> AI has become far too big to fail at this point.
This might be true for the glorified search engine type of AI that everyone is familiar with, but not for image generation. It's a novelty at best, something people try a couple times and then forget about.
Every industry that uses images and art in any way - entertainment, publishing, science, advertising, you name it - is already investing in image and video generation. If any business in these fields isn't already exclusively using LLMs to generate their content, I promise you they're working on it as aggressively as they can afford to.
Meh, I don't buy it. People dislike AI generated images and art more than they dislike AI generated, well, anything. AI images adorning an article, blog post, announcement or product listing is the hallmark of a cheap, bottom of the barrel product these days, if not an outright scam.
People dislike AI generated art in the same way that they dislike cheap injection molded plastic. When they inspect it in detail, they wish it were something more expensive and artisan, but most of the time they barely notice it and just see that the world is a bit more colorful than a blank page or unfinished metal panel would be.
But a business whose output is identical to everyone else's, because everyone is using the same models to solve the same problems, has no USP and no signal to customers to say why they're different.
The meme a while back about OpenAI having no moat? That's just as true for businesses depending on any public AI tool. If you can't find something that AI fails at, and also show this off to potential customers, then your business is just a lottery ticket with extra steps.
Most businesses don't compete on difference - most competitors are virtually indistinguishable from one another. Rather they tend to compete on brand identity and loyalty.
I think businesses assume the output of AI can be the same as with their current workflow, just with the benefit of cutting their workforce, so all upside and no downside.
I also suspect that a lot of businesses (at least the biggest ones) are looking into hosting their own LLM infrastructure rather than depending on third party services, but even if not there are plenty of "indispensible" services that businesses rely on already. Look at AWS.
This might be true for the glorified search engine type of AI that everyone is familiar with, but not for image generation. It's a novelty at best, something people try a couple times and then forget about.