the gamedev version of this is wild. i'm working on a mobile game right now and the internal calculus is genuinely confusing: using AI to help write networking code feels totally normal, using it to generate placeholder UI feels fine, but using it for the actual visual identity of the game feels like cheating, even though technically it's all "content creation."

i think the real line is about whether the AI output is the product or a tool to build the product. AI-generated code that ships isn't really the product, the behavior it creates is. but AI-generated art that ships is the product in a way the user directly perceives. the uncanny valley isn't in the quality, it's in the relationship between the creator and the output.