We're not talking about a development team of 100+ artists here and a company forcing them to work 80 hour crunch weeks leading up to launch like much of the industry.

I don't know exactly how their 30 or so team members break down for specialties, but I'm willing to bet we're talking maybe 5 asset artists. Making the tens or hundreds of thousands of concept art pieces, and in game assets. Their time is finite and much better spent working on final assets than making placeholders that will just be replaced later. Experimenting with AI and dripping a placeholder in during month 6 that never gets touched again, and the final asset is made but missed when swapping them in at the end of development isn't exactly damning

Literally removing work from a human(concept artist)

It's not really "removing" work from a human, it's utilizing the time of a very small and limited team more wisely. The AI didn't replace a human, there was never going to be an additional person hired just to make that placeholder, at worst it just let the existing artists spend more time making final assets.

That's not what a concept artist does, concept artists (if they had one) did the work before, game artists are still doing the work while the generated placeholders are in place, no person's job was compromised by using generated placeholders. That being said, if any placeholder made it into the final game then fuck them.

Ah gotcha, article is just written poorly then.

Dude, it was 2022. AI was nothing back then. Certainly not something that people were debating the morality of at the time. It was a new tool. A developer tried it out for a few very minor assets that were only meant to be placeholders. This was't "literally removing work from a human(concept artist)". FFS, it probably was the concept artist who used it!

Like imagine a new type of paint comes out that's supposed to spread on canvas better. An artist gets some and tries a few test strokes on a blank canvas, goes "huh, interesting", and then paints over it entirely with traditional paint. Then, the public turns against the new paint. Maybe it's made from orphan blood, maybe it causes cancer; it doesn't matter why, but it is now heavily frowned upon to use it. An art studio displaying the original artists work puts out a claim that none of their art uses the new type of paint. Were they lying? Like, ya technically I guess, but if you can't see the nuance and understand how such a thing could happen, then your logic is less that of a human, and more that of a machine.