When I wrote "something unimportant," I meant it from the fan's perspective - some marketing copy somewhere on a website isn't going to bother a lot of people but the art in a book that is bought essentially just for the art is something important.

For more or less important parts of an image, for artist that likes drawing hands vs faces etc., I would not be offended if they Chose to use AI because they liked the workflow, it made results that they are happy with and represent their vision, and improved their art. I am offended when AI is used to reduce the artist from drawing a full work to drawing a prompt.

For years, if you wanted art to be cheap and good you could squeeze artists, outsource it to other countries, and other dirty tricks but at the end of the day, an artist somewhere gets paid and thanklessly puts their own love and care and ideas into the work where they can. I don't think that the world would be better if all these artists went from making basically no money to none, and if commercial art was entirely soulless instead of mostly soulless. Even if miraculously the money they saved went into making the product cheaper and better for me instead of lining investor's pockets.

I think that being Very Upset at WotC using AI is pushing back at what seems like an inevitable trend by capitalists to make the world worse. I have a friend who makes marketing videos. Recently, he has been told to make them twice as quickly, essentially forcing the backgrounds to be made with AI (and ending up fine but worse that it would have been otherwise). Before AI that wouldn't have been possible, if you hire someone skilled you get good work or nothing.

I don't know exactly where the line should be drawn. If you're indie (as in, actually independent) and choose to use AI, then cool for you. But any use of AI from a company, especially a big publicly traded one, reeks of it being used against the artists will. Unlike the Thundercats reboot, a lot of the outrage against Stable Diffusion etc. is coming from artists.