newfag here lemme lay it on you:
i don't have a clue how any of this works but why would you ever pay money for a literal jpeg lmao.
Gachas and like 90% of the mobile game f2p market would be dead if people didn't pay for jpegs. We are in a hell of a weird time.
For a more serious answer, I personally am not against paying an artist for work. You commission artists because you enjoy the artwork they make and you want to see them make a specific subject. You can request an artist to draw a specific topic, but they are probably not going to do it because you're requesting their time to draw something you want. Money is a universal exchange for their time and skill. Commissions for competent artists are not cheap, either. They will also tell you up front if what you're requesting is something they can fulfill or not. The cheap ones are usually for those artists who can barely draw a paper bag and are trying to explore outside of things they don't normally draw. As someone who does commission based stuff for tech, I have some solidarity in being able to rationalize paying for art. Even though most of my stuff is licensed through open source (and I firmly believe in the power of open source!), I also gotta eat.
The only argument that NFTs hold is being able to create a universal contract in ownership. However, it immediately loses water when you realize 99.9_% of artist commissions are
not being used for marketing or any sort of exchange where someone is directly benefiting from the artist. Most people are buying jpegs to see their OC... in most likely a pornographic situation. Most OCs are not the face of marketing or really anything that generates revenue. Most porn stuff isn't going to be shared in public either, except maybe in small RP channels or on Twitter. You might get lucky and an artist might really like your OC and draw it for free, but it certainly happens less than someone buying an artist's time to draw their OC.
So let's argue that someone is buying a depiction of their OC and it's going to be used for marketing. Well, the first thing you do is sort out a contract with your artist. They will probably already have a contract thrown together for this situation or if they're an artist that actually makes money, they will probably talk to a lawyer first to help put together that contract. Can you name who made Target's white dog without looking them up? Well, an artist often transfers the rights of their art to the person buying it. They are likely to receive compensation for how much money the their art has made. For example, Disney needs to pay Harrison Ford every time they use his face in merchandise.
Imagine if you could cut the full legalese out and just get the rights to something transferred to you. Well it's great for someone who doesn't need to talk to a lawyer first, but it strongly shifts power to the buyer, rather than creator. That's the point of NFTs. For an artist that gives a damn about their work, it screws them over. For low-effort retards that are selling AI generated trash, it's great because they're making bank on something they put 0 effort in. No one is going to make money off low-effort AI generated trash for marketing purposes. But if you sell a logo as an NFT, you're fucked because you're A) losing compensation and B) how you gonna prove it was you that made that logo and C) you can't stop the power of right-click -> save as image -> upload. C was so much easier to deal with because people didn't make money off using your image but now... now people can make a boatload of money and DMCA requests are not exactly quick.
This response became a bit longer than I wanted it to, but the answer strings into a whole other topic and I didn't want my answer to seem half-complete. Most freelance artists I know (and some that I've commissioned) hate NFTs for one of the reasons I've covered.
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