> But creating and picking those placeholders used to be somebody's job, maybe a junior artist.

Is it really though? After all it's just maybe a junior artist.

I've had to work with some form of asset pipeline for the past ten years. The past six in an actual game though not AAA. In all these years, devs have had the privilege of picking placeholders when the actual asset is not yet available. Sometimes, we just lift it off Google Images. Sometimes we pick a random sprite/image in our pre-existing collection. The important part is to not let the placeholder end up in the "finished" product.

> It's up to the Indie Game Awards to decide the criteria.

True and I'm really not too fond of GenAI myself but I can't be arsed to raise a fuss over Sandfall's admission here. As I said above, the line for me is to not let GenAI assets end up in the finished product.