alt Hacker NewsI'm sure the answer is yes, even now there are pretty good model generators out there that can do realistic models. Experimental things like this just tend to go with cartoony styles since mistakes and lower quality (read: faster generation) can be chalked up to "lol", whereas realistic styles tend not to be forgiving with art mismatches and shading mistakes.
In modern polished games, the art team spends a lot of time tweaking things to make sure it looks great and coherent. Most people are not willing to have their agent run for a month to do this work. I don't know if it's been tried yet but I would be really interested to see the result.
Yeah any game ready asset has to be low poly. Even if it has 4k textures the polygon (vertex) count must be low to do anything meaningful (raycast, load many models).
Usually a combination of distance and frustum culling (breaking the model down into several that only load when you need to see it) with 4k or 8k textures can make a low poly game ready asset look very high quality