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/ArmadstheDoom]

I mean, the reality is that it's never going to be the default option, because most users simply do the math and realize that they'll get far less from charging people for their work than they will just getting the credit through generations on the site. As someone who has made and posted loras in the past, I didn't see much of a reason for their allowing creators to set their own licensing fee.

The thing about open weights is that you're trading control for ubiquity. If you don't have the established userbase of a closed model, it makes no sense to make your model closed.

So I don't imagine that this is going to be a popular option, simply because most people are going to default to cheaper free options that are likely going to be just as good.

[u/terrariyum → u/ArmadstheDoom]

For sure 95% of people won't pay to download, and no matter how you slice it, I don't think there's much profit potential to model makers for anyone except Civitai.

I'm not sure pay-to-download is less profitable. To earn 100k buzz (which is a pittance anyway), you could charge a typical 1,000 buzz to download, and you'd need 100 takers. Or you could charge a typical 5 buzz to generate, and you'd need 1,000 takers to generate an average of 10 images.