The genie is out of the bottle, but at some point, LLM/image-gen providers are going to have to raise prices for their services. While this won’t do anything to stop self-hosters, it might cut down on the number of casual users just a tiny bit. At least I hope it will!
Unfortunately realistic image gen can already be done locally on consumer hardware at the cost of additional rendering time. The cat is out of the bag. And while local video gen is pretty easy to spot, the models just keep getting faster and better at a scary rate.
Oh definitely. But setting up local solutions requires enough time, effort, know-how, and hardware that’s getting more expensive by the minute, meaning that a lot of regular Joe & Jane Blows who got used to free ad-supported options or cheap pay-to-play services might drop out of the game.
Of course, anyone sufficiently motivated to generate images/video at scale is already building out their infrastructure regardless of cost since, presumably, they are going to be state-actors or mercenary influence operations.
I wonder where it would leave the millions of Facebook/Twitter social media engagement-farmers, once their marginal costs start to skyrocket.
The genie is out of the bottle, but at some point, LLM/image-gen providers are going to have to raise prices for their services. While this won’t do anything to stop self-hosters, it might cut down on the number of casual users just a tiny bit. At least I hope it will!
Unfortunately realistic image gen can already be done locally on consumer hardware at the cost of additional rendering time. The cat is out of the bag. And while local video gen is pretty easy to spot, the models just keep getting faster and better at a scary rate.
Oh definitely. But setting up local solutions requires enough time, effort, know-how, and hardware that’s getting more expensive by the minute, meaning that a lot of regular Joe & Jane Blows who got used to free ad-supported options or cheap pay-to-play services might drop out of the game.
Of course, anyone sufficiently motivated to generate images/video at scale is already building out their infrastructure regardless of cost since, presumably, they are going to be state-actors or mercenary influence operations.
I wonder where it would leave the millions of Facebook/Twitter social media engagement-farmers, once their marginal costs start to skyrocket.
This is a lot more like Pandora’s Box - all the evils have been let loose.