without you ever knowing about it, as well as (perhaps) swapping in a cheaper-to-operate model some percentage of the time, perhaps as request loads peak, hoping you’ll just roll the dice and try again.
I think there’s a chance we’ll see that type of cost-cutting eventually, but the only way I can imagine a pay-per-image model working is if you get unlimited “spins” until you get an image you find acceptable.
I’m still unsure why anyone would pay for AI image generation purely because of the trial and error it takes. I get that not everyone has a GPU that can do it, but I use stable diffusion through automatic 1111 and I’ll likely be about 2-300 generations of text to image, image to image, some inpainting and editing, then some more image to image and upscaling before I get a representation of what’s in my head down.
I love the process of it all, but paying for tokens would completely limit me. Is there a specific reason that people use paid models? Or is it just because a lot of people are limited by their gpu?
Local stable diffusion takes more effort to get good results, I think that is the main reason.
GPU limiting and a general lack of either knowledge or wanting to put in the effort to do it themselves. Even just going into Github in the first place is enough of a barrier for a lot of people, unfortunately
Yep, I’ve a mobile 3070 in my laptop, and whilst I feasibly could run some of the smallest models around, paying on a per-use basis gets me way better quality results for relatively cheaply.
Besides, running it locally isn’t free either. Your hardware deprecates and depreciates over time, in addition to non-negligible power costs.
oh, look, it’s one of those guys who grows his own potatoes too.
AI gambling
Yes, but in theory this is factored into the price. If you get 1/4 good images then a service that provided 4/4 good images could be 4x as expensive. If a service lowers their quality to push people to regenerate more often in theory those people will see their costs going up and quality go down and switch to a competitor.
This space is pretty competitive. So while tricks like this may be used in the short term to obscure the actual cost of using the service this will probably be noticed by reviewers and customers and will likely balance itself out over time.
