Apologies if this comes off as a rude question, but its hard to differentiate these days. Were these created with AI?
True, if you ask Stable Diffusion or whatever for a "pixel art" image it will give you something horrible, because its mainly trained on normal images. However it's fairly easy these days to customise AI models. Check this out for example https://civitai.com/models/380187/faithful-32px-seamless-blocks - this website hosts lots of AI models fine-tuned by the community for particular styles/image types. It wouldn't be hard to make one of these for 32x32 characters, you just need to get a fairly large dataset of them (unfortunately probably without having the proper rights to use them).
(the AI's output is actually still 512x512 or whatever so you get pixels of different sizes and stuff - as you can see in the preview for this asset - but it's easy to fix, you just scale back down to 32x32)
57 days ago (+1)
Oh my god, I think you're right! I'm glad you mentioned it because I totally missed it - I've seen AI assets before but it's normally obvious!
This many-faced blob guy, though he is kinda cute, is proof - check out the different sizes of the eye pixels. That's because it's actually a 512x512 (or whatever) image, which is then downscaled to 32x32 for the actual asset (but for some reason they put the original in the preview).
Personally I'm not that against this, I just wish they'd disclose when they're using AI. I suspect the premium website they're promoting is also full of AI content, which would explain the huge quantity.