> 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.

That often costs a fair bit of money for an indie game that won't make any.

The two times I tried to use fiverr I literally got ghosted.

Their $ per mtok is quite high though for an indie project with no roi

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.

To quote Mr. Krabs: "MONEY"

I’ve had poor luck working with freelancers. Some good luck for the occasional drawing. But good help is hard to find.