Source (Bluesky)
People are openly selling AI art?
this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Yes, if someone believes it griftable it will be grifted. People were selling nft's too.
Yeah but nft was just a scam though.
Money laundering
They are on the porn side at least. Well, trying to.
I imagine it's like OF where the market is saturated and only the top few percent of sellers are making any money on it, but with even less to make any particular seller stand out.
Honestly, LinkedIn influencers aside, AI art seems to be dominated by two types of people
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Techies. Not "tech bros", like people genuinely excited about the technology. They often create AI art as a way to better understand the technology, push the limits of what is possible, and produce art that exists in their head, but they wouldn't otherwise have the skill to create.
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Degenerate gooners. Basically they've spent so much of their life gooning that they've come to hate the current state of online porn. Not like in a "I need a weirder fetish" sort of way, but in a "modern porn is often low effort, and you have to sift through a lot of crap to find something you like". They work tirelessly to adapt AI image models that weren't meant for any sort of nudity into their own personal spankbank generators. They are also extremely willing to share all their tricks and tuning, because their idea of a perfect world is where everyone has their ability to casually generate personalized porn.
The two things those groups have in common is that they aren't making money, and they put in hours and hours a day to perfect their craft. I don't know if I would call it art, but I would definitely say those people can do things a layman can't.
and I'm glad that neither of those groups are in it for the money and mostly just treat it as a hobby (or pastime) and acknowledge that sharing information freely helps themselves and others.
AI is a glorified paint bucket in MSPaint. If there's an automated task, it can help.
Tools for coloring, shading, even cleaning up sketches are all things digital artists have had at their disposal. Adjusting hues, contrast, saturation, etc. Drawing in blue and just screening it out with a filter is a nice technique.
That's the stuff AI can actually be useful for.
That said I don't think good works of art tend to feature prominent use of the MS Paint bucket.
This same argument happened 200 years ago after the invention of photography.
They saw photography merely as a thoughtless mechanism for replication, one that lacked, “that refined feeling and sentiment which animate the productions of a man of genius,”
Photography couldn’t qualify as an art in its own right, the explanation went, because it lacked “something beyond mere mechanism at the bottom of it.”
And where are we today? 99.999999% of photos are taken by people with their own phones for free, when they want something cheap and quick.
It's the same with AI. If I want AI generated art, I'll just do it myself. And it's only getting easier and cheaper and better.
To say there's money in the future of AI art is like saying there's money in photography. I.e very infrequent, very specialized, where quality is a premium.
Yep! That was my point.
I was going along with the other poster who said the argument was a straw man. Because no one thinks there is easy money in AI art.
This isn't a valid argument. Just because someone said that about something with a certain quality doesn't make that quality true for everything which can have that said about it