this is actually smth i think and talk about a lot, so it's very fun to see someone who has similar thoughts as I do... I disagree with how you've put some of this, I think, but fundamentally I do agree with you.
i miss how old AI generated art used to look a LOT. i think what you said about wanting to see people use the medium in ways other than to "maximize anime women output"... pretty much exactly sums my feelings on it up.I MISS "name one thing in this image" SO BAD... i loved the fucked up computer pattern recognition and output. i miss her. humans definitely CAN hit that level of abstraction, but the way human and machine pattern recognition work ARE inherently different, and its so intereseting... idk. i miss hher...
i don't know what you know about vocal synth? i'm gonna assume not a ton. but there's a lot of commercial AI-trained singing synthesizers out there — but they're ethically trained, and the community generally understands this, so everyone's chill with it. I think that in most cases you Could probably get around the AI asset ban as long as you communicate that your assets are locally + ethically trained? i think it's bizarre that I have yet to see that "as long as its ethical and not environmentally harmful" sentiment echoed elsewhere, but i DO suspect it exists. ...it's just that genAI's primary usages have understandable bred a LOT of contempt for it.
i will say: i pretty strongly disagree what you've said about using AI to generate assets to quickly create something that feels polished. I think, honestly, that this echoes part of the issue I have with most genAI output right now: we're defining "polish" in a decidedly bizarre way here. as the toxic yuri jam said: it doesn't need to be "good"! if you can code, you can open MSpaint and scribble an idea with your mouse real quick! and you CAN design a game in such a way that this CAN be a final asset, and it CAN be effective. i want to see more of that! because the way someone makes that asset, even if it's a 30 second scribble, still tells you so much about how they see the world. i too like when people have the tools, but it they DO exist outside of AI already. you can make a game with final sprites that are all photographs of pen scribbles on the back of receipts if that's all you have. the true metric of polish is simply the cohesion of the vision...
...sorry, this got. quite long. I trimmed it down, even, but as I said: i have a lot of feelings and thoughts about this. thank you for making this and sharing yours.