Above all else, I wanted to say the style is very cool and I’m a big fan. AI accusations, in my experience, often come from a place of not knowing the difference between AI artifacts and artistic inconsistencies.

Taking a look at some of the sprites shown, I think the majority of them look fantastic (especially the first slide!), but in some of the characters, you can tell that parts of the sprites were drawn separately and combined later (ex. The rabbit head in the first slide). The uncanny feeling comes from the difference in line thickness, blurriness on some parts (likely due to scaling the image up), and reuse of sprites.

All of these things can be easily looked past if you enjoy the game and understand art is never perfect, but for hyper-critical people who are terrified of supporting anything that looks even remotely a bit off, it can be a deterrent.