It's not indie, it had the full support of a publisher. Indie is a handful of people making a game with their own money, not getting a millions of dollars in investment from a publisher.
The major rub of Gen AI art is profiting off of others work. If you’re never displaying it and don’t ever want it shown then who cares?
This doesnt even make sense, you just answered your own question. The major rub is exactly why we care.
There's no red tape. From the site I provided, the license allows them to use it privately or commercially.
It's placeholder and from all the options out there they could have found something.
There's also all the environmental problems with AI.
Why go through the effort of AI then for them? It's the same amount of work, well less even, you'll get a full pack of textures at different resolutions with UV maps and all, versus AI where you then have to check it and potentially do more.
It says it all, when purchasing a texture is now "stupid busywork". You literally type in what you want, get hundreds of results, buy one, put in the game. They used UE5, Epic Games have Fab and it's integrated into the engine, they even give away lots of free assets there (granted that is probably going to fill with AI slop soon). There's loads of other options out there too.
This argument of "its placeholder textures" is null.
Why are you being obtuse? If the in-house designers didn't want to make some placeholder textures, they could have used a marketplace instead of AI. Are you just going to keep going in circles?
It's been proven time and time again that a game doesnt need to compare to AA and AAA shit to be successful. You dont need a big game with a big world. There's an endless list of simple indie games that had a captivating charm that are crazy successful, all without a single bit of AI used.
Did you even read my short comment? They can buy a brick texture from one of many marketplaces. Giving an artist money directly. Instead of giving money to use stolen assets. So that argument doesnt hold up.
Yawn. I dont think AI should be used at all and obviously an unintentional use of it appearing in a search result isnt the same as giving money to an AI company to generate textures derived from stolen artwork.
They could have just bought some textures from the large supply there is out there.