Maybe I'm missing something but they look slightly out of proportion and somewhat bland. Not awful but I wouldn't bet the house on this just yet...

The future is going to be a mish-mash of the past?

Not trying to underplay how impressive the tech here is, but could you expand on what you see as the ($) value of something like this? From my perspective, these look like not-so-interesting stock-photography-level photos, nearly all of which have clear tells that they're AI-generated.

Well...look around you. Stock photography is used everywhere.

Stock photography is copyrighted and licensed. AI art is not copyrightable.

I think this is not necessarily the case. At least one of the generative models (DALL-E?) has a license that you own the images it generates from your prompt and can copyright and license those images.

DALL-E can purport to license whatever it wants, but DALL-E has no copyright interest to license because it is an AI.

in which jurisdictions have the licensing questions been definitively resolved?

I think this question cuts the other way.

So they can make money from selling stock photography?

If everyone can just run their own prompt against free models, wouldn't it be more likely that no one pays for it anymore?

Well even the free models aren't free at scale. And if you're paying for the inference anyways you might as well pay for one in a model which was specifically truncated to your needs.

To provide some perspective here, SD can be retrained on comparably small samples to generate images for very specific needs (example see [1]). So there is certainly a bunch of $ to be harvested by generating very good training sets for industry needs, say for instance mockups in architecture, creating logos and brand styles or just nice looking designs for consumer products.

[1] https://lambdalabs.com/blog/how-to-fine-tune-stable-diffusio...

sure, stock photography may just disappear as a business model.

while SD is freely downloadable, it isn't energetically free to run inference,

so for example (and as an off the cuff speculation), opportunities could arise to provide execution of these models from places where the cost of energy is lower

we can never confidently predict what the business models will be when such an impressive new technology arises.

Not really. What's the purpose in a business using photography it doesn't have any meaningful rights in or control over?

How do you monetize fashion photography of fake people using fake products? It would be like putting someone else’s products in your ads. I would guess that advertisers want pictures of people wearing their own products?