I was watching a friend stream a dead game lately.

That game was developed before generating images became widespread, and sunset as that "art form" started really taking off (game-as-a-service... probably partly reverse engineered and retooled with AI too). So during its lifetime, it was pretty much AI free.

I remember having been seduced by that game's art style at the time. It wasn't "the usual guys with futuristic guns and armor", it had some stylization as well, nice color...

Watching the stream, it occurred to me that it was in fact artwork from "the days before", in a way I hadn't been hit with until that point, even as a returning artist looking at pre-AI works.

"People came up with the concepts and developed and rendered them themselves", I thought to myself. Not in a "oh look, floppy disks. How quaint!" way, either.

Weird feeling.

I would imagine a lot of it is mundane shit like getting ChatGPT to render the same room with different coloured walls or provide inspiration on plant pots. I have a decent amount of image usage and it's all things like this, not generating content I intend to distribute.