> AI placeholders during development as it can majorly speed up/unblock
Zero-effort placeholders have existed for decades without GenAI, and were better at the job. The ideal placeholder gives an idea of what needs to go there, while also being obvious that it needs to be replaced. This [1] is an example of an ideal placeholder, and it was made without GenAI. It's bad, and that's good!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/totalwar/comments/1l9j2kz/new_amazi...
A GenAI placeholder fails at both halves of what a placeholder needs to do. There's no benefit for a placeholder to be good enough to fly under the radar unless you want it to be able to sneak through.
it's not better as they fundamentally fail to capture the atmosphere and look of a scene
this means that for some use cases (early QA, design 3D design tweaks before the final graphic is available etc.) they are fully useless
it's both viable and strongly preferable to track placeholders in some consistent way unrelated to their looks (e.g. have a bool property associated with each placeholder). Or else you might overlook some rarely seen corner cases textures when doing the final cleanup
so no, placeholder don't need to be obvious at all, and like mentioned them looking out of place can be an issues for some usages. Having something resembling the final design is better _iff_ it's cheap to do.
so no they aren't failing, they are succeeding, if you have proper tooling and don't rely on a crutch like "I will surely notice them because they look bad"