Comment by pxoe
3 years ago
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.
you're clearly deliberately missing distinctions between artists doing individual pieces, which take time and work, and apps that can spit out thousands of "look-alikes" simultaneously in a fraction of time. the difference is not at the scale of '1 cent less', it's at a scale of 'any price difference app provider wants to set, ranging from a buck to complete 100% difference if they just make their output free', multiplied by the capability to produce multiples of the output all at the same time.
you're off away arguing about, I guess, how different AI apps can "compete" with each other", when the conversation is about apps vs artists, and apps coming in to the artist market and disrupting artist market, not just 'interplaying' in their own 'ai art / app' market.