> Players only object against AI art assets. And only when they're painfully obvious.
Restaurant-goers only object against you spitting in their food if it's painfully obvious (i.e. they see you do it, or they taste it)
Players are buying your art. They are valuing it based on how you say you made it. They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI (where someone else made the art and you just shoved it together... and the combination didn't add up to much) and they come down hard on AI slop today, especially if you don't disclose it and you get caught.
> They came down hard on asset-flipping shovelware before the rise of AI
That’s not what I remember, I remember PUBG being a viral hit that extensively used asset flipping.
The more nuanced take is that, if somehow your game is actually good or interesting despite being full of other people's assets, players will see the value that you created (e.g. making a fun game). This is missing in most "asset-flip" games.
Another example comes from Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, which despite the fact it uses a lot of pre-bought art assets, the entire game has the indisputable hallmark of Bennett Foddy -- it has a ridiculously tricky control mechanism, and the whole game world you play in, should you make any mistakes, has a strong likelyhood of dropping you right back at the start, and it's all your own fault for not being able to recover from your mistakes under pressure. You can see this theme in his other games like QWOP and Baby Steps