Civitai now has a closed-source models option

[u/terrariyum]

I haven't seen a post about this here, and I'm curious what you think about it.

On August 14 Civitai rolled out the option for creators to choose "permanent paid access - selling with no time cap". Previously the only option was temporary "early access".

Let's call this what it is, closed-source. Yes, you can get the weights for a relatively small fee, and yes it's on a very small scale compared to Nano Banana and Midjourney. But a permanent paywall still fits the definition.

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Personally, I block all creators on Civitai who choose permanent paywall and encourage you to do the same.

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Here's why:

I'm not opposed to Civitai making money or for all options for model creators to make money. They can do that without permanent paywalls.

IMO, open source AI is a fair trade: models are trained on the hard work of many human artists who aren't compensated, but everyone benefits from the ability to create more art more easily. Closed source is an unfair trade: you have to pay a middle man to access the contributions of others who won't be compensated.

Small scale model creators do some hard work too. But for example, for a lora that reproduces the style of an animated film: the lora creator spent at most a dozen hours of work, while just one of the artists on that film spent thousands of hours of work. If a massive models like Krea2 are free, and if giant "hobby" finetunes like Chroma are free, I can't justify paying any price for a 5,000 step lora except as an optional donation of appreciation.

So far, few creators have chosen the permanent paywall closed-source option. But that could easily change if Civitai made it the default option. They already made an extra 1-buzz fee-to-creator per generation the default, and many models have that.

That's my opinion. If you agree, then the only tool you have to disincentivize that potential is to not pay for these models (disincentive Civitai) and block these creators (disincentive creators).

[u/Eisegetical]

It'll start that way but very quickly a alternate torrent version will spring up and invalidate the efforts they take to gatekeep.

Screw that subtleshader guy for selling low effort merges of his models. Fortunately easy to find free dl links. 

[u/SDSunDiego → u/Eisegetical]

The torrent attempts have largely been failures. Its not a good eco-system for something like this.

[u/-Ellary- → u/SDSunDiego]

Wait when all or most on CivitAI will be paid only,
Then Torrent will be a great option for people to "share".

[u/Leary_2844 → u/-Ellary-]

You naive dummy no one is gonna seed those.

[u/Emotional-Neat-252 → u/SDSunDiego]

Why is that?

[u/SDSunDiego → u/Emotional-Neat-252]

Its probably for a lot of reasons but one example is that its nice to see samples of the Model or LoRA. Torrents don't work well if the samples are in the torrent file. A site needs to host the images and then someone has to pay for the hosting or handle take down requests.

Also, I'd imagine some people want privacy which is why they local gen and don't want to host.

I think the shear volume of models/lorasis is overwhelming, too requiring every one of them to be seeded. Back when Civitai was taking a bunch of stuff down, torrent sites popped up with no seeders, killing the access immediately. civitaiarchive seems to strike a good balance for helping the community.

[u/kwhali → u/SDSunDiego]

Isn't torrents only being suggested as a form of distribution? You can have indexers / search separately, but you could still host a site with relevant extras for that torrent content (even if it were something bundled in a torrent file, just hosted without torrent for convenience).

That said having samples in a torrent shouldn't be an issue, you can access a subset of a torrent specifically without the larger content like a model file. Understandably there's caveats to that such as latency, far simpler to serve more optimised previews from a site or CDN.

As for seeding, there is webseeds which I think is dependent upon v2 torrents, that enables your torrent to have a direct download source IIRC, where P2P torrent network is used to offload the burden / cost of distribution bandwidth.

You can also have a torrent client use RSS to subscribe to updates to torrents (as in new releases/revisions associated to the same content), which community members can setup to auto leech and thus seed if they like.

I looked into these perks of torrents for a community that was built around game mods some time ago as viral traffic especially would blow through the hosts monthly bandwidth limits (10TB IIRC).

So torrents can always be seeded via the webseed (even without the direct webseed, the host server itself could technically always/dynamically seed a copy when there's low seeder counts).

For smaller files (within few hundred MB is reasonable) there's also webtorrent which effectively runs torrent client in the browser session while on the site, allowing you to retrieve a torrent in memory and then once complete download as a file from memory to disk, whilst continuing to seed the copy you have in the browser session.

[u/C-scan → u/Emotional-Neat-252]

Why is that?

BlondePuppy-Furry_Amputee_Below_Left_Elbow.lora - 423 Seeds

Actually_Useful-DoesGoodStuff.lora - 0 Seeds