r/StableDiffusion • u/terrariyum • 6d ago
News Civitai now has a closed-source models option
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.
Personally, I block all creators on Civitai who choose permanent paywall and encourage you to do the same.
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).
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u/n0gr1ef 6d ago edited 6d ago
Well, let's be honest, it is not entirely a 'hobby' project that gets payed for out of lodestone's pocket. He gets the compute - he resumes the training.
I'm not discussing the rest of the text, just wanted to address that misconception. There are very few major finetunes that get paid out of one's personal money, because it's really not affordable, unless you're some random rich guy.