Are you running this survey with other populations, too? I think your survey results will be very skewed if you only use a specific community like the Playdate dev forum. I get the impression that, for Playdate especially, there are many developers who consider themselves as artists who use games as a medium, and so the responses may disproportionately favor human artists.
Feel free to ignore the rest of this, but if you care to hear them, here are a few thoughts that tend fly through my head when this type of question comes up:
-All of the tools you have listed use any publicly accessible image data on the internet to train. It can be tempting to claim that it isn't unethical because a human can also train on copyright-protected works... But humans are allowed a clear exception because our own enjoyment is kind of the point of this media in the first place; and we are still not allowed to publish works which overly leverage copyright-protected material. A generative tool is not a person who gains harmless enjoyment from reproducing published works. It is a tool which is made to specifically copy image data using various statistical procedures to produce similar images on command. Legally, this would not be ok using screen capture or a digital camera, nor would it be ok using a photo editing application to make existing work look somewhat different. Therefore no exception should be given to these new tools
-Depending on the type of prompt used, it can be impossible to determine how much of any number of copyright-protected images are used in a single generated image, meaning it is impossible to divvy royalties appropriately. An argument could even be made that royalties could be owed to literally all copyright holders whose images were used to train the models, which is also not possible. Therefore an offer to pay royalties is not satisfactory
-As generative AI improves (images, animations, sounds, music, maybe even entire movies and video games) it will become easier and easier to just assume that some or even most aspects of media like games was created with AI. Even statements specifically to the contrary will be under scrutiny... this really sucks for those that prefer not to use generative tools because the creation process is their entire reason for engaging in the industry in the first place. Therefore "just don't use them if you don't like them" isn't a satisfactory argument
-It is such a shame that there is a push to automate art
-The danger of the capability of these tools to produce images which look like photographs is obvious
-I'm of the opinion that AI-generated imagery which is intended to look like human-generated work should NEVER be published in any kind of project, unless it is something meant specifically to review/comment on the ability of the tools to do so. I don't see any problem with using these tools to get ideas, storyboards, prototypes, or vague drafts for a human artist to use as source material
-Image generation tools which do not produce imagery meant to look like it was made by a human, which would be very difficult to reproduce by a human, or which have their own specific visual style inherent to their model are artistic unto themselves in a way that is hard to describe (Google's Deep Dream, for one). It has been interesting seeing these used for specific effects in certain games, especially when leveraged to produce disturbing/distressing vaguely anatomical images
