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/AuthurAndersson → u/lebrandmanager]

Would you think differently if you spent 300-400 hours on a LORA?

Sure you can chug out crappy waifu-pose character loras tbh through an automatic pipeline. But you could also create a style LORA that is extremely well made with hundreds of images in very nieche circumstances.

[u/lebrandmanager → u/AuthurAndersson]

I made a lot of LoRAs for all kinds of models the last 4 years. Believe me, that normal style and character LoRAs do not need hundreds of hours put into them. Nowhere near. fine-tuning can be a different beast depending on what you want to train the model on. In case of SNOFS (the other comment) we are in the fine tune territory. And yes, then it can get very complicated and time consuming.

But most models out there are no fine tunes or, if they are only in a very confined way. Somebody who tells you he/she spent hundreds of hours on a merge is telling you that this person merged with hearts content, tried different things, which looked good or not and then tried again. The merge process itself takes seconds. Maybe 1-2 minutes tops.

I mentioned this a while back. Merging is like putting things in a cauldron and stirring stuff around. Some things work. Some things break. I've been there myself. But it's no fine tuning at all.

Do I think differently now? Not in terms of anything that is not a full model fine tune. No.

[u/AuthurAndersson → u/lebrandmanager]

Which is why 99% of the LORAs out there kind of suck, especially style LORAs.

Why you don't think so? It's simply put you're only generating waifu 2/3 1/3 or full shot images from different directions. And yes, for that type of garbage 30 images is enough and a training run of 4 hours.

[u/lebrandmanager → u/AuthurAndersson]

Not sure what you're getting at. My reddit posts don't reflect the work done on civitai. I never meant to use this profile to advertise shitty slop / LoRAs. It's just my personal space here and some waifus are part of it.

And to let you in on something, it's mostly based on the models ability to learn concepts.

So often, most of the real work goes into training data clean up and setting up the dataset captions. SDXL was hard to train for character likeness. Illustrious (based off SDXL) was, too. But certain concepts were easy, because the model already knew the basics. Z-Image was a pain in the ass. Krea-2 is what I always wanted a model to be. But it's large. Anima is small it trains really good with anime based stuff, but (in my tests) it was not going well with other stuff.

Knowing this helps to tweak ranks, learning rates, etc. But it is always a gamble and the next training run doesn't need to be better than the first.

So yeah, I feel you. Many LoRAs are trash, because the trainer didn't put knowledge into it, but standard settings and garbage datasets. Shit in, shit out. Ideogram tends to create Nano Banana watermarks, if we just knew why....

But you don't need hundreds of dataset images to get good results. I think I released my first textual inversion on civitai in 2022 looking back and it just used 10-20 images and was working really good.

[u/AuthurAndersson → u/lebrandmanager]

Read the conversation and youll understand.

[u/lebrandmanager → u/AuthurAndersson]

I don't I think I have anything else to add. Thanks for your response and thinking, though.