In a despicable, non-transparent move, civitai removed everyone's ability to get any amount of yellow buzz for free without any kind of warning, announcement, etc beforehand. This article served to inform people of the fact prior to the announcement that finally addressed it.
Personally: All this stupid pseudo-currency manipulation as they scheme on how to profit off of others' work is pushing me to a breaking point where I don't want to give them any content. If things were kept simple I would gladly support the site, but buzz is awful and their handling of it is never sound. Trying to incentivize and control people's behaviors, both in terms of what to do and what not to do... they deserve to fail.
The reality of AI art is simple. Do we want to share the ability to make high-quality art with those who don't have the lifetime of training and practice required to do it manually? Can we live in a world where art is NOT A LUXURY for a privileged few? Or do we baby those who only care about their own livelihood?
No, making art manually and making art artificially will not be viable careers for the majority of people when the volume of art being created and the number of people able to create it skyrocket. That's simple supply and demand. So how about we knock off all these charades about giving creators ways to monetize?
MONETIZATION should not be any part of this site's or this community's mission. That's why I'm done with my memberships/support. All I want is a place to share resources and more importantly discuss the how-to's necessary to enable more people to do more than they could do before. There's a big difference between addressing the costs of hosting files and trying to make so much money that you do not have to seek any other employment or source of income.
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