It's bad because it takes someone's job? However, that job was mundane petty work that seniors didn't want to bother with. Were cars terrible for taking all of those stableboy jobs? Is Excel or data engineering terrible for the obliteration of data entry and low level bookkeeping jobs? Or is it not just a slippery slope argument, when what's happening is IMO evolution of tech? IMO People will adapt. While it's up to any event organizers to decide their rules, AI witch-hunts are a Luddite response. AI/LLM can be major tools in the belt of indies to dethrone AAA. I'd like to be clear that I'm arguing in favor of tooling such as the example of placeholder usage and a pipeline to remove it. I wouldn't defend a scumbag leveraging AI to ripoff another game, artist, or dev. It just seems like the lines are being blurred to justify AI witchhunts.

The game industry, especially AAA, is actually having major identity crisis right now as technology evolves and jobs adapt around the new tool of AI/LLMs. The game awards (not indie) should demonstrate this dolphin committee you fear already exists because the limiting factor in all industries are major resources: time, capital, experience. AI/LLMs will enable far more high skill work to be accomplished with less experience, time, and possibly capital (sidestepping ethics/practicality of data centers).