That said, enthusiasts do help drive a lot of the improvements to the tech stack so if they start using this, it’ll entrench NVIDIA even more.
Plus, YouTube and the Google images is already full of AI generated slop and people are already tired of it. "AI fatigue" amongst majority of general consumers is a documented thing. Gaming fatigues is not.
Do I buy a Macbook with silly amount of RAM when I only want to mess with images occasionally.
Do I get a big Nvidia card, topping out at 24gb - still small for some LLMs, but I could occasionally play games using it at least.
No. There's already too much porn on the internet, and AI porn is cringe and will get old very fast.
How so?
Only 40% of gamers use a PC, a portion of those use AI in any meaningful way, and a fraction of those want to set up a local AI instance.
Then someone releases an uncensored, cloud based AI and takes your market?
Titanic - so about to hit an iceberg and sink?
The cutting edge will advance, and convincing bespoke porn of people's crushes/coworkers/bosses/enemies/toddlers will become a thing. With all the mayhem that results.
Suppose you're a content creator and you need an image of a real person or something copyrighted like a lot of sports logos for your latest YouTube video's thumbnail. That kind of thing.
I'm not getting into how good or bad that is; I'm just saying I think it's a pretty common use case.
(example: a thumbnail for a YT video about a video game, featuring AI-generated art based on that game. because copyright reasons, in my very limited experience Dall-E won't let you do that)
I agree that AI porn doesn't seem a real market driver. With 8 billion people on Earth I know it has its fans I guess, but people barely pay for porn in the first place so I reallllly dunno how many people are paying for AI porn either directly or indirectly.
It's unclear to me if AI generated video will ever really cross the "uncanny valley." Of course, people betting against AI have lost those bets again and again but I don't know.
"The global gaming market size was valued at approximately USD 221.24 billion in 2024. It is forecasted to reach USD 424.23 billion by 2033, growing at a CAGR of around 6.50% during the forecast period (2025-2033)"
I needed an uncensored model in order to, guess what, make an AI draw my niece snowboarding down a waterfall. All the online services refuse on basis that the picture contains -- oh horrors -- a child.
"Uncensored" absolutely does not imply NSFW.
Much of the growth in gaming of late has come from exploitive dark patterns, and those dark patterns eventually stop working because users become immune to them.
They did not collapse, they moved to smartphones. The "free"-to-play gacha portion of the gaming market is so successful it is most of the market. "Live service" games are literally traditional game makers trying to grab a tiny slice of that market, because it's infinitely more profitable than making actual games.
>those dark patterns eventually stop working because users become immune to them.
Really? Slot machines have been around for generations and have not become any less effective. Gambling of all forms has relied on the exact same physiological response for millennia. None of this is going away without legislation.
Slot machines are not a growth market. The majority of people wised to them literal generations ago, although enough people remain susceptible to maintain a handful of city economies.
> They did not collapse, they moved to smartphones
Agreed, but the dark patterns being used are different. The previous dark patterns became ineffective. The level of sophistication of psychological trickery in modern f2p games is far beyond anything Farmville ever attempted.
The rise of live service games also does not bode well for infinite growth in the industry as there's only so many hours to go around each day for playing games and even the evilest of player manipulation techniques can only squeeze so much blood from a stone.
The industry is already seeing the failure of new live service games to launch, possibly analogous to what happened in the MMO market when there was a rush of releases after WoW. With the exception of addicts, most people can only spend so many hours a day playing games.
This hardware is only good for current-generation "AI".