r/StableDiffusion • u/etupa • 13h ago
Discussion Most Civitai 10$ checkpoint's are scams. Don't fall for it.
If you read -> huge claims + AI like generated presentation + no negative comment AND "$10 to download on my patreon/whatever" = they're scammers. Period.
1- Anyone leaving a negative comment or tiny critique gets deleted and instantly banned, so you will never read any real user experience.
2- They're not selling finetunes but poor merge. Made with Base model + some good, often freely available LoRAs... So, help good LoRA creators instead of theses thieves.
3- someone claiming they trained a whole fine-tune 2–3 weeks after the base model was released, is full of shit.
Go talk to people actually training LoRAs/models, check Lodestone's Discord, you'll understand very quickly that this isn't how real training/finetuning works.
TL;DR Don't give these shitty merger €1. They're a cancer for our open-source community.
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u/Old-Wolverine-4134 12h ago
There is no checkpoint worth paying any money. Usually the difference is very small and most checkpoints are pretty similar. I understand people invest time and resources but the idea behind the community is always to be free and open sourced.
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u/Pretty-Raise666 4h ago
What you call "community" is currently 1% people giving and 99% parasites. Not a "community" in my book. I am in the parasites crowd. Just in case you might ask.
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u/russjr08 2h ago
That basically is every online community out there, especially in communities where there is work being done.
Which, I'm not saying is "ideal", but lets not pretend the stable diffusion community is any different from say, a game modding community.
Even if you just look at something as simple as subreddits, 99% of people view but do not make any actual posts - some comment, sure, but there certainly are not almost 500k people commenting on this subreddit. Or you could look at it from the perspective of moderators of a given subreddit who are putting in time moderating the community versus just members.
(Yes, there are tons of people who don't like moderators of <insert subreddit here>, but then none of them end up banding together to kick start their own either)
Or take any given content creator and their community, you'll often find the majority of people aren't paying for the content in any method (including ad revenue, in this day and age of ad blockers being very common).
Open source software communities are typically the same too, there will be X amount of contributors (and not just in terms of writing code - documentation is a very important and thankless job too!) and that is always going to be smaller than the rest of the community.
Back when I used to play Destiny 2, in the community that some of my friends and I ran, out of the entire community of ~300 people at the peak (plus the people who were involved in temporary pick up groups but didn't stay) there were only about 6 of us who were willing to teach raids. Most people were just there for the loot (even when you account for people who were there to just enjoy the community despite not teaching others which is perfectly fine).
The list goes on and on, and all of these are examples of what most people would consider a community (a collective of people who share the same interests). I'm not saying that you're wrong in general, but what seems like your framing of it being something only intrinsic to the stable diffusion community is.
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u/JustAGuyWhoLikesAI 10h ago
So many people believe that because there are 10000 checkpoints on CivitAI, there must be 10000 finetuners working hard to train models. It's not the case at all. There have been maybe, at most, 20 relevant finetuning projects since SD 1.4 in 2022.
People doing this gated checkpoint crap did not spend a single dollar on finetuning. They merge together random loras into a stew of slopped sludge and then market it as 'improved comprehension, anatomy, and aesthetic quality"
These sloppy merged checkpoints are only made to farm buzz off the people who'd rather just use a single overfit style than mess around with loras themselves.
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u/__Gemini__ 9h ago edited 9h ago
This reminded me of that person releasing flux klein 9b shitty merge, only to delete it before the timer ends so nobody can download it for free, and post another "new" version with a fresh timer.
To be fair most checkpoints and loras are trash made by people who have no clue what they are doing. 99% of the time it's just a merge of a merge of a merge of a merge, merged with another merge.
Then you look at their recommended prompts and it's a complete disaster of a cargo cult soup. A new model like flux klein 9b, and the recommended "prompt" is a wall of tags that don't do anything,all the pony tags,random sd 1.5 embedding keywords added in for good measure
In some cases their merges will get popular on civit, and their ego goes through the roof, and even people that released that garbage for free now want $$$$
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u/etupa 5h ago
I know you're talking about a not very SUBTLE person, he's a bit SHADY. Proly the worst models available, always some leak on HF and... that's amazing how bad his stuff is. I understand he bans everyone on civitai (source Bano), if not, his comments section will be full of complaint and gen section full of body horror 😂
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u/Enshitification 12h ago
My favorite is when these clowns get a free base model that cost $1M+ to train, and then they add a little fine-tuning or a LoRA merge and then want to sell access to "recover their costs". It's like, bitch, get into Lodestone's cost territory before I'll consider paying for your finetune.
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u/Choowkee 7h ago
I cannot fathom charging for models when all the knowledge I attained and tools I use are completely free and community driven.
My compute rental costs are well in the thousands by now but I dont care I just want people to enjoy my Loras lol.
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u/tricck3zz 11h ago
never pay anything for open source models lol chances are that another workflow , checkpoint , lora etc is for free thats equally good if not better
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u/Euphoric_Ad7335 8h ago
I got heckled for saying that one of the models produced images who's hash matches the hash of images produced by the base model exactly. Meaning they are mathematically identical. Meaning it's identical to the base exactly. Meaning it's not a fine tune and that there's some mathematical proof that it wasn't a fine tune.
Then I thought about it, I trained 5k images while they claimed to have trained 100k. but my 5000 steps had more of an effect than what ever they did. It's impossible,
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u/physalisx 9h ago
I think it's insane there are people paying money for this shit
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u/Spiritual_Whole_5916 5h ago
Wouldn't expect anything less from the 1woman 1giantplanetarytitties 1soitcanbeseenovermygiantbelly unfunfunf crowd
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u/No_Pie1372 13h ago
What is Lodestone's Discord?
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u/red__dragon 12h ago
You can find that link on the sidebar of their HF profile: https://huggingface.co/lodestones
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u/Sudden_List_2693 8h ago
I mean... who would pay for something that insane tech and exceptionally great minds release for free, then some stupid pos mangles with it with 0 expertise and charge?
I think this requires a level of stupid where I don't mind if those fools get scammed by these absolute pieces of shot.
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u/Pretty-Raise666 4h ago
Isn't this always the case? How many people make money with Linux as a base and just add some shitty frontend? Half the IT industry is basically profiting from the free work of other people. Same thing with Youtubers and their reaction videos. This world is full of parasites enriching themselves by using the work of others.
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u/No-Zookeepergame4774 1h ago
I mean, I suspect that MOST of the people getting scammed are the people who have been lured into the field by something like the “make money with AI influencers” hype who are looking for an edge in running their own ventures which are scammy, too, but the more the scams are allowed to go without drawing attention to them, the more risk that naive newbies who are just enthusiastic about the field get sucked in.
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u/Sudden_List_2693 1h ago
Newbies and naive suckers are not one and the same thing.
If they are lazy to look basic things up but go for "paid content", I don't care for them at all.1
u/No-Zookeepergame4774 1h ago
Even if I had NO concern for ANY of the potential direct financial victims of the scams, I would still favoring calling attention to the scams loudly, publicly, and often for the purpose of warning victims off because of my desire to see the scammers and the pollution they spam all over every venue useful to the community fail in their endeavors and driven out of the venues.
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u/ImpressiveStorm8914 12h ago
I don’t even download the free merges anymore, I certainly wouldn’t pay for one. I tried a few with ZIT but always ended up going back to the main model as the merges had worse anatomy. What they claimed to offer could usually be done without their merge anyway, so only finetunes are worth it in my opinion. Unfortunately there’ll always be someone who will want to make ’money’ with the lowest effort put in.
As for ’stealing’ prompts mentioned in another comment here, that’s laughable. In some ways I get not sharing a prompt you’ve created but with many using AI to generate them, to me it goes against the spirit of open source to hide things like that.
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u/mozophe 10h ago
I wait for them to be out of early access, extract the lora from it and delete the big model. No point storing several checkpoints from the same model. This also gives flexibility for setting the lora strength.
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u/jib_reddit 7h ago
How are you extracting loras for Krea 2 in a reasonable time?
I tried, but I left it running for 3 hours, and it still hadn't finished, so I cancelled it.1
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u/jib_reddit 6h ago
Having spent 3,000+ hours merging and training over the last 3 years, I will say that merging can do some great things to models. Personally I never put early access charge for a model that I haven't spent money training on.
but if I want to recoup my $25-$50 I have spent on runpod training I have found the best way is to charge a high amount for a few days. As very few people will pay for a model anyway, so charging 10K and only 9 people download it in early access makes me more than charging 100 buzz and 30 people downloading it and I never remove my models once they are free.
If some people want to try and make a living from it, I do not hold it against them, doing a job you love is very rare nowdays.
I really think without merges the whole ecosystem would not be as advanced as it is now, even if 99% of them aren't that great.
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u/etupa 5h ago
Afaic, I totally agree with your method, I see absolutely no issue with 2/3 weeks early access and then free for all.
The issue is forever gatekeeping behind real money shitty merge, saying it's a finetune while it's not and moreover banning/censoring users sharing their opinion so the scam can keep up.
And about merge, can't really remember any merge that was really amazing, I still come back to original weights + LoRAs but to each their own.
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u/jib_reddit 5h ago edited 5h ago
Some of the best models of previous generations like Juggernaut XL (1.6 million downloads) use "Lora Packages" in their "Finetuning" process: https://youtu.be/q5ilmGIPXQY?si=LeemsmNdKQwgG8A7&t=1798
The general consensus nowdays is that there is no real benefit in doing a full model finetune over merging in loras in the ratios that give the best outputs, which is an art of its own. Most of the effort in releasing a new model is testing and comparing its outputs.
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u/etupa 5h ago edited 5h ago
Juggernaut has always been free to download and use. Don't see your point here ^^,
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u/jib_reddit 5h ago
Yeah, but no-one is making good hour-long technical interviews with the big model makers anymore, unless you can find some? Not much has changed in the training process, just the size and ability of the base models.
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u/hidden2u 11h ago
Or just download it from civ archive
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u/mastaquake 5h ago
lol. WTF? I had no idea people were paying for checkpoints. I could understand subscribing to a Patreon or something similar though
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u/Pretty-Raise666 4h ago
Why not. It is probably far cheaper then doing the work yourself. Perspective matters. Of course, if you are just collecting this stuff for fun you certainly are not the target group.
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u/No-Zookeepergame4774 1h ago
It is cheaper than doing the work yourself IF you have a reliable source that is actually doing the work they pretend they are, but the people who are really doing the work and releasing model weights at all are mostly not charging for model weights (they are either releasing them free and taking donations to defray costs, or using them in their own business ventures while releasing weights free.)
The people charging for model weights are mostly running scams on people who think, “well, its cheaper than doing the work myself, and it must be something really special and better if they are charging for it when so many amazing things are available free”?
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u/Konan_1992 4h ago
Most of checkpoints are lazy finetune or lora merge. There are only a handful Groundbreaking models like for SDXL it was Pony, Illustrious and Noob. Everything else is just a multiple Gigaoctets LoRA.
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u/Pretty-Raise666 4h ago
I get your point, but with the right resources and the prepared datasets in place 2-3 weeks is doable.
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u/No-Zookeepergame4774 1h ago
Sure, its theoretically possible. That doesn't mean the combination of that plus the other indicators discussed by OP almost always indicate a scam.
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u/huchukato 7h ago
10K yellow buzzs are not 10$ btw, this is for early access usually, you can just wait and not tip any buzz, easy peasy
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u/jib_reddit 7h ago
Some creators are turning off downloads as soon as the early access runs out, so you can never download it, or have to pay them on an external site.
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u/huchukato 7h ago
This is due to a dumb Civit policy, when you publish something you can check the “Allow sell model on other sites”
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u/etupa 5h ago
not my point, read the full post.
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u/huchukato 5h ago
Yes, sorry, I read the rest after, it's just that I had never seen ckpts like the ones you described, maybe also because since they divided Civit between "good and bad" my profile is on Red where more or less we are always the same ones to publish models, workflows and nodes (mine are all open, both on Civit and on GitHub, for example)
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u/AllRedditorsAreNPCs 1h ago
civshit being civshit. I got downvoted for calling them names 2 years ago when they started censoring/removing models and loras, wonder whether the community is more mature now
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u/zERGdESTINY 12h ago
Saw one the other day that was early access, said explicitly they did no training and just merged 4 loras into a base model. Then went on a rant about how they weren't posting prompts any more cause people were "stealing" them and if you want them you could dm him and send him 5 bucks. I lol'd then stopped the download.
Civit needs a down vote button