the thing is this indie group, have been creating boardgames since before genAI models for artwork were popular. their first game in 2016 (top 10 since its release as rated by hobbyists among over a thousand other games) and subsequent expansions on kickstarter did really well even with public domain artwork that dont even look like they fit into a cohesive set. the expansion fetching usually close to a million dollars on kickstarter each time even before retail release
what makes the game appealing in-spite of the public domain artwork have long been discussed. so to me and possibly the journalist it seems like a question why they felt the need to use genAI art now with so many successful releases without it in the past seems to come off like not wanting to pay for better than public domain artwork
yes but it comes off as really hypocritical of companies putting that in their Terms because they know rival genAI models could train on their output data to undercut them the same way they trained freely off of human’s data to undercut humans. and somehow its only ok if theyre the one benefiting from it because they have a bigger team of lawyers