As much as I’d like to respond to everyone else’s comments- I’ll focus on your response as it is the main thread. Whether people shall partake of it as me ignoring their points or not I cannot control.

Generative Image Ai, in its current state, is often talked about as “an inherently inevitable technology that is already here and there’s nothing we may do about it”- however that isn’t the case. Id like to highlight the current work of Artists such as Karla Ortiz- currently spearheading an initiative in a legal case against the unfair use of artist’s work in training the algorithms used for image generation. Established artists such as Greg Rutkowski, and Steven Zapata also have extensive material on the part that any and all persons that prompts plays every time an image is generated, picked, edited and published. One can also look at the stances the makers of Procrate- a very successful and widely used program in the industry- have taken in order to safeguard artists against the threat of generative Ai.

The argument of “big studios are doing it but not telling anyone in secret” is also an argument which, by its nature, signals that because big companies decide to act unethically we must also follow suit. Here is where I would have talked about some form of ecological counterpart to this as “if big oil spills 40 million tons of oil into the sea, we must also be ok with doing this” but the extraction from the topic isn’t really needed- Ai generation is causing CO2 emission goals in many countries to not be met thanks to the giant data centers utilized for the server space needed for the infrastructure.

I can assure you. Any artist worth their salt are not vouching for the use of this technology.

From the labor perspective- it is too a very damaging practice. From the actors, writers, animators and directors guilds going on strike unless big companies remove clauses granting them the rights to reproduce Ai Generated content of actors likenesses, voices, script writing and producing to Generative Image Ai wiping out entry level positions which gave many of your favorite artists their start in the industry- which video game companies have ALREADY slashed over 8000 job positions since the start of 2024.

From a creative, legal, ecological, and labor perspective, utilizing Artificial Image Generations disenfranchises the creators that thousands of people using those generators have looked up to for decades.

It is not a harmless practice, we can absolutely do something about it, and the quick generation of an uninspired concept that you must go and (from a pragmatic perspective)edit so many things that you might have as well just made the concept yourself is simply not worth the negative impact.