I think it's more likely this is just a niche that Midjourney has occupied.

If Midjourney is a niche, then what is the broader market for AI image generation?

Porn, obviously, though if you look at what's popular on civitai.com, a lot of it isn't photo-realistic. That might change as photo-realistic models are fully out of the uncanny valley.

Presumably personalized advertising, but this isn't something we've seen much of yet. Maybe this is about to explode into the mainstream.

Perhaps stock-photo type images for generic non-personalized advertising? This seems like a market with a lot of reach, but not much depth.

There might be demand for photos of family vacations that didn't actually happen, or removing erstwhile in-laws from family photos after a divorce. That all seems a bit creepy.

I could see some useful applications in education, like "Draw a picture to help me understand the role of RNA." But those don't need to be photo-realistic.

I'm sure people will come up with more and better uses for AI-generated images, but it's not obvious to me there will be more demand for images that are photo-realistic, rather than images that look like illustrations.

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echelon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> If Midjourney is a niche, then what is the broader market for AI image generation?

Midjourney is one aesthetically pleasing data point in a wide spectrum of possibilities and market solutions.

Creator economy is huge and is outgrowing Hollywood and the Music Industry combined.

There's all sorts of use cases in marketing, corporate, internal comms.

There are weird new markets. A lot of people simply subscribe to Midjourney for "art therapy" (a legit term) and use it as a social media replacement.

The giants are testing whether an infinite scroll of 100% AI content can beat human social media. Jury's out, but it might start to chip away at Instagram and TikTok.

Corporate wants certain things. Disney wants to fine tune. They're hiring companies like MoonValley to deliver tailored solutions.

Adobe is building tools for agencies and designers. They are only starting to deliver competent models (see their conference videos), and they're going about this a very different way.

ChatGPT gets the social trend. Ghibli. Sora memes.

> Porn, obviously, though if you look at what's popular on civitai.com, a lot of it isn't photo-realistic.

Civitai is circling the drain. Even before the unethical and religious Visa blacklisting, the company was unable to steer itself to a Series A. Stable Diffusion and local models are still way too hard for 99.99% of people and will never see the same growth as a Midjourney or OpenAI that have zero sharp edges and that anyone in the world can use. I'm fairly certain an "OnlyFans but AI" will arise and make billions of dollars. But it has to be so easy a tucker who doesn't learn to code can use it from their 11 year old Toshiba.

> Presumably personalized advertising, but this isn't something we've seen much of yet.

Carvana pioneered this almost five years ago. I'll try to find the link. This isn't going to really take off though. It's creepy and people hate ads. Carvana's use case was clever and endearing though.

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cubefox 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, as I said, if I type "cat", the most reasonable interpretation of that text string is a perfectly realistic cat.

If I want an "illustration" I can type in "illustration of a cat". Though of course that's still quite unspecific. There are countless possible unrealistic styles for pictures (e.g. line art, manga, oil painting, vector art etc), and the reasonable thing is that the users should specify which of these countless unrealistic styles they want, if they want one. If I just type in "cat" and the model gives me, say, a water color picture of a cat, it is highly improbable that this style happens to be actually what I wanted.

	▲	observationist an hour ago \| parent [-]
		If I want a badly drawn, salad fingers inspired scrawl of a mangy cat, it should be possible. If I want a crisp, xkcd depiction of a cat, it should capture the vibe, which might be different from a stick fighters depiction of a cat, or "what would it look like if George Washington, using microsoft paint for the first time, right after stepping out of the time machine, tried to draw a cat" I think we'll probably need a few more hardware generations before it becomes feasible to use chatgpt 5 level models with integrated image generation. The underlying language model and its capabilities, the RL regime, and compute haven't caught up to the chat models yet, although nano-banana is certainly doing something right.

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wiredpancake an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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