I've never minded that an image might take 10-30 seconds to generate. The fact that people do is crazy to me. A professional artist would take days, and cost $1

I've never minded that an image might take 10-30 seconds to generate. The fact that people do is crazy to me. A professional artist would take days, and cost $100s for the same asset. I ran stable diffusion for a couple of years (maybe?, time really hasn't made sense since 2020) on my Dual 3090 rendering server. I built the server originally for crypto heating my office in my 1820s colonial in upstate NY then when I was planning to go back to college (got accepted into a university in England), I switched it's focus to Blender/UE4 (then 5), then eventually to AI image gen. So I've never minded 20 seconds for an image. If I needed dozens of options to pick the best, I was going to click start and grab a cup of coffee, come back and maybe it was done. Even if it took 2 hours, it is still faster than when I used to have to commission art for a project. I grew out of Stable Diffusion, though, because the learning curve beyond grabbing a decent checkpoint and clicking start was actually really high (especially compared to LLMs that seamed to "just work"), after going through failed training after failed fine-tuning using tutorials that were a couple days out of date, I eventually said, fuck it, I'm paying for this instead. All that to say - if you are using GenAI commercially, even if an image or a block of code took 30 minutes, it's still WAY cheaper than a human. That said, eventually a professional will be involved, and all the AI slop you generated will be redone, which will still cost a lot, but you get to skip the back and forth figuring out style/etc.