Hi everyone!
First of all, I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and an amazing New Year 2026, just a few days away! 🎄🎅🎆
Let’s start from the beginning.
It has been about a year since I discovered CivitAI, back when I was first exploring generative AI tools for creating art and images, such as Stable Diffusion and later ComfyUI, which I currently use locally on my PC. At the time, I was learning about AI image generation mainly through freemium NSFW AI art websites, which were paid and had strict daily limits for free users.
On December 14th, thanks to a friend here on CivitAI who creates AI music on Suno AI — with songs about a specific character and cover art generated with AI — my curiosity was sparked. One of those covers even included a background character from Murder Drones, which made me wonder where that kind of content was being created. That curiosity led me directly to CivitAI.
When I discovered that my friend had an account here — and realized that CivitAI was the largest hub for AI-generated images, LoRAs, and character models — I was genuinely impressed. At that very moment, I decided to create my own account, amazed by the possibilities that AI art could offer.
As I continued learning more about generative AI through blogs, websites, and YouTube tutorials, I discovered that it was possible to generate images locally using your own hardware, without limits. That’s when I installed Stable Diffusion on my gaming PC (equipped with an RTX 4000 GPU, a decent CPU, and sufficient RAM). From there, I started learning the basics of LoRAs, checkpoint models, CFG, steps, positive and negative prompts, LoRA trigger words, weights, and much more.
All of this naturally brought me deeper into CivitAI, where I could download checkpoints and LoRAs to use locally — something I still do almost every day.
Now, about the negative side.
Despite my overall positive experience with CivitAI over the past year, I can’t ignore some of the platform’s problems. Not everything is “roses.” Around May (if I remember correctly), CivitAI implemented stricter moderation policies. During that period, I — along with many other users — received strikes and penalties for posting NSFW art involving fictional teenage characters from cartoon shows that I’m a fan of. As a result, some of my NSFW content was removed.
This situation set a clear precedent for me. To avoid further issues, I stopped posting that type of content entirely. From that point on, I only shared NSFW-related content occasionally, and exclusively involving adult characters.
Of course, I also can’t fail to mention what I personally consider CivitAI’s worst decision — and one that caused outrage among many users and creators I follow: the restriction of NSFW image generation using Blue Buzz and the introduction of Green Buzz. This change, made due to pressure from payment processors, was extremely disappointing. I felt especially bad for users who genuinely wanted democratized access to AI generation but simply couldn’t afford local hardware. It was a real shame.
That said, here are.
Looking ahead to 2026, I plan to take my first steps as a beginner LoRA creator. As some of you may have seen in my previous post, I trained my first LoRA on TensorArt during one of their online training sessions. Before my premium subscription there ends at the end of 2025, I hope to release a few more LoRAs and publish them both on TensorArt and here on CivitAI. It may not be a big achievement, but it’s an important first step for me.
I’ve already tried setting up local LoRA training on my own PC, but I ran into technical issues that prevented me from completing the process. I still need to investigate those problems further. I can’t promise that I’ll fully achieve this goal, but if I manage to solve these issues — or find better alternatives — I plan to bring more LoRAs to both platforms. And of course, as a beginner, I expect to learn from my mistakes along the way.
To wrap things up:
I wish all my friends here on CivitAI a Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and an excellent New Year 2026. The future of CivitAI may be uncertain, but I truly hope for better days ahead. 🎆🎄🎁🎉🍾🎗️
