This is true, but only if you have a GPU (/accelerator) comparable in performance to the one backing the service, or at least comparable after accounting for the local benefit. This is an expensive proposition because it will be sitting idle between completions and when you're not coding.
You can do this with pretty much any semi professional painting program and a drawing tablet/display - procreate, photoshop, Krita, corel paintshop pro, etc. I looked through his website and couldn't find anywhere where he said what he used, and there isn't enough evidence to say one way or the other.
My favorite little known factoid is that when I googled his name Wikipedia says he's the guy who drew the pastafarian parody of The Creation of Adam, title "Touched by his noodly appendage".
From my time hanging out with Arne on IRC I would assume he's using Photoshop (or opencanvas version oc11b72 ;-) )... I'd be surprised if he's on a PS version newer than CS2 though. I think Adobe added a subscription model to later versions and back in the day (ca 2000) he was mostly just using regular round brushes. If that's still how he's working, I don't see any reason at all why he'd have upgraded. Perhaps he's written his own raster editor by now, though (another low-odds bet tbh).
You can read his art tutorial on his main page. But essentially, I think he strives to get a clean result (no scribbling to "find" the form) with as few brush strokes as possible, which takes a lot of practice. He's also does a lot of pencil drawing, obviously.
i do throw a paywall on most of my projects. i'll both probably remove the paywall and this project entirely. but i was curious to see how people behaved with this bot and my question is answered! still no one has compared it to character AI which is what i was most interested in
>Would be happy to take it down if asked! this is an experiment for me, and don't expect it to be a product
Putting a pricing page up was almost certainly an extremely bad idea.
By putting the pricing page up you moved yourself out of the "hey I'm just a fan it's just fan fiction" category and into the "unlicensed commercial use of a registered trademark category." The later is a much more serious category to put oneself in, and involves a much more serious set of lawyers than the bots who send out cease-and-desist and takedown letters.
Removing the pricing page will not make the fact that you had shown a pricing page go away.
IANAL but I'd take the site down very quickly and never put it back up again. Just receiving a letter from one of the brand's many law firms will almost certainly end up costing you thousands of dollars drafting an appropriate response in hopes that it doesn't escalate. You really don't want that to happen.
Having a pricing page with disclosed pricing tiers, one of which has an active (even if broken) signup link might produce a different impression to, say, the legal team of an IP owner who came across this site.
If the user preferred reduced latency and had the RAM, is that an option?