The consumers of said product knew that way before the economy did.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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People enjoyed it for about five minutes and then they got bored.
Because it's all the fucking same and these LLM's are programmed as a race to the middle.
These digital asset markets were already on the edge of gluttony.
This is a great way to put it
CGTrader is a cancerous company. They have implemented every feature they can think of to screw their creators, and increase their profit margins on the back of the hard working 3d artists :
1- After becoming one of the biggest 3d markets (I think 2nd) they have lowered creator's share from sales from 70% to 60%
2- They have allowed 3d generated trash to be sold along side human created content taking away traffic from creators
3- They have introduced a pay to to rank for products. meaning on top of the 40% share they are taking, now they expect creators to pay to have a chance for their products to show up in a very crowded maket
4- 5 Out of 7 days of the week. CGTrader is running sales, with the lowest discount on weekends being 30 % and on weekdays being 50%. Creators who don't opt-in to those sales shouldn't hope to receive any views to their products. they are pressuring prices down because they can earn more on volume. while mid sized creator shops take the loss.
5- They are introducing subscriptions akin to spottily. If most customers switch into subscriptions instead of buying single product, than creator's revenue will quickly crater
6- Now the Cherry on the top : they have introduced the option for users to directly generate AI 3d models. trained on the millions of models the platform is hosting. Despite providing the option to opt-out products from ai training, it is hard to trust such a greedy company to honor creators choice. especialy when no one has access to the training data set and no independent company has made an audit.
Since CGTrader introduced all these changes my revenue went down 65% compared to before.
If you care about human created content and creator's agency. avoid buying from CGTrader and TurboSquid ,most creators have their products listed elsewhere. and if you buy from their own shops the creators will receive a bigger share cutting out these cancerous middlemen.
1000000% they are ignoring the opt out.
What I don't get is are these models not copyrighted by the creator? I'm not one to defend IP law but how exactly is it legal to not have it be opt-in?
Chances are you forfeit the right to sue them over it by signing off on their license agremeent
To be fair, "AI-generated has almost zero value" is a stretch so far from "AI generated 3D models have low sales", that it holds no water.
It's almost as if no one who is doing serious work would buy 1000s of slop models hunting for ones that fit their setting instead of just generating their or god for bid hiring a artist to make them tailored to the intended experience
"Mindlessly churning out garbage is, surprisingly, garbage."
Dont get me wrong, i fucking hate AI with a passion, but if youre going to make slop, maybe spend 5 minutes with it to make it at least look okay (and then use those skills you learned to actually make something useful)
Society can now have technical debt. And it's piling up.
Quite possibly negative value
Well, yeah. Why buy it when you could just generate it yourself? It's like when people expected others to pay $30 for an NFT that was generated with 0.2ms of cpu time and looks exactly like every other one.
And still people are dumb enough to buy AI gemerated pictures on stock photo platforms for a shitload of money. A company I work for as a contractor just payed 400€ for a “1 year exclusive usage” License for a shitty AI generated photo. And then they are proud of themselves for supporting the artists.
That's not true. It has negative value. We lost a lot of coworkers from layoffs.
AI companies are burning money by giving the same pile of money to each other and jacking up prices of hardware.
AI influencers are spending thousands of dollars to make hot garbage that nobody wants.
It's not zero value.
It has costs, not negative value.
Infinite supply with zero demand, of course is has no value.
All it does is flood the market with garbage, ruining the value for real creators.
I love that it ruined blockchain collectables as well.
Didn't blockchain ruined itself before AI?
It's DDOS attack on content.
Which in turn is an algorithm-incentivized DDOS attack on art.
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(5 replies)
So, Marx’ labor theory of value was correct after all. No labor, no value
Very literally yes.
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CGTrader, a long-established online marketplace for 3D assets ... is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they only account for only $1 out of every $90 in revenue.
The article is about a single marketplace for 3d models. Those numbers are stark and probably reflect people purposely not buying ai, as the article says. But this is a single website in a small niche of the economy. That's just not at all "The Economy Has Spoken".
Headlines these days.😮💨
Even beyond this little example, if people wanted an AI gen 3d asset they will AI gen themselves, no one gonna buy AI gen 3d asset because it has basically 0 value. The same thing probably happened to design company that shifted to AI gen. No one need to pay the AI design company to get an AI gen logo and pamphlet, they can do it themselves.
I am not sure the majority of genAI 3d models are even usable as is. 3d prints need a conscious approach that optimizes them for being printed bottom2top, with popular precision/nosle sizes options in mind, with more interesting build using that limitation to their advantage - see e.g. infill printing on chain-connected toys you probably saw sold in bulk on marketplaces - from free designs on the internet, not to mention springs and other material/technology-dependant tricks. 3d models for animation and wiring need to have clean topology to render without surprise glitches and wasting cpu time. And I'm not even talking about super serious CAD stuff that needs consistency and precision in the smallest details.
I had little time with 3d, but from what I had with vector images and auto tracing, broken or/and overcomplicated geometry can lead one to a point it's just easier to redraw the thing than trying to fix it.
Is there a marketplace where lots of AI generated assets are selling?
I remember someone who make ads was noticing their engagement dropped to nil after "saving money" with AI ads... They did an experiment. They handmade a cheap ad with cardboard and humans.
Engagement went way back up. People crave real art in a world of slop.
Yes, and even moreso than before GenAI.
One doesn't know what one takes for granted until one loses it, after all
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It just pushes the market to use AI in each object unnecessarily. An AI integrated fridge, AI integrated hair dryer, AI integrated soap holder.
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