Buggy code, yes, but that's not what I said. Players never look at the code directly, only the end product, whereas they do look directly at the assets. My point is that the scrutiny likely is (and should be, IMO) on the direct player experience, and that ends up meaning that the code itself being sloppy is only indirectly relevant, compared to the assets that they see directly. The comparable output of the code is the behavior, which is possible to scrutinize more directly in most cases.

But the comparison to code isn’t dead code (that would be akin to what? Idk, maybe excess triangles in a mesh that didn’t need them).

But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.

The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.

A standard mind you that very few hold the code to.

> But I disagree with your premise, players ABSOLUTELY look at the output of both the code and the visual art. The code is the thing putting it on screen. It doesn’t matter how many fingers a model has, if your engine incorrectly renders it.

That sounds identical to what I was saying; the output is what matters to players, not the process.

> The scrutiny here, and the pushback against it, is actually not even about the result, it’s about the process. Even if the AI art was perfect and could not be distinguished from human art, a large fraction of people would oppose it simply because it was generated by an AI.

Yes, and that's what the entire second paragraph (which is much larger) in my first comment in this thread was talking about.