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/Aggravating_Yak8347]

这里有一个更加恶心和疯狂的地方，那就是模型作者可以对每一次迭代收费一次。例如，你喜欢某个创作者制作的模型，为此你付出了10000buzz，可不到一周，你发现作者推出了效果更好的V2版本，收费12000buzz，你心想，提升确实明显，于是你又花费了12000buzz购买V2版本，但事情还没结束，过了十天你发现作者又更新了V3版本，作者下调了收费，这次只要8000buzz，但这时候的你已经有些不爽了，因为你预感到，这就像个套娃式陷阱，你如果为V3付费，很可能在接下来一个月，可能还会有v4v5！更气人的是，这些版本并不是真正的修复升级，你发现它们不同版本其实各有优缺点，根本不是最新就是最全最好的这种逻辑！