Alright so to begin i want to say I wanted to address your thoughts and so I spent some time looking into everything you wrote. I want to begin by saying my stance hasn't changed, that I ask for donations primarily to help buy subscriptions for patreon and pertfile, that I spend way more money than I receive, and that I don't mind doing so and still appreciate any help I can get since I do this for a hobby.
Now to address all of your points.
First I think that your point on price that 5$+ is incomplete especially in terms of the cost of time. In quite a few cases I would agree with you, in fact I've already explained in a previous post how I decide to buy a subscriptions (literally only 14 posts above on this page), but when I get a paid subscription I make sure that I can use images in them for at least a minimum of 3 to 4 packs and most of the time I get enough for at least 10~40+ packs because they allow access to sometimes 2 years+ of images for just 5$. Because of this the value I get from these subscriptions increase the more images I use for future image packs making the price worth the subscription.
I'd also like to say that paid AI generators almost certainly have a limit to how many images you can generate per month so the 15$ subscription wouldn't generate me unlimited images, and the lack of experience would make probably all of the images unusable. To get better results than what people already put out would take months of experience and also quite a bit more money than you would probably imagine, not to mention that It takes time to generate and sort through AI images as well. To cut down on that time would require me to have a higher spec GPU and PC to generate the images on my own device which would just cost more money. The biggest downside is that you have to manually go through all the generated images yourself to delete any with distortions that aren't the best for packs and creating the images myself would only double the time it takes to sort through them since most of them time the subscription sellers themselves already go through packs once to remove the worst images. I'd rather just spend that time and money making packs.
As for supporting artists, I agree it's unfair to artists who have talent and put in the work. But my goal isn't to spend money to support artists but to make packs. Most of the talented artists you can find the content for free for on the same site that you recommended and others as well and If I had to support every single talented artist whenever I used their images to make a pack, I wouldn't be able to make a single pack. Also I'm not advertising the subscriptions I buy, if anything I'm doing quite the opposite by offering them for free to people which is strictly something i'm doing primarily so that other packmakers can also add more good images to their packs for free.
Now to address financial burden. Its true I don't have that much money, but I still have enough to pay for a few subscriptions and any donations I've received have allow me to buy more. The key to this is that there are tons of subscriptions I want to buy that I don't because I of course don't want this to become a financial burden. I keep asking for donations constantly because doing so gets more people to click the link (I can track the number of visitors) and any person who decides to donate lets me buy another subscription for a pack I want to make, maybe one that has less value but good images. That's worth it to me since I'm not a saint. I'm also making packs for my own enjoyment.
Now I checked the link
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. Its a good archive but its not really better than Exhentai.org which I already use first to check if I can find access to archives for free . Exhentai also has to upside of containing several pixiv/patreon/fanbox accounts that were taken down or deleted and is much better updated having been around the longest. I double checked all of the archives I bought already on kemono and either couldn't find them or found that most of them were months outdated. It also doesn't keep archives of any pertfile subscriptions which is really what I wish i could find and is usually what I end up paying for these days.As for using AI CG to replace missing content; Buying AI imagepacks is something I do to improve the quality of imagepacks and not something I do to just complete them. My goal isn't just to find every hard to find tag to get that A+ rating but rather to find as many good images as possible to add to the pack because packs do better in game when you have several good images for each tag combination and the upside to AI images are that you can get a bulk amount of images that in the hands of someone with experience can turn out to get much closer to the source art than hand drawn art can do which is a huge plus. Obviously there are plenty of talented artists as well but again, most of the time I can already find those for free. It just turns out that with so many AI art creators out there, not even some of the best ones can be found for free on the internet. If they were out there I wouldn't have to buy them to make the packs.
Now to end what I want to say. I know people probably don't like when I ask for donations on every post. But not doing so just means that I wont receive any which means I cant make the packs that I want to. At the end of the day making packs is a hobby which I do for fun and is primarily the thing I find fun
I know your intent probably wasn't a personal attack but to get your opinion across. Everyone has that right to free speech
Originally I wasn't going to respond to your post because while reading at the start it felt like a personal attack, I decided to write a response after reading that you didn't mean it as one. Just wanted to say that what really takes the joy out of pack making is when you have to explain why and how you make packs when really you just want to make packs and I'm sure others would have rather had me post a new pack release instead even if It meant me asking for a donation.
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