No. Instead of making designers work on Brick Texture #7298, they allowed them to work on actually interesting design bits while the necessary textures were placeholdered by AI.

Also, stolen art... The same argument comes up here as with piracy. If I take something you created, BUT you're not deprived of said thing, then it's not theft. It is a breach of licence but not theft.

I do agree that some genAI models have very questionable copyrighting issues due to source dataset usage, but, just by creating a model you haven't deprived anyone of ownership of their property. You haven't actually done any financial damage to them.

So please stop overblowing the issue and instead begin by pushing for support of artists' rights to decide if their art can be used by third parties for the purpose of AI training, which is the core issue here. And even go and push for artists' rights to reserve their art's training data usage to themselves, thus allowing artists to create their own specialised models with their own style that they can use to offer cheaper art, or even license the use of the model out for money, thereby allowing artists to directly benefit from AI instead of being fervently against it.

You're also forgetting that most companies like Sandfall Interactive, that work on a budget, have their own designers so they don't just shop around for artists, even without AI. But without AI it would've meant that those hundreds of brick etc. textured would've gotten a placeholder that was unsightly. See e.g. Valve's Source Engine pink-black checkerboard placeholder. Would you have preferred that?