edit: i am so sorry wow you got a lot of other responses while i was writing this

to me the biggest point against generated art is that it’s just crap.

A shitty man-made drawing will still have some sort of consistency between each piece, an inherent uniqueness due to the artist behind it, and the mistakes or inaccuracies aren’t nearly as jarring or disturbing. It takes some serious dedication to draw or paint something that’s unpleasant to look at.

Some schmuck with stable diffusion (or whatever the new favorite slop churner is) could generate a million picturesque landscapes, selecting only the finest of outputs, and they’d still be samey, weirdly framed, and plagued with unpleasant oddities in the details, only enjoyable from a distance and without looking for too long.

In the context of game development and illustration (comics etc), AI falls apart real fast. You often need to depict the same characters, objects, and places, possibly hundreds of times in different poses, actions, settings, etc. Weilding an image generator and sifting through dozens of results at a time, trying to find one that shows your original character doing what you want while looking the same (no sudden changes in outfit or number of fingers), sounds downright sisyphean. Not to mention the lack of intention behind each asset, subtle details or expressions being even more completely unobtainable than reasonable consistency between shots. It will either be somehow more effort than doing it yourself, or look even more low-effort than AI “art” usually is. Both outcomes are inferior to doing it manually.

The only thing i can’t yet come up with a real issue against is generating boring repeating textures for 3d scenes. One of the least interesting parts of the process.

So that’s why we need real artists. Because AI slop looks like shit.