Yes. I'm having fun making an indie game, which will most likely never see the light of day, let alone profit. I'd definitely pay cents to dollars to have fitting background music. There's no chance I'd pay for a human musician.
Why not? The experience of working with a freelancer for a piece of creative art is more or less like prompting except they take longer to reply, understand better most of the time, write/spell worse, but produce way better results, especially after two/three iterations ("prompts").
I occasionally commision visual art from young artists/students via Krita's web forum, and what I find to be true is that if I had AI do the same art, it would just be exactly what I ask the AI to do or iterate toward (I'm detail-oriented enough, and iteration rounds are cheaper and more plenty). If I ask a human instead, I get the somewhat-unpredictable input of another creative mind besides my own brain, and often this sums up to something greater.
It really depends on what you want/need, augment/extrapolate your own creativity with AI tools, or invite someone else's.
The AI debate is for now most often centered on whether AI is capable of replacing individuals, but replacing the results you get when you put multiple humans together is another dimension entirely.
Yes, you raise a really good point too! The best collaborators I've worked with, has pushed back on what I've said and we got rolling with coming up with how it should be together, they leverage their experience and creativity, and they're good at teasing out what the client (me) actually wants and can combine it all.
What if there is no potential of the game making any money ? I am sure if a musician wants to create cover art they will give AI image generator a first pass.
It again works like LLMs, you gotta try a few and see which one works out for your use cases and tasks, some are better at some things, others not. Also, both quality and style of communication differs a lot, worth trying to figure out if that basically matches first, then quickly move on if it doesn't.
Why not treat AI-generated art as scaffolding in cases like this? Use the AI-generated music or sprites so that in early stages, your game can more closely resemble a complete game and you can think through your aesthetic preferences with concrete examples.
Then, if the project lives and grows long enough to be published, you start soliciting involvement from human artists but with minimal budgetary commitments. If your project gains momentum, you start allocating more realistic incentives for human collaborators.
