Let the Controversy Begin - Revenue Generating Potential for DAZ and PAs
DAZ AI Studio is quite remarkable. It's important to remember it's still in Beta - but already does some things better than mature products. In the DAZ published blog about AI Studio, there is this excititing news about future functionality:
In the Layered Products: It gives you the ability to select environments, characters, lighting, and more as predetermined elements in your creations. This gives you quick, predictable iterations granting you even greater control over your generated images. Our Published Artists will be creating these Layered Products, currently Victoria 9 and Michael 9 are available for use.
This is huge. I've been using MidJourney and its challenging and quite unpredicatable (which is core to the MJ 'philosophy.')
The question will arise about purchased DAZ Assets.
A lot of work is involved in creating (I call it 'training') AI models - my understanding is they are using images not the 3D assets themselves (but I'm new to this I may be wrong.)
I for one would have no problem purchasing an AI Add-on to products I already own. It takes a lot of time and work to create those AI models. (It would be great if the actual images they used were made available to use in other engines for a price, that that's a reach.) This also means all your favorite products from all generations become 'fair game' as well.
I don't want to post it here since this Forum is dedicated to DAZ AI Studio, but I reached out to a PA who graciously gave me permission to work with a product I purchased and use it in MidJourney, results in my Gallery and Instagram. I don't pretent to be an expert, and it's far from perfect. I only used images to train the AI, not the 3D assets themselves, and I bought the asset, so I'm pretty sure it's within the license, but this is all so new.
It gave me real insight into how much work is involved.
(I'm hoping DAZ lawyers are working on a legal loophole using purchased, proprietary AI modules to allow people to copyright AI works, but I have no idea what I'm talking about here. That would be a huge selling point for thool vs other venues if they could do a legal tap dance like that.)
It's all so new, and there will be many so so many questions, but so so many possibilities - It's amazing.
Let's the controvesy being.
Comments
most commentary about Daz AI Studio from people who operate outside of the Daz space has been fairly dismissive of it. I would suspect that if Daz users got serious about AI, they probably will end up having the same opinion and move to those other systems, like A1111 etc.
anyone serious about AI art probably wouldnt want to use a restrictive interface like daz's system. And if they wanted to calibrate their AI to use Daz studio content (and that's a big if), they would just use img2ijmg or make their own lora. It's pretty trivial to make a lora (from what ive read).
I dont know if the right question is whether you can make a better image with Daz AI studio than you could without it; the question is whether it is competitive with what else is out there that you can also use for free.
Daz Studio proper does actually have a place in the 3D marketplace (for now). Daz AI Studio, on the other hand, it's difficult to conceive that it would
It's a little (a lot) soon to pronounce on the final version when this is a featue-incomplete beta of a step along the way.
perhaps premature, but assuming it grows and new models are added, and assuming it has all of its slated features, plus all features of other systems, then at best it's just a redundant version of those other systems like the web-version nightcafe or desktop version A1111 etc. Then sole value proposition is having daz3d asset loras (i dont get how this is valuable myself), and also having a captive daz user audience to advertise to (which i guess could be valuable to them but says nothign about the merits of the software itself).
If you look at the full announcement, from last year, you will see that it goes beyond those - and when i looked Nighcafe at least seemed to have a very limited free option.
Post edited. (I moved my questions to the official Beta announcement thread to stay on topic here).
I find the original post in this thread on point.
LoRA
I hoped to see LoRA in the Daz 3D store to show up within weeks
Some artists released photoshop brushes, stand-alone apps or tutorials in the Daz Store so it is not an unreasonable idea to provide LoRA or checkpoints rather sooner than later.
The common theme: Tools to create images.
checkpoints
If someone has the resources to create specialized versions of checkpoints with verified training material then why not sell licenses for checkpoints in the store as well?
Stable Diffusion 3
The first Stable Diffusion 3 beta versions are available for selected testers.
This update to the SD base model is advertised to provide "[...] improved performance in multi-subject prompts, image quality, and spelling abilities."
Checkpoints and LoRA are trained on base models like SD1.5, SDXL.
LoRA are only compatible with the specific checkpoints they were created for.
To create custom checkpoints and LoRA for SD3 some time is needed.
This could be an interesting entry point to be among the first to provide solutions...