[Fraterkes]

Sure, the part about everyone just pirating photoshop is absolutely tue (it comes out to be the same thing though, you can't pirate hardware). My point is the gap in potential quality and art output between photoshop on a powerful pc an a pirated copy of ps on a thinkpad is pretty small: you need a lot of ram to produce 4k art, but a thinkpad is fine for most comissions. The gap is obviously a lot larger with ai: you yourself mention that sd (just one of the models people are currently using) runs slowly and with limitations. If the expectation becomes that you deliver 100 4k permutations on a certain theme, the time it takes to achieve that from a human labor standpoint will be similar, but the time that takes to render wise will vary orders of magnitude based on your resources. Not to mention that a workflow with a realtime refresh rate is qualititavely different frome one that runs 0.1fps.

[orbital-decay]

Commissions are professional work. If you need speed to get things done, you can pay to rent the GPU and the cost will be negligible to what you earn, even if you're just starting. This is really not that much of a barrier compared to the hoops hobbyist 3D artists had to jump through 20 years ago.

Regardless, you can run SD on a several years old laptop just fine, this is entirely within the reach of most; yes you won't be getting realtime updates but that's not really necessary.

And that's only the beginning. SD was trained using really poor data; everybody is doing that on semi-synthetic datasets with much higher quality labeling now; high quality data and new advancements (see the Beyond U paper [1], for example) allow fitting more into several times less weights with much faster inference. In a year or two, this will be available to practically everyone.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.20092