> 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.