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AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

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Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#11

Post by MarkusQ »

vunderba wrote: post #6
shellwizard wrote: post #2

Has anyone really ever bought a STL (I assume) model? It's like WinRAR, does anyone ever buy a license?

Having purchased a number of 3d models both professionally and personally - it’s just like any other asset you might need. They can be useful in games, as props in larger modeled scenes, and so on. This article is mostly talking about assets used outside of printing or manufacturing, so it’s probably going to be closer to formats like OBJ or FBX. You can almost always tell when a model was created with 3D AI tools. T…

> The topology is usually an absolute mess

This.

"Absolute mess" may even be giving them too much credit, since most seem to have shot past "steaming pile" and are offroading in hitherto unexplored regions of sucky-space.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#12

Post by snovv_crash »

palmotea wrote: post #5

> CGTrader, an online marketplace for 3D assets, found that one in six models uploaded to the site these days is AI generated, but that AI generated assets account for only $1 out of $90 in revenue on the site. These numbers show that AI generated assets are quickly flooding the marketplace, but that most people are not interested in paying for them. > ... > AI generated content is creating a discoverability problem…

Why is that a goal? More likely the site that can surface the stuff people actually want to pay for (which seems to be human generated) will get more revenue in total.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#13

Post by cosmie »

shellwizard wrote: post #2

Has anyone really ever bought a STL (I assume) model? It's like WinRAR, does anyone ever buy a license?

I have, but only a few times. For one-offs, it's been when I've come across a paid model that included a particular technique or mechanism involved that I really liked and hadn't seen before. In those cases, it's worth the cost just to get a working example of it I can pick apart, rather than flail around trying to replicate it from scratch.

The other time was paying for a subscription to this[1] Thangs profile, which was more or less the same. I love making stuff using these techniques, and having access to all of his paid models really helped me get familiar with it using working examples. I mainly make my own designs now instead, but still pay for the subscription out of pure appreciation.

[1] https://thangs.com/designer/kaizen3dprints

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#14

Post by MarkusQ »

tamimio wrote: post #7

I won’t be surprised if 3D modeling and rendering software will soon add some sort of mechanism or watermark or a hashfile to prove that it was modeled with this software rather than some slop.

Or you can just look at the geometry. 3d slop is orders of magnitude easier to spot than text slop.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#15

Post by palmotea »

snovv_crash wrote: post #12
palmotea wrote: post #5

> CGTrader, an online marketplace for 3D assets, found that one in six models uploaded to the site these days is AI generated, but that AI generated assets account for only $1 out of $90 in revenue on the site. These numbers show that AI generated assets are quickly flooding the marketplace, but that most people are not interested in paying for them. > ... > AI generated content is creating a discoverability problem…

Why is that a goal? More likely the site that can surface the stuff people actually want to pay for (which seems to be human generated) will get more revenue in total.

We need to increase slop tolerance to speed AI adoption, and the best path towards that is to increase the availability of slop while simultaneously gaslighting people about how good it is. Eventually people will accept slop and buy it or ideally generate it for themselves (which uses more tokens in aggregate).

If we can keep that up for only a little while, we can frustrate artists economically, causing people to de-skill, eventually leaving slop as the only (and therefore best) option. Then people's revealed choices will prove that slop is really all they want.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#16

Post by LarsDu88 »

The leading 3d gen techniques are latent diffusion models that work off voxelized intermediate representations of objects. When you convert these into meshes, very often they will have poor topology. Topology is important if you need to modify these meshes or animate them. Bad topology and excess verts is also bad if you're building assets for a game.

There's still more refinement of existing techniques that need to be done before AI generated 3d models match what humans produce.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#17

Post by abirch »

u8 wrote: post #3

Isn't this basic economics? Supply and demand. If slop floods the zone then human work becomes even more scarce and valuable. What is my incentive to pay you? A person who spent no time working on something and who probably won't spend any time working with me if I need support. You're literally a meat puppet and a useless middleman when I could pay $20 and do it myself.

Unfortunately we've experienced the basic economics of spam. It costs virtually nothing to spam emails and so the spammers exploited that. Now it costs virtually nothing to spam markets with AI slop. Platforms need anti-slop filters and the easiest one is to charge x dollars per model to publish there.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#18

Post by dehrmann »

The buyers are saying it's because the human-created models are better. This might be true, but it could also be some other things. Maybe they're doing the AI dream and using AI to create the models themselves. The article cites revenue maybe AI model are selling, just cheaper. Maybe human creators are buying from humans out of solidarity.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#19

Post by palmotea »

dijksterhuis wrote: post #8
palmotea wrote: post #5

> CGTrader, an online marketplace for 3D assets, found that one in six models uploaded to the site these days is AI generated, but that AI generated assets account for only $1 out of $90 in revenue on the site. These numbers show that AI generated assets are quickly flooding the marketplace, but that most people are not interested in paying for them. > ... > AI generated content is creating a discoverability problem…

> The obvious solution here ... is to force more low quality AI generated slop down people's throats? sorry, have i misunderstood what you're proposing? (the ratio part of your comment was super confusing to read).

> (the ratio part of your comment was super confusing to read)

Basically, we need to get the the point where people rarely encounter anything but slop. Right now on that site 1 out of every 6 models is slop, it would be better if 5 out of 6 were slop. Getting to 99 out of 100 would be even better.

Re: AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them

#20

Post by site-packages1 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #16

The leading 3d gen techniques are latent diffusion models that work off voxelized intermediate representations of objects. When you convert these into meshes, very often they will have poor topology. Topology is important if you need to modify these meshes or animate them. Bad topology and excess verts is also bad if you're building assets for a game. There's still more refinement of existing techniques that need to…

My experience here has been so bad with the topology that I usually use the created mesh as an example and rebuild the whole thing from scratch to reduce the verts. Not even worth the time.
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