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Well if GPU and Ram prices are any indication, we might get some de facto restrictions in that very few can afford a rig powerful enough to actually produce the images.
I was generating porn locally with Stable Diffusion XL running on an $800 gaming laptop that had an RTX 4050 with 6 GB of VRAM two years ago. Most of what I made was hentai, but it would have been trivial to train a LoRA on a couple dozen SFW photos of a particular girl, then made porn of her on demand.
I get a feeling people here vastly overestimate the required HW needed for generating random NSFW images because so much discussion is about LLMs that do require an order or two of magnitude more HW. If you don't care much about prompt understanding, concept flexibility or accuracy of poses and such, even "ancient" (ie. SDXL) models are more than capable of doing the job on piddly half a decade old computers that can be bought for $300 second hand.
Even if you really care about prompt-adherence, there are realistic Pony finetunes you can use to get a model that can understand *booru tags.
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Why would that be the case when a seven year old laptop is already powerful enough to do it? You don’t need fancy new hardware when the existing far from top of the line hardware will do fine.
This is true, but unless the intention is to keep salvaging old hardware as the various components die, we're still ending up in the same place.
(My actual guess is that capacity WILL expand to meet demand, so this is probably a shortish term crunch)
I’m not talking about old high end gpus but the middle / low-middle end that’s now eclipsed even by integrated gpus. When you equalize for processing power, gpus are still way cheaper than when the hw that was capable of image generation first became common (which was several years before the software was invented). You really don’t need a 32 GB 5090 just to do some basic NSFW generation / inpainting.
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