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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 9517642" data-attributes="member: 42856">That's a very important thing lots of people are missing. The customer pays for the end products. He doesn't care if it took a lot of effort to make or if it was made effortlessly. He doesn't care if it took years of training to learn how to draw or if it just came naturally to the painter.When you're buying 6.2 millions for a banana stitched to a wall, you're paying for the effort it took to stitch the banana, which was likely minimal. You're buying the product, which is a strong statement about modern art, whose you value, obviously, much more than the work put to create the artwork.Paying for labor would mean that it would be natural to pay more for a meal made by a poor cook, who did a lot of effort to create a half-cooked bland bagel, than you'd pay for a good tasty  bagel made quickly by someone who has basic cooking abilities.This is not how it works: the valuation is based purely on the result. The labor is part of the cost on the producer part, and there is obviously some venture that are successful (when labor cost is inferior to the revenue produced) and some which aren't (when cost exceed the revenue). It doesn't mean that one shouldn't paint if they can't sell their paintings, it just means that it's not something they can benefit from. Van Gogh only sold one painting, yet he is generally acknowledged to be a greater artist than most people who will accept commission for Random NPC #43 online. Success as an artist isn't correlated to financial success as an entrepreneur selling images.What does make the price? Generally the law of supply and demand. Supply has greatly increased with AI, especially supply of average, throwaway images -- the AI didn't stitch a banana to a wall yet -- making it available for a few cents. Naturally, prices will adjust accordingly, much like when sewing machine imitated tailors to mass-produce suits, driving the clothes prices down... When was the last time to repaired an item of clothing? It certainly reduced the opportunity to make a living by sewing and tailoring (but it still exists, as there is a market, though reduced, for hand-made clothes). While it is certainly bad news for the producers of images, it is good news for the general public, who couldn't afford images before, to have them at really inexpensive prices.</blockquote>

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