I think you're right in the sense it's a skill development issue where a fucking piece of shit RCG (random content generator) is being used to deskill workers in a way that produces minimally-viable dogshit while not actually helping workers anywhere out much, especially in the long run. And since labour is where profit comes from it's not going to help out the companies long term either. I'm imaging them making a grass texture and going "good enough" rather than making an actually good one by someone who's actually skilled.

This is the same pattern we see with capitalist tech where instead of making the machines do the shit we can't or don't want to do, it gets the easy, fun stuff driving us into shittier and shittier work. Like machines used in logging driving humans to have to cut the trees on the dangerous slopes while the machines get the easier, safer trees on flat ground.

All technology is a labor issue going back to when the luddites smashed industrial looms

Programmer art, formulaic procgen, free assets with permissive licenses, or just going without assets for a given thing also replaces that labor. I genuinely do not believe that there can be a standard that small artists working on a small and precarious budget must hire additional artists as some kind of make-work program. Once you reach a corporate level where there are executives and shareholders making bank and teams dedicated to supporting this or that and middle managers, then the whole outfit should have to be unionized at the least and there there is an obligation to hire artists as a make-work program because it's bleeding money on useless things like shareholders and marketers and executives and middle managers so they could at least cut some more productive workers in on the deal too.

Like a lot of indie games are basically art projects some programmer is doing on the side while working a day job, that's not even at the small business scale of things. If they actually have revenue and funding, then they probably have money for artists and should have one who can do important assets, but there's still no obligation to keep scaling up to provide the sort of space-filling-noise that generative AI can make sort of ok-ish.

And not for nothing, but you know how the Luddites were like "damn, these mechanical looms would be really cool if we, the skilled workers, owned them ourselves and could use them to benefit us, but instead it's some rich bastard owning them and fucking us all over" and then they did industrial sabotage against the capitalist owned machinery instead of against machinery in general? Labor saving and labor replacing capital is bad in the hands of capitalists, because everything is bad in the hands of capitalists. "This machine replaces additional workers" is perfectly fine in the hands of workers themselves, and it can't be considered tainted simply because capitalists use similar machines for harmful purposes.

I mean I care because I think this shit is not good. If someone feels like they need to trick me though they suck.

It's like hiding what's in your food, or where materials came from or whatever.

Just don't be ashamed of what you use or be a lying dick and everyone is happy.

If you think people that find diffusion generators or llms objectionable are stupid that doesn't really entitle you to try and trick people.