AI Generated 3D Models Flood Market, but Almost No One Is Buying Them
Jimmc414
34 points
39 comments
August 13, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
shellwizard
Has anyone really ever bought a STL (I assume) model? It's like WinRAR, does anyone ever buy a license?
u8
Isn't this basic economics? Supply and demand. If slop floods the zone then human work becomes even more scarce and valuable. What is my incentive to pay you? A person who spent no time working on something and who probably won't spend any time working with me if I need support. You're literally a meat puppet and a useless middleman when I could pay $20 and do it myself.
u8
AI Creators and NFT Bros are cut from the same cloth. Just polluters who think because they can type on a keyboard it makes them special despite having spent most of their lives as talent-less hacks.
palmotea
> CGTrader, an online marketplace for 3D assets, found that one in six models uploaded to the site these days is AI generated, but that AI generated assets account for only $1 out of $90 in revenue on the site. These numbers show that AI generated assets are quickly flooding the marketplace, but that most people are not interested in paying for them. > ... > AI generated content is creating a discoverability problem across the internet. On Instagram, porn sites, YouTube, and music streamers, human creators are being drowned out by a flood of AI generated slop. The obvious solution here is to to increase the upload rates to speed AI adoption. Maybe direct integration with the generation tools? If we can flip the ration from 1:6 AI generated to 1:10 or even 1:100 human generated, we can probably drive up the AI generated revenue proportion.
tamimio
I won’t be surprised if 3D modeling and rendering software will soon add some sort of mechanism or watermark or a hashfile to prove that it was modeled with this software rather than some slop.
LarsDu88
The leading 3d gen techniques are latent diffusion models that work off voxelized intermediate representations of objects. When you convert these into meshes, very often they will have poor topology. Topology is important if you need to modify these meshes or animate them. Bad topology and excess verts is also bad if you're building assets for a game. There's still more refinement of existing techniques that need to be done before AI generated 3d models match what humans produce.
dehrmann
The buyers are saying it's because the human-created models are better. This might be true, but it could also be some other things. Maybe they're doing the AI dream and using AI to create the models themselves. The article cites revenue maybe AI model are selling, just cheaper. Maybe human creators are buying from humans out of solidarity.
serious_angel
> Our goal isn't to increase the volume of AI-made assets on the marketplace. It's to give designers better tools to work faster and focus more of their time on creative work. > > Source: https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-3d-models-flood-market-but-almost-no-one-is-buying-them This is not art. I do not and never will believe "AI" supports the creativity mentioned. More to that, I believe only not artists would say that nonsense. Or, sorry, a dear idiot even, who could not care less about art, human, the future at all. Do you even realize how ineffably much an artist may imagine, consider, realize, choose while actually creating? It may be weeks, months, years... when artists developers, creates, enchants their unique miraculous creation... making it invaluable... an actual art... These human experienced choices are immeasurably important where no "AI" should ever exist... The effortful lovely choices, where every single choice polishes an artwork... reifying it into a perfect or an imperfectly perfect miracle...
avaer
3D model generation is for end-users to generate bespoke without waiting for an artist. It is not for artists to slop onto a store. You don't go to a restaurant to order 1 minute hot pockets. That's why 3D artists are not being replaced by AI. I feel like this article doesn't understand how people use AI in the industry, or how products integrate it.
justafewwords
I have a little thought to add... (reads:) "AI Generated Content Floods Market, But Almost No One Is Buying" So if that is a Thesis, in Terms of: heck the 'AI' has perfectioned it's own 'due to circumstances'-Copyright ?? I may add (reading further:) "AI" content in terms of "voxelized intermediate representations of objects" for example... ...converted to meshes, they will have poor topology. But topology is important if you want to modify the meshes or animate them -so "bad 'ass'-hats (assets) AI technology exchange models may sound like a solveable prob, and lesser Ideological than hu politics which was added to those LLMs before, not? Maybe pick a size first (limited) 320x480 if thats the old PAL, dunno...now let 'AI' slove the mystery you all seem to have... And for motivation (btw), if there are some pixel-games falling off from, may be they are liked, too... But as always, just my 2 Cents... (somebody listed US$20,- that may count a lot more...) regards... (-: (Edited typo^^)
NotGMan
The reason nobody is buying them is that if everyone can generate them on their own, exactly as you require as per your project specs, why would you buy it online? You know much better what kind of a model to generate and you pay 3$ for many variations.
BarnabyQJones
You mean, people aren’t willing to pay large sums of money for something that cost almost no effort or resources to create? Weird.
bluejay2387
I would imagine there is some obvious bias and that the AI backlash plays a role, in that many of those that would be buying the models are likely to be part of industries where we are seeing the most backlash against the technology. In another train of thought, how mind blowing is it that 4 years ago I could barely get 512px images out of models and just 4 years later there are legitimate arguments as to if AI generated 3D models are usable for production work?