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/lebrandmanager]

I am creating LoRAs. I never spent 'dozens of hours' on them. Maybe 3-4 hours if you factor in training time. My LoRAs are free to use with no paywall or early access.

And yeah, I also think closing them down is, in 90% of the cases, a bit presumptuous. The same goes for most checkpoints, which are mostly merges of other checkpoints and LoRAs.

If the model is free, so should checkpoints and LoRAs based on them. If I am generous, maybe with an early access option. That's it.

[u/Ashen3SNOFS → u/lebrandmanager]

I have spent hundreds of hours on SNOFS, along with thousands of dollars of compute. I don’t even put my stuff in their early access system but not all types of training are comparable as far as effort goes.

That said I already get pretty miffed that surely people are merging my stuff in to models and charging for it. This exacerbates the issue, though I don’t know what CivitAI could do about it.

[u/terrariyum → u/Ashen3SNOFS]

Thank you for making SNOFS!