The only way they might have a point is that the marketing department and the developers are probably not the same people. Unless this is a 1-5 person operation.

When I think, "AI slop" I think of things like fully automated tweets, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, etc that are literally created from prompts like, make sure to post about topic X at least once a day. OMG, that shit is toxic waste as far as I'm concerned.

...but cover images? Who TF cares‽ If the story is successful, they'll replace that image with something superior made by a real artist. In the mean time, they were never going to pay an artist anyway so it's not like it hurt artists.

Having said that, there's one very specific industry that has already been completely destroyed by AI: Stock images. Getty? Nobody pays for that anymore when they can just generate something with AI. But how upset can we be when stock image companies are such highly exploitative corporate entities?

For me, it's like someone vibe coding an alternative to Photoshop with minimal effort. Like, yeah, I'm sure it's missing loads of features and has tons of bugs but it hurts Adobe (a proper villain) so let's go! Haha.

Should people be able to request refunds of Clair Obscur where an AI generated placeholder asset ended up in production? Or was Clair Obscur supposed to disclose AI use even though they believed the final product didn't use any AI generated assets?

And then there's also the question of who verifies if the asset is AI generated, AI generated but touched up by hand or actually made without AI. Because to even enforce the missing disclosure you need objective proof of AI generated asset and that's far from easy to prove.

Users can create and tag games and then exclude games based on that tag. There's even an "artificial intelligence" tag but looking at the games tagged by it that means something else than what we're discussing here.

But I think what the other person was pointing at is that developers are supposed to have AI generated content disclosure when they have any pre-generated AI content in their game or use AI to live-generate content. AI assisted tools (such a using AI to code the game) don't need to be disclosed. You can find an example of AI disclosure on ARC raiders because they've used AI to generate voices. This is something developers are supposed to fill disclosure but a lot of the devs don't even when their game does release with AI assets. And my question was that what is Valve supposed to do when the developer chooses to ignore that clause?