Content Announcement
Preface
Well, it's high time after a week or more of considerations on this - and yes, even while trying to make the back mixes for realism models that we considered to release - we were still weighing up if this was the right avenue for us.
Realism?
The short reasons
Keep to your morals (your own, not anyone else's)
Quality control
Keep to your desired strengths and skills
The Long Reasons
Well, we've only just put out the one article last night detailing the struggles we've been having for a while now with realism.
But in reality it also does boil down to: We don't care how popular realism is, our morals don't align with continuing with them. That doesn't mean that REALISM IS always used for dodgy things, it's that if a model cannot produce adults 90% of the time for realism even with loras and textual inversions -- whats the point?
I realise that in private that there ARE reasons that are NOT dodgy, Very CLEAR and defined reasons to use realism and generate SAFE pictures of certain things - but that's only a 1% factor in the game of AI.
Always scarily remember Avenue Q: The Internet is for Pr0n/Corn.
Why? Why go reminding you all this?
Because while yes EVERYTHING can be used for that?
And scarily EVERYTHING can be used for super dodgy illegal content, realism is under the microscope right now - Hyper-realistic, photographic quality content is under the new lens - it's being tracked by governments everywhere.
No, I'm not advocating for anyone else to stop making realism content.
We're advocating for us to stop, and start removing all of our realism content according to our current content guidelines on our own feelings, morals and rules.
Whats Next?
While we can't prevent people from backing up our content, putting it on other websites or hiding it out in a huggingface repository for back mixing... We can at least work with any generation sites that we're involved with to prevent re uploading.
Yes that's right.
We are VERY focused on keeping ourselves safe- because this subject with realism stresses us out VERY much.
We're not talking 3D/2.5D here - we'll blur the lines for art for sure - but you'll see some of our previous back mixes of Epic V4, Epic v3 and otherwise start to drop off in coming days- If you're LUCKY? We might be able to rename some of them and pass them off to CivitAI.
We'd almost prefer NOT to do that because in any case of crime or otherwise? We'd still be liable in some form or another. One wrong idiot in a criminal investigation and the person being prosecuted just has to admit what content they used.
They're going probably largely after Midjourney i'm sure -- but SD 2 and 2.1 had similar views thrown at them...
All of you who MAKE REALISM CURRENTLY? Saints, the lot of you. How you do it consistently, not nesscarily cause of morals but the theory I had in my article last night - the "HAPSBURG GENETICS" of Realistic models.... there's only so many QUALITY models you can merge with without starting to get pixel bleed.
But I WANNA USE IT IN A HYPERREALISM VR GAME
No.
No you don't.
Because I don't want some nerd jerking off to underage content produced by a realistic model. I know I can't prevent it from anyone else's content - and anime and illustration models ALWAYS blur that line in some form or another -- but I"m not gonna sit by and have 0 sleep from someone generating 10 year olds for a Mature game for a VR headset.
Again, while I CAN'T track everyone downloading and keeping content - So if you've downloaded anything of ours that's getting removed soon -- I"m not going to beg of you to DELETE it.
What am going to do is put a cabosh on the following:
No re-uploading any content we remove on CivitAI that is our content.
No re uploading any of our content we remove to Tensor Art or Pirated Diffusion, SeaArt or PixAI (preferably not even Happy Accidents)
Preferably, though we cannot track EVERY generation site, anything we remove don't re upload to any other generation site if at all possible
What we can't prevent entirely:
People rightfully backing up content they enjoy and hoarding it in huggingface.
Mixing and back mixing with content we've removed that is backed up somewhere.
That's dumb - I'm gonna hoard it!
We're not dumb, people hoard models that have been deleted, and while we feel even for quality reasons that our content that's realism for FULL MODELS btw.
Ok I'm confused.
Yea, we'll still take requests for Loras, TI's etc and if it's something we're OK with doing we'll do it. Realistically you can control your content MORE with Loras and TIs anyways and i'm not against making semi realistic and realistic loras and TI's.
but y'all gotta remember: our current Textual Inversions ARE NOT TRAINED - they're created using prompts with the Embedding merge tool.
WORK SMARTER NOT HARDER AI PEEPS LMAO
That's about it that covers it.
We don't have a full list yet of what we're removing, we're privatising a lot of our model dumps for a bit while we clean up. back mixes or realistic models that we don't want to keep.
IF YOU ARE DETERMINED TO BACK UP ANY OF OUR CONTENT to huggingface as long as it's within the above rules (aka: you can make your own merge with any of our deleted content just don't re upload the original) -- You can ask us in discord or comment below - but you have to note that if you're going to bork the rules and reupload, don't credit us - don't lol - we don't want to be realistically involved in some AI site that generates underage content from a realisitci model..
ALL Sites are struggling with this right now, people dont' get the laws and regulations and complain they are legal to do wtf they want.
<3
So yea, if you ARE DETERMINED to grab anything that's not a lora or TI and use it - i'd do it now before we get rid of a TON of back mixes for Epic V3, V4, Boneless unreality mix - and Epic V6 entirely.
God i don't even remember which on'es V5 by now lmao.
OH ALSO:
EPIC MIX LINE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THE ANIME NERDS:
We're MOSTLY RETIRING but not removing -- the Epic Mix line.
We'll GLADLY keep it up, we're super proud of them - but they're VERY hard to continue the same style for each of them - so we're sort of moving into a different focus based on the fact that we have a HUGE project we're still working on, and need to start making more focused content as well for that.
So Epic Mix V3 and V4 LIKELY won't receive many updates for a while if at all - but won't promise a yes or a no - it's more like a "FOR THE FORESEEABLE FUTURE"
The new lines we just dropped in your face this last week are the ones we want to seriously start working on more - we want to develop more illustration and anime content that pushes different styles so ther'se more "GENETICS" for the anime crowd to play with.
Always remember: Our permissions only state that y'all SHOULD in theory CREDIT us when you merge with our models. "IN THEORY" means look if you forget - we're not gonna sue you - we're trying to make a Rentry card of 90% of the content we've accessed to say "We've probably used it in a merge, and it's a damn good model."
So yea.
Sorry for the HUGE ARTICLE AGAIN GUYS.
Needed to make a statement that was big and get it off our chest because it was stressing us out.
As for "ELLIS MIX", the rule on that one is it's privatized, it's not open for beta testers anymore - but if you're extremely determined to see how it works? Chuck a coffee on ko-fi and i'll throw the link to monthly and one time supporters when i move it to google drive.
I won't really do it unless people are interested, so don't b e suprised if in like days to come that model just gets deleted LOL.