The reason is simple. No matter what kind of game it is, even if the AI was trained ethically on publicly available, copyrighted material, people will try to attack it and bury it just because it has an AI tag. I know how to use AI without making it obvious. And companies are the same. They claim in public that they don’t use generative AI, but in reality, most of them do. Especially in the subculture scene.

every major game company I know uses it, lol. If you don’t believe me, go check the games yourself. Anyone who has used AI image generation a lot will be able to tell.

And even if they get caught, they’ll probably just say it was an artist’s independent decision, fire that person, and move on. This is exactly the kind of world the antis wanted and created. The ones who end up getting hurt are the artists themselves. Companies have always done this kind of thing, and they have no intention of stopping their cost-cutting.

Anyway, I’m the same. I have no intention of adding the tag they want. I could even say in public, “I don’t use generative AI. That isn’t art,” lol. All I’d have to do is create a fake artist name and delegate it to that persona. There are plenty of other techniques besides that.

The reason is simple. No matter what kind of game it is, even if the AI was trained ethically on publicly available, copyrighted material, people will try to attack it and bury it just because it has an AI tag. I know how to use AI without making it obvious. And companies are the same. They claim in public that they don’t use generative AI, but in reality, most of them do. Especially in the subculture scene.

every major game company I know uses it, lol. If you don’t believe me, go check the games yourself. Anyone who has used AI image generation a lot will be able to tell.

And even if they get caught, they’ll probably just say it was an artist’s independent decision, fire that person, and move on. This is exactly the kind of world the antis wanted and created. The ones who end up getting hurt are the artists themselves. Companies have always done this kind of thing, and they have no intention of stopping their cost-cutting.

Anyway, I’m the same. I have no intention of adding the tag they want. I could even say in public, “I don’t use generative AI. That isn’t art,” lol. All I’d have to do is create a fake artist name and delegate it to that persona. There are plenty of other techniques besides that.

The reason is simple. No matter what kind of game it is, even if the AI was trained ethically on publicly available, copyrighted material, people will try to attack it and bury it just because it has an AI tag. I know how to use AI without making it obvious. And companies are the same. They claim in public that they don’t use generative AI, but in reality, most of them do. Especially in the subculture scene.

every major game company I know uses it, lol. If you don’t believe me, go check the games yourself. Anyone who has used AI image generation a lot will be able to tell.

And even if they get caught, they’ll probably just say it was an artist’s independent decision, fire that person, and move on. This is exactly the kind of world the antis wanted and created. The ones who end up getting hurt are the artists themselves. Companies have always done this kind of thing, and they have no intention of stopping their cost-cutting.

Anyway, I’m the same. I have no intention of adding the tag they want. I could even say in public, “I don’t use generative AI. That isn’t art,” lol. All I’d have to do is create a fake artist name and delegate it to that persona. There are plenty of other techniques besides that.

The downfall of so-called "artists"—who have long lived off the sweet scraps of conglomerates while flexing a false sense of authority—has officially begun. Having been discarded by big corporations, they are now looking for their next target to leech off of. Ironically, they’ve chosen the most vulnerable group: indie game developers.
Their true colors are on full display. They demand thousands of dollars in upfront fees from indie teams who are grinding from scratch purely for the love of art and self-expression. And if these developers can't afford it and turn to AI instead? They subject them to collective cyberbullying and online harassment.

"If you don't like it, draw it yourself."

That’s their go-to logic. It’s a laughably absurd narrative—the equivalent of someone protesting a 1,000% tax on bread, only to be mocked with, "If you're so upset, go farm your own wheat."
But don’t flatter yourselves. Those ridiculous threats are nothing more than a slow self destruction for your remaining careers. While the public still bothers to label you as "pure artists," here are two rules you must follow if you want to survive:

1. Stop Leeching Off Others' IP (Stop the "Theft")

If you want to preach about copyright and creators' rights, start by immediately halting your own clout-chasing and profiteering from fan art and commissions that steal other people's intellectual property.
You rake in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Patreon and Fanbox through unauthorized derivative works without the original creators' permission. Yet, you throw a temper tantrum over AI training, calling it "theft." It is the absolute pinnacle of sickening hypocrisy. ​(Think I'm exaggerating? The doujinshi industry is worth over $750 million, and Pixiv Fanbox’s cumulative payouts surpassed $330 million a long time ago).. If you want to demand your rights, wash your own hands first.

2. Stop Demanding "Royal Treatment" in the Indie Game Scene

Game designers, programmers, and scenario writers on indie teams aren’t idiots for taking the risk of revenue-sharing after a game’s completion. Developers already know exactly why illustrators are the only ones refusing this option, power-tripping and demanding, "Give me thousands of dollars in cash right now."
It’s because you have a safety net: you can always retreat back to the shadows to make a killing off NSFW content or illegal fan art. It’s an open secret that top-tier artists rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year purely from unauthorized fan art.

"I can just whip up a few furry drawings, sell them, and easily make more than the revenue of a game you spent years slaving over."

This pathetic sense of superiority is the root of your pride. And AI is currently smashing that exact, filthy cash cow. No wonder you’re so furious.
Now, you must stand at the exact same starting line as everyone else. Work in this harsh environment where success is never guaranteed, and shoulder the same risks as the rest of your team.
Does this feel unfair to you?
Welcome to reality. Every other creator in the world has been doing it this way from day one.

The downfall of so-called "artists"—who have long lived off the sweet scraps of conglomerates while flexing a false sense of authority—has officially begun. Having been discarded by big corporations, they are now looking for their next target to leech off of. Ironically, they’ve chosen the most vulnerable group: indie game developers. Their true colors are on full display. They demand thousands of dollars in upfront fees from indie teams who are grinding from scratch purely for the love of art and self-expression. And if these developers can't afford it and turn to AI instead? They subject them to collective cyberbullying and online harassment.

"If you don't like it, draw it yourself."

That’s their go-to logic. It’s a laughably absurd narrative—the equivalent of someone protesting a 1,000% tax on bread, only to be mocked with, "If you're so upset, go farm your own wheat." But don’t flatter yourselves. Those ridiculous threats are nothing more than a slow self destruction for your remaining careers. While the public still bothers to label you as "pure artists," here are two rules you must follow if you want to survive:

1. Stop Leeching Off Others' IP (Stop the "Theft")

If you want to preach about copyright and creators' rights, start by immediately halting your own clout-chasing and profiteering from fan art and commissions that steal other people's intellectual property. You rake in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Patreon and Fanbox through unauthorized derivative works without the original creators' permission. Yet, you throw a temper tantrum over AI training, calling it "theft." It is the absolute pinnacle of sickening hypocrisy. ​(Think I'm exaggerating? The doujinshi industry is worth over $750 million, and Pixiv Fanbox’s cumulative payouts surpassed $330 million a long time ago).. If you want to demand your rights, wash your own hands first.

2. Stop Demanding "Royal Treatment" in the Indie Game Scene

Game designers, programmers, and scenario writers on indie teams aren’t idiots for taking the risk of revenue-sharing after a game’s completion. Developers already know exactly why illustrators are the only ones refusing this option, power-tripping and demanding, "Give me thousands of dollars in cash right now." It’s because you have a safety net: you can always retreat back to the shadows to make a killing off NSFW content or illegal fan art. It’s an open secret that top-tier artists rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year purely from unauthorized fan art.

"I can just whip up a few furry drawings, sell them, and easily make more than the revenue of a game you spent years slaving over."

This pathetic sense of superiority is the root of your pride. And AI is currently smashing that exact, filthy cash cow. No wonder you’re so furious. Now, you must stand at the exact same starting line as everyone else. Work in this harsh environment where success is never guaranteed, and shoulder the same risks as the rest of your team. Does this feel unfair to you? Welcome to reality. Every other creator in the world has been doing it this way from day one.

The downfall of so-called "artists"—who have long lived off the sweet scraps of conglomerates while flexing a false sense of authority—has officially begun. Having been discarded by big corporations, they are now looking for their next target to leech off of. Ironically, they’ve chosen the most vulnerable group: indie game developers.
Their true colors are on full display. They demand thousands of dollars in upfront fees from indie teams who are grinding from scratch purely for the love of art and self-expression. And if these developers can't afford it and turn to AI instead? They subject them to collective cyberbullying and online harassment.

"If you don't like it, draw it yourself."

That’s their go-to logic. It’s a laughably absurd narrative—the equivalent of someone protesting a 1,000% tax on bread, only to be mocked with, "If you're so upset, go farm your own wheat."
But don’t flatter yourselves. Those ridiculous threats are nothing more than a slow suicide for your remaining careers. While the public still bothers to label you as "pure artists," here are two rules you must follow if you want to survive:

If you want to preach about copyright and creators' rights, start by immediately halting your own clout-chasing and profiteering from fan art and commissions that steal other people's intellectual property.
You rake in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a month on Patreon and Fanbox through unauthorized derivative works without the original creators' permission. Yet, you throw a temper tantrum over AI training, calling it "theft." It is the absolute pinnacle of sickening hypocrisy. (Think I'm exaggerating? The doujinshi industry is worth over $750 million, and Pixiv Fanbox’s cumulative payouts surpassed $330 million a long time ago).. If you want to demand your rights, wash your own hands first.

2. Stop Demanding "Royal Treatment" in the Indie Game Scene

Game designers, programmers, and scenario writers on indie teams aren’t idiots for taking the risk of revenue-sharing after a game’s completion. Developers already know exactly why illustrators are the only ones refusing this option, power-tripping and demanding, "Give me thousands of dollars in cash right now."
It’s because you have a safety net: you can always retreat back to the shadows to make a killing off NSFW content or illegal fan art. It’s an open secret that top-tier artists rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year purely from unauthorized fan art.

"I can just whip up a few furry drawings, sell them, and easily make more than the revenue of a game you spent years slaving over."

This pathetic sense of superiority is the root of your pride. And AI is currently smashing that exact, filthy cash cow. No wonder you’re so furious.
Now, you must stand at the exact same starting line as everyone else. Work in this harsh environment where success is never guaranteed, and shoulder the same risks as the rest of your team.
Does this feel unfair to you?

Welcome to reality. Every other creator in the world has been doing it this way from day one.

Had a nice dream, didn’t we? Time to wake up.

Let’s be real: making a comfortable living solely as an "artist" was never the norm. Unless you were born rich, had wealthy parents, or were already a household name, that whole career path was mostly a pipe dream. For the vast majority of human history, art has always relied on patrons, power, capital, markets, and trends to survive.

But in the internet era, some artists started having this delusion. You built careers on fanart commissions, NSFW stuff, Patreon, and Fanbox subs, acting like it was some inherent creative right. But let’s call a spade a spade: that is copyright infringement, plain and simple. You didn't exist because you were "entitled" to that market; you existed because rights holders couldn't be bothered to sue you into oblivion. You were profiting off IP theft and playing fast and loose with creative ethics.

Now that AI is cutting into that demand, why are you complaining?

Was your income really based on "pure artistic value"? Or is it more accurate to say it was built on IP theft, internet loopholes, a "gray market" mentality, and the artificial scarcity of being one of the few people who could actually draw?

When you charged thousands for a single commission, was it really because you were a genius? Was it because people purely wanted to support art? Or was it just a price tag inflated by technical gatekeeping, industry elitism, and this weird, persistent myth that "art is a sacred craft" that must be protected?

Look at the indie game industry. Many teams dive into projects with no guarantee of success, pouring time and labor into the void. Designers, devs, writers, composers, and marketers—they all share the risk of failure, completion, and sales. Yet, art commissions were always treated as this special, non-negotiable upfront cost, totally isolated from the project’s actual success or failure. Sure, labor deserves pay. But the problem is that it solidified into an entitlement—the idea that "art must be paid upfront, at a premium, and protected from risk."

AI isn't "destroying" this situation. It’s normalizing it.

People don’t have to kneel at the altar of art bottlenecks anymore. Designers can mock up their own concepts, devs can generate placeholder assets, and solo creators can finally prototype the ideas in their heads immediately. The gatekeeping is finally breaking down.

A lot of artists are sitting there, desperately hoping that corporations—who have nothing to do with art—will keep throwing money at them.

Spoiler: That dream is over.

Welcome to the real world.
good luck with the “I followed my passion and now I’m unemployed at 33” vlog arc.
AI hasn’t fully replaced that genre yet.

Had a nice dream, didn’t we? Time to wake up.

Let’s be real: making a comfortable living solely as an "artist" was never the norm. Unless you were born rich, had wealthy parents, or were already a household name, that whole career path was mostly a pipe dream. For the vast majority of human history, art has always relied on patrons, power, capital, markets, and trends to survive.

But in the internet era, some artists started having this delusion. You built careers on fanart commissions, NSFW stuff, Patreon, and Fanbox subs, acting like it was some inherent creative right. But let’s call a spade a spade: that is copyright infringement, plain and simple. You didn't exist because you were "entitled" to that market; you existed because rights holders couldn't be bothered to sue you into oblivion. You were profiting off IP theft and playing fast and loose with creative ethics.

Now that AI is cutting into that demand, why are you complaining?

Was your income really based on "pure artistic value"? Or is it more accurate to say it was built on IP theft, internet loopholes, a "gray market" mentality, and the artificial scarcity of being one of the few people who could actually draw?

When you charged thousands for a single commission, was it really because you were a genius? Was it because people purely wanted to support art? Or was it just a price tag inflated by technical gatekeeping, industry elitism, and this weird, persistent myth that "art is a sacred craft" that must be protected?

Look at the indie game industry. Many teams dive into projects with no guarantee of success, pouring time and labor into the void. Designers, devs, writers, composers, and marketers—they all share the risk of failure, completion, and sales. Yet, art commissions were always treated as this special, non-negotiable upfront cost, totally isolated from the project’s actual success or failure. Sure, labor deserves pay. But the problem is that it solidified into an entitlement—the idea that "art must be paid upfront, at a premium, and protected from risk."

AI isn't "destroying" this situation. It’s normalizing it.

People don’t have to kneel at the altar of art bottlenecks anymore. Designers can mock up their own concepts, devs can generate placeholder assets, and solo creators can finally prototype the ideas in their heads immediately. The gatekeeping is finally breaking down.

A lot of artists are sitting there, desperately hoping that corporations—who have nothing to do with art—will keep throwing money at them.

Spoiler: That dream is over.

Welcome to the real world.

Good luck with those "30-something unemployed" vlogs you're all going to be making soon. Pretty sure AI can't replace that content... yet.

When did it become clear that the loudest "artists" against AI aren't actually about the art, but about maintaining their own monopoly on creation?

If you’ve ever worked on a corporate game or a medium-to-large scale art project, you know the drill. AAA studios aren't exactly bastions of pure artistic expression; they’re profit-maximizing machines. That’s not necessarily "evil"—businesses exist to make money. But because of that, real, raw creativity is stifled. That’s why people with actual artistic integrity go indie.

And we all know the reality of the indie scene: it’s a money pit.

Promotions and marketing are massive hurdles, and unless you’re one of the lucky few, there’s no budget to speak of. Yet, we do it anyway. But the moment you need to scale—the moment you need external assets—the cost goes through the roof. We aren't talking about fan-art commissions here. You're talking about commercial work, where you add zeros to the price tag.

Indie dev is a war of attrition against your own bank account. You try to cut costs where you can, often by offering rev-share or equity. But as you've probably guessed, these "great artists" suddenly develop a sudden, desperate need for a massive upfront payout.

There's that meme about artists charging $260 for a shitty commission. Wrong. That’s the price for a sketch. If you want commercial-grade work, it's $2,600. If you want a pro who guarantees deadlines and quality? You're looking at $10,000+.

Do you see the hypocrisy yet? They don't care about the "soul" of art. They care about being the middleman. They are terrified that if you—the creator—find an alternative, their power to gatekeep and demand exorbitant fees disappears.

True artists should be excited that technology allows them to realize their inner visions regardless of budget or logistics. But these people are paralyzed by fear. They don't want a world where individual creativity can flourish; they want a world where they are the ones holding the keys to the kingdom, waiting for you to pay the toll.

The Indie Reality

Anyone who’s been part of an indie team knows the drill:

• The programmer, the writer, the designer—they’re all working for free, burning the midnight oil on top of their day jobs.
• They aren't doing it because they hate money. They’re doing it because they’re betting on the potential of the project.

But the moment you bring an artist in, they demand a heavy upfront fee. They act like they’re the only ones working, while the rest of the team is just "crazy" for working for free.

I’m not saying artists shouldn't be paid for their labor. Everyone has the right to refuse work, and everyone has the right to charge what they want.

But here’s the kicker: They refuse to share the risk (no rev-share), they demand guaranteed upfront cash, and when an indie team—desperate for a way to survive—turns to AI or other low-cost alternatives, these same artists cry "unethical" and "dehumanizing."

That isn't the language of a fellow creator. That is the language of a gatekeeper saying: "You aren't allowed to create art unless you pay for my permission."

Indie developers aren't soulless capitalists trying to squeeze workers. They are individuals burning their own time, money, and health to build a world. If you tell them, "If you can't afford my fees, don't build your game," you aren't protecting art. You’re making art a luxury for the wealthy.

The Corporate Hypocrisy

They hate AI because it democratizes creation, which destroys their leverage. They'd much rather work for a massive corporation that can afford to dump thousands into their pockets, even if the game is just a soulless cash grab.

And the irony? Most of the companies these people worship are already integrating Generative AI into their pipelines. The indie devs on Steam who get "canceled" for labeling their AI usage are just the naive ones. The corporations are doing it quietly, behind the scenes, effectively.

If you’ve ever applied for an art job lately, you know the truth: if you aren’t on board with using GenAI, you aren't even getting past the screening. The anti-AI crowd thinks they're fighting a movement, but all they’re doing is forcing companies to hide their AI usage even deeper, making the industry even more opaque.

TL;DR: The "anti-AI" sentiment in the industry isn't about ethics; it's about gatekeeping. Artists who demand massive upfront fees from broke indie teams while refusing to share the risk of a project don't care about "the art"—they care about their position as the exclusive gatekeepers of creative production.