I don't know about Stable Diffusion in particular, but three examples of AI-generated art making money immediately spring to mind:

1 - some guy won hundreds of dollars in an art contest from AI generated art (and this made big news, so it should be easy to find)

2 - one person reported using midjourney's images as a starting point for images that wound up being used in a physical magazine

3 - another artist has used midjourney images that they modify to sell in all sorts of contexts (like background images on stock illustration sites)

You'd probably find many other examples in midjourney's #in-the-world discord channel.

I'd also be shocked if stock image sites, clipart sites and freelance design/illustration sites weren't already flooded with AI generated images that have been sold for money.

That being said, because high questly AI-generated images are so easy to make, the value of images of all types is likely to plummet soon if it hasn't already.

> the value of images of all types is likely to plummet soon if it hasn't already.

The price might, but the marginal value having them or not has to other products which incorporate them likely won’t as much. So, say, if you are a TTRPG publisher, the value of art to your business doesn't change, but the cost of moving farther along the no art -> scattered sketches & tangentially relevant public domain works -> ideal quantity of art, specific to the product, goes down. So, you are, in effect, making money on SD.

Ultimately, its an art tool — a shovel — ecosystem that is democratized enough that it is dominated by high-quality, end-user usable components.

Making money with it in the non-shovel-selling sense is going to be commercial artists (or other people with visual image needs, perhaps avoiding the need for commercial artists) incorporating it in production workflows. But except when they are also selling shovels (e.g., Pixar with Renderman) there’s not a whole lot of incentive to trumpet workflow components rather than product in that space.

> commercial artists (or other people with visual image needs, perhaps avoiding the need for commercial artists) incorporating it in production workflows

Maybe it's just me, but that reeks of the archetypal race to the bottom.

"We didn't have to pay professional X to do task Y as we and others have been doing for decades, instead we used modern replacement Z funded by cheap money which costs peanuts at present".

Q: Is there really a business to be made selling Z?

Who cares? If Z is free, and there are businesses to be enhanced using Z, then people are making money with Z, even if the mechanism isn’t “selling Z.”