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Inside the AI Porn Marketplace Where Everything and Everyone Is for Sale
(www.404media.co)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I'm guessing that the "marketplace" and "sale" refers to sites like "Mage Space" which charge money per image generated or offer subscriptions. The article mentions that the model trainers also received a percentage of earnings off of the paid renderings using their models.
Obviously you could run these models on your own, but my guess is that the crux of the article is about monetizing the work, rather than just training your own models and sharing the checkpoints.
The article is somewhat interesting as it covers the topic from an outsider's perspective more geared towards how monetization infests open sharing, but yeah the headline is kinda clickbait.
Well, instead of bitching about the AI porn aspect, perhaps they should spend more time talking about how much of a scam it is to charge for AI-generated images.
Compute costs money, it’s more ethical to charge your users than it is to throw shady ads at them which link to malware.
Also buying and eventually replacing expensive hardware. Running AI at scale requires hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure.
I took their comment to mean running the generation locally is almost free.
Sure, if you have hardware and/or time to generate it client side. I’m just saying that if you run a web service and decide to charge for it, that’s better than most of the alternative monetization strategies.
I get no malware or shady ads when I generate AI images with Stable Diffusion. I don't know what kind of sites or tools you're using where you're getting shady ads, but you're getting ripped off.