Gaming

I feel the problem is that in the end referencing isn't about copying but extracting accurate information. You don't reference something you want to design but something where you need a very specific object to be accurate. Using AI reference for this just sounds kind of useless. I can understand that very untrained or untalented artists will find most of the AI references useful because they don't have the design language to construct things themselves. But this brings out the last problem that Generative AI models have a lot of diminishing returns. And after using them for a while everything starts to look the same and you need to steal more stuff to shake things up.

All that time could be better spent forming a design language or gathering useful references.

In the end most design processes I've see that use generative AI end up looking very flat and lifeless, because the system tends to veer towards that.