> Nobody's forcing anybody to pay.

I never even implied that they were, or that they shouldn't be charging for the service. I was responding to a typical dismissive tech crowd response to criticism of its capability.

> Isn't that the point, mass testing to find areas for improvement, many users = many combinations and prompts that could never be thought of by QA alone

Yes, which is why I responded to the person calling the critic "numb" and "spoiled" for saying negative things about what this service produced for them.

> Apply the same logic to this service?

That was my point.

> in exchange the users pay for a novelty for a while.

What people get out of it is not prescriptive, and being early access doesn't change that. Playing a game is almost always a terminal experience where the end user creates a novel experience for themselves. Self-entertainment. Even then, issuing critique of that end product is very important to the people with more skin in the game, so to speak. (Yet so many fans get so defensive about it when they gain a lot from the increased scrutiny.)

Beyond that, generative AI platforms are fundamentally different in that many people don't use them purely for self-entertainment. Working in the entertainment business, generative AI tools like this impact the work that I do every day. They make things possible that previously weren't, kill jobs, add others, make potentially good things bad and potentially bad things good, among many other things, and all of this has been true for quite some time.

The current tech culture is weirdly aggressive about trivializing the value and difficulty of commercial creative work, and dismissing the perspective of those that make it; I'll always explicitly point that out when I see someone do it. Starry-eyed SV tech optimists just want to feel cool about being involved in such a pivotal moment in our culture, and people trying to ride the gee whiz neato vibes are excited by the prospect of creating things that were beyond their reach. Many of them feel insecure when anyone challenges that and they attempt to discredit critics by calling them names like "spoiled" and "numb."

Would picking at its artistic merits be obnoxious if it was proof of concept code for university research? Of course. If this was a FOSS project too new to even meaningfully address output quality? Sure. But that's not what's happening here. One of the first comments in this comment section was a professional music producer recreating this service's output using professional tools, and I'll eat my hat if this isn't already being used in many studios for commercial work as a cost saving measure.

Anybody that cares about these media, cares about the business viability of these services, cares about the business viability of commercial art, cares about people who stand to gain or lose something from generative AI in the very near future, cares about the sustained quality of our artistic culture, and cares about the people whose professional lives are being tossed into a vitamix and remolded because of these tools should be very, very fucking happy to see vigorous critique of what these things produced. The people who get defensive about it and start calling people names rather than actually engaging in any useful way should probably just close their browser tab because they're not helping.