I'm a furry, I commission a decent bit of art and furry artists (unless they're super popular) tend to actually be much cheaper than normies.
Commissioning a comic is >$100 for a page, from a popular artist at least several hundred.
And that's also for personal use with no commercial rights whatsoever - it's actually an impasse because they technically still own the art, you technically own the character in the art, so it's in licensing purgatory, which is fine for conbadges, smut, icons and whatnot.
I used to work at an agency that shared a floor with an art studio, commercial rights for art, especially something as complex as a comic page can easily run into $1-10k or more.
Don't get me wrong, artists deserve the money they get, but as with everything that gets automated, there's a financial incentive to do so. Inb4 someone drops all the etsy links of sellers doing AI art as well or (as has been done for a loooong time) using a non-ml based filter to achieve the same thing.
There are definitely cheap-er options available from Brazil, China, Venezuela etc (same as fursuit commissions) but that's also another interesting topic in relation to ai; we already outsource heavily.
I'm a furry, I commission a decent bit of art and furry artists (unless they're super popular) tend to actually be much cheaper than normies.
Commissioning a comic is >$100 for a page, from a popular artist at least several hundred.
And that's also for personal use with no commercial rights whatsoever - it's actually an impasse because they technically still own the art, you technically own the character in the art, so it's in licensing purgatory, which is fine for conbadges, smut, icons and whatnot.
I used to work at an agency that shared a floor with an art studio, commercial rights for art, especially something as complex as a comic page can easily run into $1-10k or more.
Don't get me wrong, artists deserve the money they get, but as with everything that gets automated, there's a financial incentive to do so. Inb4 someone drops all the etsy links of sellers doing AI art as well or (as has been done for a loooong time) using a non-ml based filter to achieve the same thing.
There are definitely cheap-er options available from Brazil, China, Venezuela etc (same as fursuit commissions) but that's also another interesting topic in relation to ai; we already outsource heavily.