Exhausted by GenAI "Art"
Part of what I do for my circle Avenue Q (and for myself in my solo projects) is sourcing and curating asset materials. These are textures, sprites, background illustrations, clip arts, sound effects, code snippets... basically any piece we can process and edit to supplant parts we make ourselves. A lot more people are making assets compared to the number of people actually making games, so traditionally many makers are happy to share their creations and see them appear somewhere. It's a vibrant world, as asset makers can just make anything they want outside of any team-specific obligations.
I used to enjoy this process. It's amazing how many wonderful things people shared just because they like to do so. I may not have time to do full games, but here have a set of fishes I draw that you may use in a fishing game. Packs will have small notes from the makers, something encouraging like "I look forward to what you make with this :D" and sometimes you get the drive to make something just to feature this cool stuff. I also enjoyed writing thank you notes to the asset makers, along with the links to the finished project for them to peruse.
Well, that task has been getting increasingly hard. And frustrating. Be it on itch.io, booth.pm, or dlsite, the storefronts are increasingly flooded by GenAI art, often with few ways to filter them out. Some people are nice enough to properly state that somewhere in the store page, many people are... not. Sometimes you have to download samples to check and groan because you've just wasted your time.
So far I've been avoiding the big 300+ packs, but there are cool makers out there who genuinely have packs this big (usually an accumulation of many years of creation + mostly variants/recolors). I end up avoiding certain art styles and asset classes too, which is a shame for someone actually making them.
You'd think filtering for paid assets would yield better results, but no. There are many, many, many accounts pumping these junks at considerable prices and impossible pace. It really kills the mood and makes life difficult for me, but most importantly they drown actual asset makers.
It's sad that we end up associating many perfectly nice, perfectly valid styles with AI, which degrades someone's chosen styles in the process.
It's making me cynical and bitter.
I wish I know a better way.
For now, it's safer for me to stick with my old collection and MVNA entries.