Look, I understand wanting to do everything by hand and feeling proud of pure manual work — that’s your choice.
But calling AI in game development “lazy, sloppy and nonefficient” is straight-up wrong in 2026. Yes, AI outputs are often inconsistent, animations need heavy cleanup, styles break across scenes, and you scrap a ton of garbage generations. Copyright issues are real and some games get called out for it. Nobody denies those problems.
The reality is different for most indie and solo devs: tools like Leonardo AI with custom LoRAs, Scenario, or Meshy let you generate consistent sprites, textures, tilesets and concepts in minutes instead of days. You iterate 30 variations fast, pick the best, then hand-refine the key assets and animate the important parts yourself. That’s not laziness — that’s smart use of time.
Solo devs using AI finish prototypes and full games much faster, focusing their limited hours on gameplay and polish instead of grinding 500 background tiles by hand. Even bigger titles have used it for concepts and filler (like some Ubisoft and Treyarch pipelines). Pretending this has “zero value” just ignores how the industry actually works now.
If you prefer spending weeks drawing every pixel manually, go for it. But don’t bash people using available tools as “smooth brain” or “lazy” just because you like the old way
the industry is changing.