What a lot of people forget about LLMs is that they are tools. Most people see them as solutions, easy answers for complex questions, the perfect result without the effort. I am fairly anti-AI these days for a lot of reasons, but the main reason is abuse of the technology, both by the users and the companies that make them. You have a good mindset in that you're thinking of using AI as a tool, a way to streamline a process that you already know and understand, to make it take less time and give more consistent results. That's the point of AI. To give a simple example, if you have to send out thousands of emails, and each one needs different data points, you can use an AI tool to draft the email and pull the data points to the draft. You know how to write the email and add those points, and you'll still need to proofread the emails to ensure their accuracy, but not having to physically type out thousands of emails saves you incredible amounts of time. That does not mean you tell AI to draft and send thousands of emails and you have nothing but free time now, because the AI will mess up, and machines can not be held accountable. I will note that for the work you do, you will need local AI on your personal computer, as that is the only good way to avoid censorship. So yeah, limited use of AI to reduce resources for exceptionally time consuming tasks seems a good idea for a single developer trying to brute force development of an amazing game.
Yeah, as I said elsewhere, I don't want to give AI any kind of freedom. I just want it to do what I want it to do, and that's generating frames in between the key frames I'll give it. So, it doesn't actually dispense me from animating, as I'll still have to pose the animation itself to render the key frames, but it will save a tremendous amount of time on the rendering. If I manage to overlook my ethical concerns, I have to admit that it can be a powerful tool. As a creator myself, and with the musical work I've been able to do with the help of Suno, I'm starting to see it as a possibility, even if I'm still afraid of it.