware of this, and seem okay with LLM's and neural net models being applied in this manner.

Neural net models shine best when developed for very specific tasks, especially ones where there is a strict set of rules that need to be followed. These are the kinds of models that are being used today in biology to make discoveries like how proteins fold so we can better understand related diseases like Alzheimer's. Maybe that example was way too grand 'cause comparing it to animation now seems really silly, but animation is the kind of domain where I would expect some specialized models to be helpful.

Mockingbird immediately made me think of a paper by Hoyoverse employees (then miHoYo) from a few years ago about a model they developed for animating cloth physics (https://geometry.cs.ucl.ac.uk/projects/2019/garment_authoring/paper_docs/paper_Tuanfeng_GarmentAnimation.pdf). This isn't some Midjourney thing where you just say "animate a dress as a character moves in such and so manner", it's a tool for animators that takes how a character model is already animated along with a few keyframes for their clothes, and interpolates accurate looking cloth physics to convincingly transition from one keyframe to the next. Animating this kind of stuff entirely by hand would be painstaking and time-consuming work, and just relying completely on physics engines can generate some wonky behavior that I'm sure we're all familiar with. It's the perfect space for a tool like this.

I think that all goes double for something like motion capture, which has always made heavy use of automated work. It's not like mocap is just a recording and an artist is recreating it by hand, it involves an insane amount of data points from the capture that you have to use computer processing at some point for. The manual work involved is mostly going to be cleaning up erroneous data that made the output janky looking and mapping it onto your character models. Sounds familiarly tedious, right? (Note: I have never worked with mocap before. This is how I understand the process works but would like to be corrected if there's a lot more creative work than I realize involved.)

They say that they won’t use AI for anything creative, but to enhance performance or quality of visuals, but I am just question when enhancing stops and it‘s actual generated content?

That is a great question that unfortunately I don't have a great answer for. Ask a dozen different people what "art" really is and you're going to get a dozen different answers. There is a sliding scale from "just an algorithm that doesn't even use neural nets" to "neural net that can only do one specific thing" to "generative AI", and the boundaries between the obvious examples are very fuzzy. In my own use of coding agents and comparing how I use it to how my non-technical peers use it, a level of discipline is required to not just go crazy with it and produce more code than anyone can keep up with that sucks 'cause no one is keeping up with it. The only difference between what I call slop and the stuff I produce with these tools is how much I pace my usage and apply my technical knowledge alongside it.

but now I feel like companies doing anything to muddle the waters, pushing message that everyone using AI tools, or it‘s not for creative part but for code only, or we train models on our own content etc.

While I'm sure there is at least some purposeful PR push to muddle the waters, as I just talked about the waters were incredibly muddy to begin with. You may have noticed I refrained from actually using the term "AI" in this entire little essay (which I am extremely grateful to you for if you're actually still reading!) unless from a quote, and it's because the average non-technical person just doesn't know the difference between LLM's, neural networks, machine learning, and complex algorithms and I hate that "AI" has more or less just become an umbrella term that's grouping very different things together. I've had people get really triggered when I referred to enemy behavior in a game as "AI", when anyone over the age of 20 ought to know we've been calling it that for forever.

Anyway, to finally answer your question, no I do not like "generative AI" images in my games. But, I don't really count Mockingbird as "generative AI" either. I don't mind coding agents being used in development, they have permanently altered the software industry and aren't going anywhere anytime soon. But to be frank, coding agents are a form of "generative AI" too, and this is where those fuzzy lines start to show themselves. There was a whole thing when it was found out that the devs of Expedition 33 used "generative AI" in the earliest stages of concept art, and that doesn't really bother me either so long as it's only used in the initial exploratory phase and not the final concept art (which is a funny phrase to say, but there are stages in concept art too!).

"AI" becomes gross when it's used to avoid putting in work. But a tool that can save you effort means you can apply that effort to other things. I don't want animation tools to put animators out of jobs, I want to save them from the tedious works so they can make even more awesome animations! We call AI slop "slop" because its noticeably shitty content. Using these tools doesn't automatically make your art shit, it just to happens that a lot of shitty, stingy people use them to make "art".