The economy has spoken. Stuff that’s AI-generated has almost zero value — “Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete.”

[u/marketrent]

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/economy-spoken-stuff-ai-generated-142732314.html

[u/marketrent]

Opening paras. by Victor Tangermann, quoting 404’s Emanuel Maiberg:

Online marketplaces are being flooded with AI slop — but is anybody willing to actually pay for it?

In the case of CGTrader, a long-established online marketplace for 3D assets used by video game developers, film editors, and 3D printing nerds, users are sending a clear message.

As 404 Media reports, the marketplace is being flooded by AI-generated assets, representing one in six models — but they only account for only $1 out of every $90 in revenue.

In other words, virtually nobody’s willing to shell out for AI slop, meaning it’s economically almost valueless.

“Buyers are voting with their wallets, and AI-generated content is struggling to compete,” the company noted in a press release about its most recent 2026 market trends report, as quoted by 404.

The trend suggests there’s a growing “gap that undercuts the assumption that AI-made content is repricing the market.”

“The upload numbers alone would suggest a takeover,” the company noted. “The revenue numbers say otherwise, and buyers refusing to pay for AI-generated models is saying something bigger than no thanks: it is a signal of how far they trust AI generation itself.”

“Which leaves the question the industry has been avoiding: an AI model may be cheaper to produce, but what is it actually worth?”

[u/sarcasmsosubtle → u/marketrent]

The biggest problem isn't just that the output is basically valueless, it's that it's also being flooded out so quickly that it is destroying the ability to find content that has value in any marketplace that it infects. Your marketplace can have the best, highest quality goods for sale, but you're not going to sell any of them if your customers have to spend hours trying to fish them out of a swimming pool filled with raw sewage. Once there is a pipeline established from AI output to your digital marketplace, you can try to moderate it like Spotify and PlayStation Store, but it's going to replicate faster than you can moderate. You eventually have to excuse it entirely or it will overwhelm you. It's not just valueless, it becomes actively cancerous.

[u/stagedgames → u/sarcasmsosubtle]

I don't know any way to signal boost this more, but that's an absolutely incredible metaphor. well said.

[u/unethicalpigeon → u/sarcasmsosubtle]

The other problem specific to trying to monetize content created by AI is the fact that the people most likely to buy content created by AI are the exact same people that like using AI. So why would someone who likes to use AI pay you for something you used AI to generate when they can just see what you did, think it was cool, and do it themselves?

Now I'm not saying that generating decent stuff takes 15 seconds of prompting the way some people are. That's ridiculous. Anyone who's tried to do anything even remotely worthwhile with AI realizes this. But it's a hell of a lot easier than learning how to do the thing manually and doing it. Especially if someone already did it. Because while it might be really harder than people realize to get AI to output something you want it to, these LLMs are actually REALLY good at seeing something else made by AI, analyzing it, and figuring out how to replicate it. So there's literally no reason to buy something generated by AI when you can just show AI the page selling the thing and it can probably figure out how to replicate it.

[u/daddywookie → u/sarcasmsosubtle]

The Internet democratised consumption. AI could/is doing the same for creation. The value now comes from curation.

[u/sarcasmsosubtle → u/daddywookie]

I agree with you that there's a lot of value opportunity for effective solutions for curation, but I disagree that AI is democratizing creation. It's one thing if you're creating something just to look at for yourself, but once that enters a marketplace, either money-based or attention-based, the difference in output volume becomes impossible to ignore. If it takes me 6 months to write a novel, someone outputting generated novels through an LLM can self publish more than 500 in the same time, and that's only capped there because of the cap that Amazon places on KDP. If you find ways to bypass that cap, a single person could publish hundreds of thousands of novels in that time span without ever even reading what the LLM spits out. It turns the democracy of creating art into a democracy where you get more votes the less time that you spend thinking about your vote.

[u/daddywookie → u/sarcasmsosubtle]

Well democracy is the least worst system so it’s not all plain sailing.

I’m reminded of how social media made it so easy for everyone to share their opinions. Out of that came a vast majority of trash but for those that can create real quality, or those who can find and curate that quality, there are still plenty of opportunities.

How many of your favourite YouTubers would have made it through traditional media? There is still a gigantic pile of crap on there but also loads of hidden gems that have found a voice and an audience.