> Illegally circumventing the Terms of Service is unethical/stealing.
That seems like a difficult argument to make because laws don't always align with ethics. Given the myriad of replies around this topic, it seems like opinions on the ethics of violating the ToS are mixed. It gets even more complicated when you consider that very few people have the time/skills to read/interpret such a complex and lengthy ToS. At what point is a company not morally complicit for taking advantage of the layman's inability to understand such a legal document? It doesn't help that the UI/UX seems to deliberately provide incentive for users to blindly accept.
I think whether or not it will actually be cheaper remains to be seen. Right now many AI products are still being heavily subsidized, thus the cheap or free price tag. Once these services decide they need to monetize, it may not be cost effective for most video games at scale. Maybe eventually these computations can (reasonably) take place on the client side, but I think that's so far away that we could very well see another paradigm shift by the time that's realized.