I pretty much do the same thing as you lol. I absolutely suck with names. Don't really care if chatgpt gets it wrong, as long as it looks/sounds good to me, that's all that really matters.

I like to do very literal place names. Bluelake, Understar, Northpoint, Highridge. It's realistic, it's pretty easy, and it avoids the problem of unpronouncable and hard to remember names. Also it instantly tells you something about that place.

Sometimes I create a fake language, sometimes I just make up cool sounds, other times I do the classic human and go "town is called silver tree because there is a silver tree there"

I took a variety of words and translated them from english to finnish/icelandic, and then wrote them in english again phonetically.

I usually take a language or languages I want to use as a theme, translate words and then remove letters or move things around until they sound neat enough.

They get so jumbled, I don't even know what words they came from anymore. For my most recent setting I came up with two kingdom names as Adeya and Coridia. Original they had big long Icelandic names describing where they were, and then I cut out letters, introduced new words, cut it down and so on until it became completely unrecognizable.

I don't have a single unified process, but I usually create name in focused sessions, trying to come up with all the toponyms for a region in one go for instance. This to avoid having names that sound too similar or too different, while still having some unified approach and feel.

I will take basically whatever the place inspires me, including dank memes and private jokes, and twist it until it fits with that "feel" that I'm going for. As a result, many names in my projects are recycled and adapted from previous projects.

On a different note, tbh AI to me is a tool, if it lets you focus on what you dig in your WB, that's great. Art has always been about reinventing what others did before, following and improving on existing patterns. AI made the process much more accessible, giving people without artistic skill the power to express themselves in a visual fashion. Personally I find this awesome and liberating.

I usually start with the race's culture. What things do they find significant about places in the world? Find a word or phrase that describes something they'd find unique about this location, and translate it.

Say the new phrase over and over again until it becomes easy to say, and then write down this new thing you're saying, because it won't be the same. That's your town name.

This mimics how towns used to actually be named: Oxford, for example, was the place where you forded your oxen across the river. People started selling stuff there, and a town sprang up at that ford over time.

I'm pretty terrible coming up with names. The names that I do come up with an end up sticking with are either extremely blunt descriptions turned into proper names, or are references that like too much to abandon.