At this point even the fine tuning isn’t a big differentiator. It costs a few bucks to make one in Replicate and you don’t even have to caption the photos because it can use another model to do that (I usually download and improve them for the second run). You just upload a zip file of images and give it a keyword.

There’s an art to fine tuning but plenty of laypeople have done it, it just takes time to experiment and some cash for the cloud providers.

I think your definition of laypeople and my definition of laypeople are different. If I talked to anyone not in my IT department about fine-tuning, their eyes would glaze over in 2 seconds.

These types of services are, in my opinion, targeted at the people who live their entire computer lives in Chrome & Excel. Not people who know what fine-tuning is or can recognize what "Replicate" is without Google.

I don’t mean it’s common knowledge among laypeople, just that someone determined enough to spend a weekend reading image gen documentation and the StableDiffusion subreddit can probably figure it out. It’s not like they need to take a months long bootcamp to learn to code first. Once they sign up for replicate (and I guess github for SSO first), all they have to do is find the page for the fine tuning and upload a zipfile of images.

Its not that it has no appeal, its that I expect it to be a tough sell to get people to actually take out their credit card for this when its free and good enough to go to chat.com or gemini. But I may be wrong.