I don't think the author is posing as a professional. These models are like having a 3D printer at home. Very handy in a pinch, but what they make doesn't replace the real thing.
The problem isn't that they look shitty to pixel artists or experts, they look shitty for anyone with a bit of observation.
It's junk art the same way Mc Donald's is junk food.
I think we could do a bit better here with the explanation of what looks bad to you..
- the magenta background is still visible along the edges - the color palette is all over the place - random noise pixels of totally different colors are visible scattered around - the lighting and shading doesn't look that good
There's plenty of real food that is as heavy and as salted, and as such no healthier, than junk food. But it actually tastes good. (I can't exactly put the finger on what makes an Italian pizza better than a US 7/11 one, but it's not about the former being healthier).
McDonalds', over time, will make you less healthy.
AI slop over time will perhaps change aesthetics, but hard to chalk that up to anything other than personal preference.
That's the wrong layer to tackle this problem. Or I should say: that's necessary, but not sufficient. Yes, the model should be trained to roughly generate something which looks like pixel art (i.e. with a concrete pixel size, reduced/consistent-ish palette, etc.), but enforcing that should be done deterministically in post-processing.
I just don't get the complaints about "use proper art" when it comes to games. Most of the time the game has some other, far more glaring, visual issues (anti-aliasing, clipping, icons-not-matching-items).
I have a suspicion that when you're looking at (and generating, because you then look at the results) AI generated images and text more you get desensitized and are more likely to say that something looks okay when to other people it won't.
How come pretty much every modern UI is garbage? Are the devs just lazy? Like google.com on mobile does not have parity with the desktop version (there's no "set specific date range option).
In anything you do, there's a point where you've got to say "okay, this is good enough" and ship it. In fact, I would argue that using pixel art itself is "settling" in the majority of cases.
you either trust and/or verify. the people clearly cannot verify and clearly do trust. vagueposting about ai bad won't break that vacuous trust, on the contrary, due to the incentives involved, induces distrust on the human expert side.
so maybe you wanna actually elaborate?
The worst result would be if these models were any good vs being absolute slop. Then human artists would need to worry. But in fact there is no need to worry at all, as surely people (aside from a few people with bad taste) will clearly see the difference.