As someone in the industry (asset side) I feel there are some legitimate uses for Gen AI but they’re the kind of uses where if done properly you wouldn’t notice:

• UV seams and unwrapping, its a skill but it adds nothing to to the creative process in many cases. That said there are some caveats though to pull them off you wouldn’t want to use AI anyway.
  • Using tiny UVs and the way game engines interperate them to create gradients and colour mixes on tiny textures (Current AI can’t do this)
  • Texture Atlases, especially non-uniform ones; this is a 50/50 case, you can get super creative with them (Again its too specific for AI) but there are many more cases where it would also be super convenient if I could apply a bunch of seperate materials to faces and then have the AI unwrap and overlap the UVs which us the same materials to create the most efficient Atlas possible, this one kind of already exists as a non AI tool and results in no machine input on the end product, it just saves some texture space and thus potential performance.
• A basic AI texture generator is generally welcome for minor/throwaway assets, A lot of us are already using node based procedural texturing which is both a skill and an art form or texture libraries (or node libraries). Its not something I’d want to use on a main character or even large props but it would be super handy for small or out of the way details that just don’t merit the production time to give more than a glance.