Comment by pxoe
3 years ago
it sure as hell will displace artists and wreck art market. people are already choosing to pay couple bucks for an app to get some "art" from a random company that repackages stable diffusion, which was built on unlicensed art, instead of paying an actual artist to create something. and when called out on their choice, people make excuses like 'it's just for fun', 'it's cheaper than paying an artist', 'i don't have money for an actual commission' (and yet, somehow they have enough money to pay for an app). apps are currently actively undercutting and pricing out artists, and it is working for the apps, which also get free promo with every customer that gleefully posts their results.
apps can set any price they want on what costs very little to create - there's some compute, storage, etc. - but they can just repackage existing models, train on unlicensed artwork, get all the parts for free, and then price it (and undercut) any way they want. there's a lot of leeway on how aggressively can a service like that price it's "goods" which are basically free to make, and can be made in no time, at enormous scale. there's infinite possibilities for predatory pricing when the base price is approaching zero. actual human artists, who do commission work, which take time to complete, and are worked on one piece at a time, can hardly compete. even an entire market (or a piece of it), full of different artists, hardly can.
That's only a market problem if they are "dumping", i.e. selling under their price of production in order to gain more market share. Like Uber subsidizing their actual product with VC money and gaining more market share. I think you can sustainably sell the images for pennies as long as you run your own hardware and keep a lookout for unnecessary costs/middlemen (AWS, various paid Google products, etc.)
Apparently, undercutting (and other forms of predatory pricing) is not a market problem.
To reiterate, they're pricing out other artists, and undercutting artwork (such as, commission work) prices, not just the price/cost of generated output (which services can also undercut/predatorily price between their own kind, going as low as 'free' - 'but you'll have to pay us extra for priority/compute/features/whatever').
An artist might be offering commissions for, say, $10. Someone on fiver might do something for $5. An app comes in, and offers you a package of 20 "commissions" for $2. See how that undercuts artists? It's frowned upon even within artist/trade circles when artists do that sort of thing (as overt lowering of prices can affect everybody else in the market), let alone when a random non-entity comes into the market to disrupt it (and that is the intent, when such services specifically advertise their 'art-making' ability), and does so while operating on your own unlicensed (stolen) artwork.
That's how markets are supposed to work though, otherwise there's no downward pressure on prices. Artists undercut other artists all the time, saying you will do a commission for 1 cent less is undercutting. There's no market failure wheresoever here. There's not a cartel or monopoly or anything like that either, I explained how you could get started yourself by minimizing your reliance on other services, running your own hardware, and watching out for increasing costs.
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