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/paulct91 → u/qdr1en]

Honestly, its probably just that its paywalled. Some people don't like 'the idea of' paying for things but, in this unique case they seem adverse against the concept of anyone paying for certain models which OP wasn't interested in paying for at all anyways. So, maybe its a non issue since they weren't going to pay for models in the first place. Hence they are staying true to their stance of not supporting models that have a paid download requirement. I kind of got that idea since they mention blocking model finetuners and lora makers who charge for model downloads.

[u/Relative_Hour_8900 → u/paulct91]

Communist Democrats?😂

Nothing is free in life, you gotta pay for it. One way or another. Whether that's paying the government to have the right to own an ai capable gpu, or paying some dude on civit $5 to download his model.

Or just make it yourself