Your reasons are not good enough. Some are not relevant, some simply wrong. You need better arguments against ai.
I do not like ai slop. That is because I do not like slop. And the ai slop publishers spam that content. It is a nuisance and Itch should do something against this. There are accounts that publish several games a days. That is not ok.
But I have no issues with hobby developers using ai to develop some games. AI enables them to overcome a hurdle. Not unlike using a game engine does.
So let's analyze your reasons:
unethical: uses other people's art, writing, photos from social media, without their consent
So? I just used your writing without your explicit consent. I used it to write this post. Unless there is a legal grounds for this "unethical" thing, this is just your opinion that this would be unethical. Also there is things like fair use where people can use things without consent. Consent is not the defining attribute what is allowed and what is not allowed. Or what is ethical.
Plus, an ai user is not even using the art of other people. You could make an argument that some ai models were built with suspicious training methods. But the things created by those models are in fact not the other people's art.
And to water your argument further down, you cannot even prove that all ai models use unconsented data. You might find some models. But if you do search, you will also find models that use consented data. A trivial example is that there are audio models where they hired people to speak. How is that unconsented?!
*takes jobs from artists, writers and musicians
In the professional sector, yes. That's a problem not only for the arts.
In the hobby sector? You say the people that use a free game engine and have no budget for anything would pay for artists?
*unoriginal: no human creativity or insight used to create it
That's wrong. With the exception of ai agents maybe. But if you have ever tried to use an ai, you would know that this is simply a wrong statement. Your creativity is not the same creativity. It is a different skill. For visuals, it is similar to the comparison between taking a photograph and drawing a picture. It's different skills.
Now, for the slop games, that's kinda true. But using ai as such is not the key element here. It is effort put into the project. If you tell your ai agent: make me a game, that's zero insight. If you use an ai to generate your assets or help you code, that is still you and you decide what assets to use and what the game is about. Using ai is not 0% or 100% creativity.
Plus, people copying another game and not putting creativity into a game is not something people need ai for. They can create slop and copycats all on their own. This point is not limited to ai. It's just easier to do this with ai.
*wastes tons of electricity and water to run the data centers
That's not true. You equate the industry usage of ai to the personal usage of ai. I did try a local ai system and used it to create a few images. I wanted to know what this is all about. Know what? The system could generate an image every few seconds. On my own computer.
And for comparison: running a graphics intensive game a few seconds would use the same amount of electricity.
Use this argument against crypto currency. But for indie game assets it is just wrong.
It might hold up for some devs that use ai companies to code and have to buy those ai usage tokens. That can get costly very quickly for larger projects. But even here you can make an argument of money: the companies selling this service will ask an equivalent price for hardware and electricity used. If it is tons of electricity but you only have to pay peanuts, that does not add up.
*the data centers are built by clearcutting tons of land that used to be home to many native plants and animals who now have been displaced from their habitats
Same as before. Use it against crypto and use it against industry usage of ai. For indie games it does not scale.
*in the US, laid-off workers are being paid diminishing fees to train the algorithms that are replacing them.
Use this against industry usage. Same argument could and should be used for outsourcing work to other countries.
A glimmer of hope is here, because some companies actually lose money becaues they tried to replace workers with ai.
*using generative ai, both by generating images and by generating text causes AI psychosis and degrades critical thinking, and makes people lose touch with reality
That's not an argument against games made with help on ai on an inde game platform.
That's an argument against using ai chatbots to solve your personal problems. And I agree for the critical thinking. But you lost me there on the ai psychosis.
You need to roughly know the answer if you ask an ai. And you cannot trust its answers. AI will happily lie to you and they can hallucinate and invent facts. They are not thinking. They simulate giving an answer that will look like it fits the question.
*Using AI to create writing and then putting your name on the final product is plagiarism
No, it is not. If you use ai to recreate an existing work to a very similar degree, that is plagiarism.
Your argument tried to use the same aspect as the unethical usage. It can only hold true, if the unethical one holds true, and it does not.
Whom would you even plagiarise? AI have no copyright for their output. You cannot steal their output from them.
And if you create works that infringe on other people's work, that is forbidden no matter how you achieved the result. If you did this by ai or by hand does not matter.
Using ai and claiming you wrote this all by yourself would be undisclosed ai usage, deception, depending on context academic dishonesty or whatever. But not plagiarism.
*It fabricates disinformation
Not really. It fabricates things that look like answers to a question. If the question asker then distributes that answer as truth, that can be disinformation. But ai do not intentionally fabricate disinformation. They are certainly used to intentionally create and spread disinformation. But this is people doing it.
*the engines that run generative AI are used [by criminals] to create [bad things]
This is about the most trivial and nonsensical approach to villify a tech. If you accept this argument, you will need to ban pen & paper, computers, breathing air, the internet itself, electricity and to be sure: humans. Also, this would actually not be the thing you described, but a fictional thing. And fictional things are ... well ... fictional. If I kill you in Call of Duty, you would not call me a killer.
With over the top nonsensical arguments you will not convince anyone. Try to tailor it to the topic. Not try to argue here for something that was rejected in courts. AI training is not illegal. And the environmental arguments would go against the computers that players use to play the games as well. Or for Itch itself, because of all the hosting and serving over a million projects. If you cherry pick bad aspects to only apply to ai, this will be a weak argument. And easily picked apart. You do not want that.
You want future proof arguments. For Itch, that might be the slop and spam aspect. Some publishers do this and Itch should do something here. /t/6959561/ai-agent-usage-on-itch