Oh, the bubble will burst sooner or later. It's a bubble, and a bigger one than crypto, NFTs or "web 3". And the longer it takes to burst, the worse it's going to be when that happens.
(Never mind that it's also a big scam, that's ruinous for the environment and the public sphere. That's another story.)
A lot of people in this thread are making predictions based on the current status quo of AI holding, where there's major money being poured into it in an effort to get it good, but the results are diminishing and the Generative AI systems are just never going to be profitable, because nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to pay for it. LLMs are probably here to stay, but image generation AI is never going to pay for itself, and you can forget about video or "game" AI.
I know several people who are paying to use generative AI for images and other content.
We can debate how many of those people need to exist for it to be profitable, but they do exist, and just yesterday, a client asked me if I could help him generate some images for his website using AI and if we had to pay a license fee, and if I could give him a quote (even though that's not my area of expertise).
I've also spoken with other people, and I remember one case of a person in Australia who was thinking of making a game based on a musical group and was looking for people to help him generate images based on AI, and again, he was willing to pay.
Another game I participated in, one created by a fan.
The person leading the development paid a membership fee so they could generate and use AI-generated music to add to the game, so that if people uploaded videos to YouTube, they wouldn't run into copyright issues.
So I'm sorry to say that, as much as we might not like it, there are plenty of users out there willing to pay for generative AI, especially because it's cheaper than paying a human to do same amount of work.
Believe me, I personally would like it to be unprofitable and for all generative AI to collapse, but based on everything I've seen and read, I highly doubt that's the future scenario.
