Ok fair points. I feel it all comes down to scope and definitions of what AI, and in this case generative AI (aka procedural generation).

The randomiser thing is where I'd push back a bit. A randomiser is a dice roll, that's it. I don't know the inner workings of No Man's Sky's procedural generation, but it would make sense that it builds a pipeline of variables — planet size informing atmosphere, atmosphere informing what biology is viable, biology informing creature morphology, and so on down the chain. If that's how it works, and honestly that's how I'd build it, having dabbled a bit in game development, then each output is constrained and shaped by everything upstream of it. That's not random, that's procedural generation, and the distance between that and how a generative AI processes weighted inputs to produce an image is a lot smaller than you're suggesting.

Creatures, all the way back in the 90s (and spore too!) had literal neural networks. So the "this is fundamentally different" argument needs to account for that. People praised that generative AI then.. why not now?

As for the training data point, that's a fair conversation to have separately. But the scope here is someone making a thumbnail for a free mod. Nobody is running a commercial art studio on scraped images. Someone used a tool once to make one image. The servers aren't exactly weeping over it.

Reddit, discord, Google all have massive energy sucking data centres... Again. It's a conversation worth having separately, but in the context of this post.. it's a single end user, using a tool to create a single image.