The market for the digital items plummeted after their glory days in 2021 and 2022, and they’ve proven to be not only an artistic and aesthetic disaster, but a shortcut to financial ruin
I remember playing with Stable Diffusion in 2022, and thinking “Oh. That’s the end of NFTs.”
NFT art was stupid to begin with, of course, but SD was such a blatent, extreme inverse of the “artifical digital scarcity” angle. If I wanted a shitty, albeit “unique” and deterministically reproducible digital image, I could just make it in 30 seconds on a desktop. If I wanted a certain look, I could use img2img or eventually controlnet and all sorts of augmentations.
Yes, junky AI was junky AI, but ironically it was the antithesis of everything NFTs stood for. Instead of “digital information is worth commodifying at great expense,” it was “digital information is basically free.” And I still find it amusing that Tech Bros and con artists jumped from one ship to the other so quickly, or somehow have feet in both.
I remember playing with Stable Diffusion in 2022, and thinking “Oh. That’s the end of NFTs.”
NFT art was stupid to begin with, of course, but SD was such a blatent, extreme inverse of the “artifical digital scarcity” angle. If I wanted a shitty, albeit “unique” and deterministically reproducible digital image, I could just make it in 30 seconds on a desktop. If I wanted a certain look, I could use img2img or eventually controlnet and all sorts of augmentations.
Yes, junky AI was junky AI, but ironically it was the antithesis of everything NFTs stood for. Instead of “digital information is worth commodifying at great expense,” it was “digital information is basically free.” And I still find it amusing that Tech Bros and con artists jumped from one ship to the other so quickly, or somehow have feet in both.
AI wasn’t the NFT killer, right click > saveas killed it at the very moment of conception.
Digital scarcity is a complete joke.
Sure you can copy the image, but you can’t have the same machine-readable hash indicating ownership in my private system!