I actually share your concern about transparency, the hiding of AI use is a real problem, and I think that's a legitimate thing to push back on. I'm not hiding anything. My original post said outright that AI is part of this workflow. That's the whole point.
But I'd push back on the idea that any use of AI automatically constitutes theft or erasure. Look at what just happened with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. One of the most critically celebrated indie RPGs ever made, nine Game of the Year awards, a game people described as emotionally devastating and deeply human. It came out that the devs briefly used AI-generated placeholder textures in early 2022, most of which never even made it into the final release. The ones that slipped through were patched out within five days. The result? Two awards stripped by the Indie Game Awards, widespread calls for boycott, and a studio that by any measure poured enormous human craft into their work getting labeled "AI slop."
That reaction, to me, is the tragedy. A tiny studio with a limited budget used a tool to prototype faster and still made something genuinely extraordinary. The outrage didn't make art safer — it just punished people who were honest about their process.
I'm not a studio trying to replace artists. I'm one person building something ambitious because I love it, using every tool available to me. If that's disqualifying to you, I respect that… but I don't think it should be.