i can’t wait for when chatGPT and ai image generation also crashes and each prompt cost $50 an attempt. oh you can’t get your stolen big tiddy anime ghibli art for free anymore? you want to buy real big boy art from real artists now? beg for it. beg for it like a dog.
To inject a bit of realism,
OpenAI is losing mind boggling amounts of money every week. Not month, not year. Every week. Every second that passes, every prompt that is fulfilled, they lose a bit more of those tens of billions they have to raise every quarter from investors to prevent bankruptcy. The second investors stop increasing the amount they additionally invest on top of what they’ve already invested every time an opportunity presents itself and actually ask for a return instead, OpenAI will be forced to increase the price of their APIs threefold just to prevent imminent bankruptcy.
As you can imagine such a price increase would probably induce bankruptcy in the dozens of “AI startups” serving as OpenAIs demand, or would at least force them to decrease use significantly.
Additionally, OpenAI would need to cut expenditures related to projected higher demand (that due to the price increase would collapse), forcing them to cancel commitments to companies like CoreWeave. The problem is that CoreWeave pretty much only exists to serve OpenAI. Thus it and other OpenAI partners would either die or massively downsize and go into bankruptcy proceedings, meaning that all the big investors and banks which overextended themselves with these AI investments would suddenly have disasters on their hands. The Japanese SoftBank is literally taking out loans (money they do not have) just to invest more in this stuff because they literally could not afford it otherwise.
With the giant financial institutions, like Vanguard and BlackRock (you know, the ones that use the big companies and politicians like marionettes), suddenly having their opinions on AI soured, Big Tech will probably be forced to divest as well.
Generating a thousand images of stolen big tiddy anime ghibli art may take 0.06–0.29 kWh of electricity (a few cents) and 5 hours of GPU wear (like 3 dollars assuming the GPUs cost only $5000) in Microsoft’s cloud when they’re selling it with 0 profit margin, but it will surely take far far more on your computer if it’s even powerful enough.
Would people be as enthusiastic if every time they tweak the prompt it costs them a cent or three per image that is generated (they often generate several at a time for each prompt)? Because that’s how it would look (assuming you have a good enough PC to put the GPUs in). With the time, cost, and initial investment you would have to put in to get exactly what you imagined you might as well commission a cheap artist.
Generative AI will, in my opinion, become a niche hobby for people with latest generation gaming PCs and a ghoulish corporation or another that wants to break an artists strike and doesn’t know how. I mean, if copyright law doesn’t catch up, if it does, then it’s pretty much over.
Oh also, training the models. That’s not calculated in here, but it’s the most expensive part though you only need to do it to improve it or to make it generate new stuff that only recently started existing.