Machine-made doesn’t have the same stigma as AI-made and the kid isn’t trying to sell copies of the house while competing with fully hand-made houses, so nobody is going to call the kid out on it
You did an interesting thing there. Bringing in morals. This is not about morals. It's about classification. And how you identify which class an object belongs to. It sounds to me similar like a vegan demanding vegan food, but upping it by also demanding that the cook is vegan.
Morals only come into this, if a user would use any filter for moral reasons. If I use a no-ai filter to avoid sloppy ai graphics, that's not a moral decision.
Is a game ai made, because the assets are ai made? No, of course not.
Is a game human made, if the assets are human made, but the game is assembled and "directed" by ai? Depends on your definition, since ai do not have agency. The assembling the bits part for games is called coding. And even if you would consider the game to be "ai made", you would default the agency to the ai operator and thus would need to call the game human made - if you were to even have that category. Maybe in the future there will be independently acting artififical life forms that can have agency. But right now it always falls back on the ai operator.
And my Sokoban level is the same “kind of thing” as elevation data.
Not conceptually. Yeah, yeah, you can do all sorts of shenanigans by interpreting raw image data as sound or interpret topological data as a level.
But your level would not be a level in the level kind of sense. It would be visuals. Oh, you could call it a level, if your game is a walking simulator. But conceptually, your game then acts as an image viewer. That you randomly select data just transfers some things. Like your choice of the topological map, which would then do things by that very choice. Similar as to how a photographer would chose which picture to use. There is still decision and not mere displaying things.
So, why does a block pushing game not act as mere image viewer and why is the level data not just data? And what happens, if you use "other" data as the level data?
Well, mostly you would have gibberish. A defunct level. And if you manage to have a transformation of something like topological data into a syntactical valid level, your accidental level probably would not make sense or would not be solveable. And if you keep selecting topological datasets until you achieve a valid level, a large part of your level design would be the selection process.
Note how I casually mentioned the syntactical bit? A level has syntax, even if it is primitive plain symbols. And if it has no syntax, but is just data that is shown, you would not call it a level for a block pushing game, you would call it a background image. Or you would call it an area "level" of your walking simulator game.
But all this is besides the point. A level is not something you would need to have a separate category or select none, because it does not perfectly fit. If you hand code a block pushing game and only make the levels with ai, I would expect a developer to select graphics, code or text, or a combination of it. Depends on how the level was made. If an image generator was used, graphics fits. If you asked a chatbot, it's text or code or both. And that will depend on the preconceptions of that developer, how they understand the continum between data and code. And users might disagree here.
But that's tags, there will always be disagreement. I saw a game get tagged as point & click by the developer. The justification apparatnly was, because you point and click .