Update: https://civitai.com/articles/22863
Context:
A few months ago, I wrote this article, in which I discussed Civitai's situation from a somewhat critical perspective: https://civitai.com/articles/15995/about-civitais-current-situation
You also have the article (in a more intense tone) in which I explain transparently how many of my models were hidden: https://civitai.com/models/1660755/list-my-shadowban-models-13-and-counting
A little more context on where this censorship comes from: https://civitai.com/articles/18114/anime-fanart-video-games-and-ai-are-in-danger-visa-and-mastercard-complete-timeline
I want to try to provide a serious and thoughtful update on this issue. I'm not going to jump down Civitai's throat (at least not in the way people normally jump down Civitai's throat these days). Nor am I going to criticize abstract entities like Visa and Mastercard. I want to focus on my future, my impressions of the community, and what's happening right now with AI.
Message:
To begin with, I want to highlight something very important, which is that as a community we are currently losing ground and we are not even aware of it. Open AI has gone from being something remarkable to something anecdotal. State and corporate control channels are stifling open source and its freedom, while the difference between open and closed models is becoming increasingly noticeable. We will never have a real chance against Nano banana 2, and open Chinese models will always be models that emerge from more powerful models. The most notable anime development in recent months, "PonyV7," has been quite disastrous. And then there's the whole issue of age verification rules, constant attacks on privacy, and other totalitarian elements that seek to limit monetization and free access to information on the internet. All of this has only contributed to my pessimistic view of the future.
That is why I have decided to completely change my approach to AI and abandon Loras training and other forms of open contribution altogether, because, let's be honest, it stopped making sense a long time ago. Flux edit models make them partially useless. Yes, they are still necessary for NSFW or styles, but these are very specific cases. It should also be remembered that the vast majority of Illustrious-type Lora models have already been trained, and since there are no notable new models (not everyone has a powerful PC to run Qwen or Chroma), training repeated models (or infinite variants of a character) is pointless. Continuing with the reasons why I'm not continuing, I have to say that censorship has discouraged me quite a bit. The atmosphere is not ideal. As I said a few months ago, Civitai is in survival mode.
What am I going to do? Will I do other things at Civitai?
Continuing with the topic of Civitai, it seems to me that after the grace period I gave them, Civitai has not met my expectations as a creator (nor those of many other people). To begin with, I urged Civitai to enter into private discussions to regain the trust that had been lost. The truth is that Civitai has not contacted me, nor am I aware that it has contacted any of the other affected creators to open a dialogue about this. The explanations given in public announcements so far have seemed insufficient and vague to me, which personally does not inspire confidence (without going into details as to why). Apart from that, I have had other problems with the platform. Recently, when I contacted technical support to report a critical bug in the platform, not only did they close the ticket the first time without solving the problem, but the second time, they have not updated the problem since the beginning of September, keeping it open.
But the truth is that I don't have another platform where I can continue contributing articles (which is what I would like to continue contributing to the open community), so I will continue on it until an alternative arises (maybe I'll move to HuggingFace).
That's all, Civitai wishes you all the luck in the world.
I wish the community more strength and resources to get out of this predicament.
To the people who followed me because of the creation of loras, I would like to tell them that they can take a look at the articles (which I truly believe are valuable to the community).