So you’re not keen on uninspired, all-the-same-looking 2D/3D art, but uninspired, all-the-same-sounding writing and VO is fine?

First, doesn't have to be if done right.

VO issue can be solved by training with the speech of different professional speakers (controversial topic, I know...) And when feeding the base LLM generating the dialog with a suitable amount of hand-written, high-quality NPC-specific examples, the same sounding writing issue can also be tackled.

But secondly, and most importantly, the choice is not between fully interactive realtime conversation using Ai or the same but human generated,
but rather between fully interactive realtime conversation using AI or non of that at all.

That's the main difference between this specific use and, say, the graphics art example.
There the alternative to AI never is "no graphics at all"...

That's the reason why I would accept AI use for this specific purpose, as it delivers something completely new and unachievable by other means, and is not only used to substitute existing human labor.

Get out of your echo chamber.

The only echo chamber I'm in is Lemmy, and playing the devil's advocate for certain topics (e.g. AI) I feel is my personal obligation to widen it up a bit to better represent the real world, despite the floods of instant downvotes.
But that's just part of the self-reinforcing process by which echo chambers manifest and stabilize themselves, so I don't care.

Claiming no dev is going without AI shows a very limited exposure.

On the contrary, I think it is the opposite.

I could well imagine still happily hacking away AI-less on my internal C-projects in my previous tiny 15-people company, with the only connection to the outside being mandatory functional specifications and clear interfaces.

But today, working at a 60k+ SW developer company serving hundreds of different kind of customers, from deep historic brownfield custom device to cutting edge virtualized manufacturing cloud solutions, the gain of using AI is so substantial, you would be totally left behind if you didn't use it.

Integrating your stuff with dozens of existing and upcoming products, written using a plethora of different tools an languages (some even based on Windows ;-) ), especially for rapid prototyping, debugging and system integration testing, the gain is substantial.

And by now the recent tools are even already at a point, where they start to know the fringe stuff in my own Company's extended portfolio better than I myself, despite working 10 years within the company.

Had that exact case just last week:
"Based on the outputs you supplied, it seems you are working on a Docker based realtime xxx image by company yyy. They use tool zzz on the lowest layer to set up containers. The zzz tool's use of SSL can be configured by setting the environment variable GnarglfarzActive=true. You might try it."
What should I say - not only was that correct, I now also knew who to connect to in the company for further support (the developers of mentioned zzz tool, which I had never heard of before).

Insanely impressive in complex environments involving many different projects and people.

I know a lot of companies working on niche C++ projects that would never use AI.

Are the companies claiming that, or the devs?

Because I would have a hard time believing the second.

AI in SW-Dev is just too powerful and convenient a tool to resist. Honestly can't think of any dev I know not using it to some degree.
And especially in obscure, long-running niche projects I imagine it an invaluable asset to be able to just throw a code snippet at the Chatbot and ask it what the heck is supposed to happen in the unstructured legacy mess (eye opening moment for me back in ChatGPT4 days).