From my experience - people who abuse AI don't see AI's cracks any longer. Their writing changes. How they see things.

It's like the plastic surgery people. They don't realize how weird and off-putting they look.

No sane person is going to spend that massive amount of money just to see what AI thinks their games could look like. The people who buy games want to see what the devs made them look like. Not what an AI thinks the devs made. Absolutley no one wants a middleman between the art and artist. As that's supposed to be you. We don't need AI there. That's dumb as shit, and expensive as shit to boot.

Not to say your wrong, because your right. But developers absolutely waste time on sub 1% player stuff, just look at mmos.

the cost

I have a suspicion that they are ramping up to the acceptance of cost-prohibitive technologies in order to eventually transition people into cloud based gaming rig services. I can envision a AAA title that is sold as a service and cannot be run on a reasonable computer

And, to be fair, it is.

It's not. The Resident Evil side-by-side is the clearest example.

You took what was supposed to be a grim, shadowy, grungy, dusty set piece and you made it brighter, cleaner, smoother, and happier. That subverts the whole mood of the game. Now imagine DLSS 5 doing this same kind of work on a shambling zombie or a Licker or William Birkin from RE2. You really want your super mutants and murder hobos to get this kind of glow-up?

This reminds me of an old mod that got rid of all the fog in Silent Hill. People posted it to joke about how it destroyed the entire vibe, making large parts of the setting trivially easy to solve.

Even if I opened the hardware, I wouldn't use it. I want what the artist intended, not what some AI slops together. That goes for games, movies, books, paintings, etc. I'm not paying for AI, it brings no value to me. I didn't care if it's a filter, or something generated from a prompt.