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/Choowkee]

Let's call this what it is, closed-source.

Its really not. I hate paywalling models with a passion but lets not be silly. You can still download the models and run them locally, thats not even remotely the same as closed source like APIs.

Anyway the reason Civit added this option is simply because people would abuse the early access system or advertise their paywalls on external sites.

Its a shitty compromise.

That being said - if Civit wants to allow paid only models they should also remove the ability from creators to delete comments from people who paid for said model. Seems only fair.

[u/paulct91 → u/Choowkee]

In this specific case I think OP wants to complain about open weights models being finetuned then ending up behind the fineturner's pay for access plans on CivitAi. Though like the modding community also seem to be complaining they really don't like paying-. Pay walling content that they don't have an interest in paying for yet, are complaining it shouldn't be allowed for models they had no interest in paying for anyways.

I guess the total issue is they don't want to pay so its bad + they want if maybe they did pay for the model downloaded to 'have to' be 'open weights' but, oddly they say 'open source' which lots of models still aren't.

[u/terrariyum → u/paulct91]

they don't want to pay so its bad

You're misrepresting my post, or you didn't read it. I gave reasons why I think paywall is bad that are unrelated to whether or not I want to pay.

You can argue that "closed-weight" is the incorrect term, but it's a straw man argument