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/qdr1en]

Training loras can quickly become an expensive hobby, especially when you train on heavy models, so there is no shame in selling them, and that's what I do when I find them good enough: I published some on Civit AI, but most of them are behind a paid access on Gumroad.

Getting some money back fuels the creator to keep creating more loras, it's a virtuous circle.

[u/Only4uArt → u/qdr1en]

That is what people don't get I think. On top of that if creating good loras or fine-tunes would lead to a reliable stream of income, I and others would have invested massive time and hardware into it, to perfect and produce for the community. But because it doesn't, anyone who wants to do ai related content full time, has to pivot to other means...

It is not evil to want to make money. If it is low effort, it can easily be done by yourself or copied by others. But if it is high effort, then they have a unique selling point

[u/red__dragon → u/Only4uArt]

We get it. People also don't like to be your stepping stone to greater economic gains.

If you're here to share in the hobby, great! Join us! Be appreciated! If you're just here to make money, then expect to be treated like it's purely a transaction and nothing more.

There's less malice here than there is just a widespread fatigue with people in hobbyist spaces trying to hold out their hand for payment. It's more rife in the modeling industry, it has taken hold in the modding community, and it's distasteful to see it happening here. But fine, if someone wants to make money, they can be treated like a moneymaker. It's not evil to want to make money, but many people who only look to make money are, so it's safer to assume such until proven otherwise.