Using generative AI to replace toil and not the creative human process is fine imo. Even doing something like generating visual things, to me, is OK if it's driven by real creative intent and doesn't result in something that looks low quality. But it's not very simple to get output that you can tweak in fine ways to get predictable changes based on specific creative intent - human language is not descriptive enough to really capture that. "A picture is worth a thousand words" is accurate. You're also shooting yourself in the foot when you end up with a ton of assets or systems that you don't have fine control over because you can't do something simple like tweak a layer of an image because what you got at the end of the day was just a raster output from a black box.

What exactly does this mean?

If you use an LLM to help with the code does that count? Or is this just about writing and art assets?

I'm also wondering if using AI to make concept art / placeholder text and then replacing it later counts?

The conversation around gen AI seems to go to putting people out of work or replacing tons of human effort, and I'm sure some companies are led by people with those naive dreams, but that My Summer Car example is exactly where my head goes when I think what the future of the technology is. It's artwork that ought to be there, because the scene demands that there's art on the walls, but what that artwork is basically doesn't matter, so if gen AI can get the job done cheaply, it's probably the right tool for the job. However, I'd have thought that the scientist portraits in Jurassic World Evolution were another prime use case for it too, but people rioted over that one. Even if it's a good tool for the job, if it's poison in the marketplace, it's no longer a good tool to use.

Procedural generation of content in games is by no means a new thing. Even if the end state isn't completely procedurally generated, odds are a version of the asset was initially and a human touched it up as necessary. When you're talking about large asset sets (open world and/or large maps, tons of textures, lots of weapons, etc) odds are they weren't all 100% hand made. Could you imagine making the topology map and placing things like trees in something like RDR2?

That's not to say all this automation is necessary a good thing. It almost feels like we're slowly chugging through a second industrial revolution, but this time for white collar workers. I know that I tell myself that I would rather spend my time solving problems vs doing "menial" work and have written a ton of automation to remove menial work from my job. I do wonder if problem solving will become at least somewhat menial in the future.