Fiverr AI Art Is Overpriced – September 12, 2023

Fiverr is filled to the brim with AI “artists” flooding the internet with synthetic images created by machines. And shockingly, people in many cases are paying more for an image from Fiverr AI than it would take to make it themselves.

The marketplace started accepting generative AI in January 2023 in response to a 1400% increase in searches for it.

Here are some of the public images found by searching completed jobs from AI artists on Fiverr. Let’s start with this turtle whose head is its hand. It cost somewhere between $20 and $90.

For comparison, Stable Diffusion is free (so long as you have the GPU to handle it), MidJourney starts at $8/month, and Dall-E 2 and other options cost between $0.02 and $2.00 for an image.

This puts a huge price increase on having someone else run a prompt for you. And it doesn’t get better.

Here’s a chair that makes no sense. At least it only cost between $15 and $25.

And the AI rabbit hole goes deeper. What is happening to this bicycle?! $15 to $45 buys you this mess.

Often there’s a large range, like this burger place (what’s happening with the car?!) that cost $15 to $100.

It’s not all just running prompts. This person offered to train a model off 30 images…and it came up with this lady with mutated hand blobs.

We are going to need to do a twofer on this next AI artist because it was too hard to pick a favorite worst. The kid on the tree has no arms and hands on his knees somehow. And he’s still less mutated than every kid in the playground pic. These atrocities could be yours for $25 to $100.

Astronauts are especially popular with generative AI. This dog’s ear is melting into the helmet. Guess he won’t survive, which is a shame for $15 to $25.

But he’s still in a better position than this human astronaut. He has a crazy middle finger we are admittedly impressed by, but he seems to be missing his feet. Probably in the lower end of the $40 to $75 price range for this gig.

Sometimes I can’t tell whether they’re doing what they say in the gig. Like this seller says they’ll fix or create a character for $80. This is mostly a tree growing a bunch of fruit from the trunk/bark for some reason. The kid is ok but has gibberish on his shirt.

And last but certainly not least we have this mouse design with horrific finger merging together. But the gig attached offers black and white tattoo illustrations for $20 to $55, so it’s hard to tell what happened in the backend to cause this.

There are plenty more AI abominations to be found on Fiverr. Ever since it embraced the technology, its marketplace became a magnet for synthetic media made using AI. Of course, the platform was always exploitative—after all, who can afford to do much of anything for $5?

And although the top percentile of sellers make a decent living, most sellers are completely buried and unable to make any headway. If you’re a fan of humans, avoid Fiverr.