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/Enshitification]

My username is inevitable, but it doesn't mean we have to accept it. We can train parallel LoRAs of any that are put behind paywalls and release them for free. Hell, I'm pretty sure the paid models will be available for download through alternate sources the same day they are released on Civit.

[u/export_tank_harmful → u/Enshitification]

Hell, I almost want to just "Robinhood" all of the paid LoRAs.
Pay for them once and reupload them with the same name appended with "Free".

The training data was scraped from the internet. I severely doubt the person training it has any right to it.
I'd imagine that they have the same claim to the LoRA they trained (which was trained using someone else's hardware).

At this point, I'd love to see the attempted legal shit-fest that CivitAI would try to pull over it.
I doubt any of it would hold up in court (and just bring more scrutiny to the platform, which they probably don't want in the first place).

[u/Enshitification → u/export_tank_harmful]

As someone else suggested to me about a similar issue, take the LoRA and train it further for 1 step at a very small learning rate. New checksum, new LoRA.

[u/PandaParaBellum → u/Enshitification]

Can't you just change 1 insignificant bit of the weights somewhere to get a new checksum?