Relatedly, CivitAI has recently had issues with their credit card processors for the reasons you suspect, and today they lost the ability to process credit card payments: https://civitai.com/articles/14945
I suspect the company will be operating more conservatively policywise for the foreseeable future.
beeflet · 7h ago
I think this is a pretty acceptable use-case for cryptocurrency/micropayments. Credit card companies are notoriously restrictive.
tommica · 6h ago
Its scary how much power they have - get blacklisted by them and you are out of business. For a system that is so critical to everyday life, almost like electricity, it's insane how much control they exert over it.
benterix · 5h ago
I agree with you in general - it seems supereasy to pressure them into blocking CC payments via (potential) lawsuits etc.
However, as for crypto and banks, I don't really blame them they don't want to have anything to do with these. Its really easy to scam people, lose money and so on. Who is to blame then? With crypto, you have nobody to blame. Except if there is a terminal, in this case a bank. They become a scapegoat for everyone, including lawmakers. So they decided not to play the game. Want to cash out crypto? Deal with the ones that are willing to accept the risk.
Animats · 6h ago
They already have their own currency, called "Buzz". Maybe that's why they're in trouble with credit card processors. Using credit cards to buy money equivalents is considered high-risk.
quotemstr · 6h ago
If there's ever been an industry that needs to be subject to common carrier regulations, it's the payments industry. MasterCard and Visa have no business unilaterally, secretly, and unaccountably policing their idiosyncratic idea of moral righteousness. They need to move money and shut up.
jallmann · 5h ago
> MasterCard and Visa have no business unilaterally, secretly, and unaccountably policing their idiosyncratic idea of moral righteousness
That's not why they do it. The reasons are regulatory compliance and risk. Processors would be in big trouble if they facilitate payments when they shouldn't, or broke due to rampant fraud in certain sectors.
I get that you might not like it, but take it up with the US government. The processors would be happy to move as much money as possible to make as much money as possible.
objclxt · 5h ago
> MasterCard and Visa have no business unilaterally, secretly, and unaccountably policing their idiosyncratic idea of moral righteousness. They need to move money and shut up.
Mastercard and Visa don't block companies from processing because of morals, they block them because they lose them money. They will happily process your payments for all kinds of shady schemes that are - to them - low risk.
ygjb · 6h ago
Nah. I don't mind businesses that take a moral stance that is intended to de-risk finances. We (well, decent people at least, IMO) need mechanisms to prevent human trafficking, illicit or illegal transactions, etc. That said, the rules should be completely transparent. When a transaction is blocked for a reason, or an account is suspended or terminated, there should be a clear audit trail of the reason why, which rules were broken, and what the steps to remediate are, if possible. There should be an appeals process that is equally as transparent, and countries should impose ombudspersons to oversea the enforcement with significant financial penalties for payment companies that fail to uphold these rules. Some part of this may already exist, I have been out of finance and payments for almost 20 years at this point, but there was and remains a lot of shady stuff going on in the industry :/
elaus · 5h ago
> We (well, decent people at least, IMO) need mechanisms to prevent human trafficking, illicit or illegal transactions, etc.
There are already laws (from actual governments) against human trafficking and illegal transactions. The issue is not about credit card companies obeying the law.
jazzyjackson · 5h ago
Can't force a company to do business with customers that they don't want to do business with (barring protected class discrimination laws)
AnthonyMouse · 4h ago
No, but you can break up concentrated markets so that being refused by some payment processor is irrelevant because there are a thousand others willing to do it and they're all completely fungible.
throwanem · 6h ago
Yeah, they tend to frown on violations of property rights. So do most segments of society. Cryptocurrency advocates?
OsrsNeedsf2P · 7h ago
> acceptable use-case for cryptocurrency
Once in a while I think this, and then I remember what a disaster cryptocurrency became
beeflet · 6h ago
A lot of cryptocurrency's problems are fundamentally social and unsolvable.
But there has also been significant technological improvements since 2014 including payment channels and zero-knowledge proofs that could patch some of crypto's gaping flaws.
jeffhuys · 6h ago
Bitcoin at its highest point in history right now but whatever
djur · 6h ago
People making money off of something doesn't make it not a disaster, obviously. Within the past month crypto's biggest headline has been its use in bribing the US president.
vachina · 6h ago
Highest point in what? Filthy fiat?
saurik · 6h ago
In anything? Measure it in hamburgers or fancy chairs, if you'd like.
conception · 6h ago
That’s not good if you want to use it as, you know, a currency.
BoorishBears · 6h ago
Yeah, such a mark of success for a currency to appreciate 24,000% in under a decade.
When buying a pizza today can cost you a house in 10 years, you have a failed currency.
mvdtnz · 5h ago
Are people using it as a currency? At scale?
protocolture · 6h ago
Crypto is fine its the users that are the problem.
okayishdefaults · 6h ago
Is it at this point? When used earnestly, it's regulated, traceable, and slower than other methods of transacting money. History can and has been rewritten, but not when someone is scammed.
Seems like bad currency, but maybe you're aware of something meaningful that crypto contributes.
protocolture · 6h ago
>Regulated
Well humans are regulated so I dont know what you are driving at here.
>Traceable
The core concept was built on traceability. Privacy coins are the aberration. Like crypto was developed by people who want provable auditing of banks online.
Actually if you compare Bitcoin to later standards, Bitcoins biggest weakness is that it wants to track coins individually instead of just balances. Literally invented by goldbugs.
>Slower
Depends on both parties. I can go Crypto -> Crypto -> Fiat in like 15 minutes. Osko can be faster.
>History can and has been rewritten
Thats a fail state but its done rather less than traditional currency
>Seems like bad currency, but maybe you're aware of something meaningful that crypto contributes.
My fondest memory was watching a whole bunch of libertarian crypto guys using it to donate to Venezuelans who would pop up in crypto spaces to talk about how hard their lives were and how bad government had screwed up their lives. I liked to think the libertarians were getting scammed but it didnt really matter, because there werent many other onramps into VZ at the time.
Really its best feature is that its largely unpreventable. Sure you can police the on and off ramps to an extent. But if I need to evade financial censorship, I can. Mostly I see people against crypto throw up a big smokescreen but at the end of the day they tend to be in favor of the financial censorship that crypto is avoiding at the moment. Be that donations to wikileaks, purchasing services without a credit card or what have you.
BoorishBears · 6h ago
I mean we're in the comment section of a provider removing models primarily used to make non-consensual porn of celebrities (https://arxiv.org/html/2407.12876v1), then talking about how crypto is the answer.
Visa and co are a cartel, a lot of the pressure Civitai is facing is unreasonable, but even a broken clock is right twice a day: and they had a lot of problematic content.
Even if they turn to crypto, this is a change they shouldn't walk back, or other providers are probably going to turn on them too.
pseudo0 · 5h ago
This paper is trash. They preemptively define any models they don't like as "abusive models". This includes any model that can generate real people (including for transformative, fair use purposes like parody) and separately any NSFW model, including stuff like cartoons.
Also they are using a ridiculous definition of "NSFW" to achieve the correlation they want to find. They are putting the prompt (not the image) into ChatGPT and applying an arbitrary metric of NSFW-ness sentiment analysis that returns false positives. Actually NSFW content of real people was always banned on CivitAI.
BoorishBears · 4h ago
I'm not sure how anyone's really going act like the vast majority of the deepfakes generated with celebrity LORAs isn't porn when the term itself has become synonymous with non-consensual porn.
And it was just in April (less than a month ago) that they stepped up moderation of celebrity NSFW content: the study is from June of 2024.
The study was an attempt to avoid someone immediately trying to argue about a really obvious truth, but some people will still try to argue about the study about the really obvious truth.
pseudo0 · 3h ago
I have been using CivitAI practically since it was created. Real person NSFW content has been banned since day one, because they didn't want to get sued. The change in April was a cosmetic update to how they displayed search results. It completely separated out real person content and NSFW content, to ensure that NSFW could not be displayed in proximity to real person content. This changed how content was displayed, not what content was allowed.
I'm sure some people do generate porn with celebrity LoRAs, but there are also plenty of legitimate uses such as parody, criticism, transformative art, etc. If people do post inappropriate content, there are civil remedies and now also federal criminal remedies via the TAKE IT DOWN Act. CivitAI is fully legally compliant, but they are being held hostage by an unelected, unaccountable payment processor cartel.
protocolture · 5h ago
>Even if they turn to crypto, this is a change they shouldn't walk back, or other providers are probably going to turn on them too.
Yep
vachina · 6h ago
In most countries there are usually multiple (viable) alternative payment methods to credit cards.
beeflet · 6h ago
for micropayments? like what?
makingstuffs · 5h ago
Can’t speak for other countries but India has PayTM, UPI, BHIM and others
speedgoose · 6h ago
Are the reasons a dislike for porn, pornographic deep fakes of real people, or pedophilia?
rnd0 · 6h ago
Litigation in some form or another. This is undoubtably related to the take it down legislation recently passed.
Porn isn't the only worry; there's also getting sued by the estates of dead celebrities, being misused for misinformation purposes.
Things are going to become increasingly restrictive until it is not worth using unless you're a corporation or a state actor. But for hobbiests? Resources are going to become thin on the ground and no, that is not a good thing.
Jubijub · 6h ago
I have no beef against porn, but what makes you think the other two use cases at acceptable ???
speedgoose · 6h ago
I don’t think deep fakes of real people and pedophilia are acceptable.
aussieguy1234 · 5h ago
I'm against misuse of real life likeness AI content, but also against credit card companies deciding what we get to see and hear based on the whims of the backwards ultra hard right conservative leadership at the credit card companies.
I'm aware of a site that was blocked by credit card companies due to some controversial content, but survived and kept growing with a high rate of paying members.
The payments space is now a bit more compilcated than just credit cards. There's alot of country/region specific methods i.e. SEPA in Europe, PayID in Australia, QR payments in Thailand and of course crypto. Many of these options are just as easy or easier to use than credit cards.
Basically, the site started accepting lots of these different payment methods, you see different options depending on your country. Free members kept upgrading to paid members using these new options. This was more than 6 years ago and they still are blocked from taking credit cards.
nullc · 4h ago
> whims of the backwards ultra hard right conservative leadership at the credit card companies
the credit card companies executives like money, this isn't originating with them.
It works quite similar to the great firewall in China. ISPs are not so much told what they are to block, they're told Do Not Embarrass the Party or Else.
So even as the pressure has come off in this administration, the memory of the or Else remains, and processors will continue to swat random shit in the hopes of appeasing an uncommunicative but clearly spiteful god.
sinuhe69 · 6h ago
Will that also exclude users’ own person? That’ll be to bad. You not only take away the agency of the people, you also limit the creative space severely.
I guess open source models for image diffusion will get a huge boost then.
ZaoLahma · 6h ago
This is an interesting one. Do we own the rights to our own likeness? And if we do, what about doppelgangers - people who look eerily similar to celebrities, or other "unknown" people?
AnthonyMouse · 4h ago
> Do we own the rights to our own likeness? And if we do, what about doppelgangers - people who look eerily similar to celebrities, or other "unknown" people?
Is this somehow a novel question? We've had the same issue since at least the invention of cameras.
throwanem · 2h ago
It's fun for these dorks to fantasize. Knowing things is for nerds.
userbinator · 6h ago
As a saying I once heard goes: Trying to stuff the genie back in the lamp will only ensure it replicates itself into other lamps.
Rohitcss · 6h ago
Deepfakes are already becoming a mess to handle.
Joel_Mckay · 5h ago
Indeed, if businesses will rip off Mark Hamill of all people, than most actors stood zero chance of protecting their image.
It is an odd part of US copyright well known to figures who sue already, and it is good normal citizens now have similar rights.
Some folks took things way to far already, and unfortunately copyright enforcement on the web has always been ridiculous. =3
Rohitcss · 3h ago
Agree!!
sureIy · 6h ago
What has been the problem exactly? Just generic "fake news" or did the platform generate porn?
altairprime · 5h ago
Recent legislative changes (further) increased the risk tier of generative AI when human beings could be reasonably considered to have grounds to sue the business, and the bank likely also sought and received regulatory advice directing them to classify such businesses as higher risk (than their tolerance threshold might have permitted previously). To quote the recent Debanking article:
> This particular bank did not, at the time, have a small business practice within its personal banking division. Very many banks do, but this particular bank did not. And thus this bank had not built out the higher degree of policies and procedures [required]
Most likely, the payment processor does not wish to invest operational spending into the necessary banking and processing policies that continuing to transact with CivitAI without restrictions that reduce legal risk would have demanded of them. And then when CAI encouraged everyone to spend money rapidly and fast, it massively spiked their transaction volume, leading the bank to kill services a day early due to the additional risk flag that sort of processing behavior carries on an everyday basis.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Aeolun · 5h ago
What a surprise. Not. All of these companies go the same way once they become popular.
Count the number of days until models that are capable of generating real-person likeness content are banned too.
duxup · 7h ago
> We are removing models and images depicting real-world individuals
So any images that look real, or images that look like specific real people?
throwanem · 6h ago
> This applies to any depiction of a real person, regardless of context or rating - including PG and PG-13 content. Whether it’s a public figure, celebrity, influencer, or private individual, if a model or image is based on a real human being, it will be removed. This includes fan-art depictions of characters portrayed by a celebrity - e.g. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford).
It is the second or third paragraph in the link.
godelski · 6h ago
Likely the latter. They hosted a lot of LoRAs and embeddings that help generate images of specific people. Users would post samples of those people nude.
Honestly, I'm surprised it lasted this long. Like that was clearly egregious. At least pretend to not be a deep fake porn generator...
pseudo0 · 5h ago
They always had a pretty strict policy against mixing any NSFW content with depictions of real people. Anything tagged as a real person would get run through a NSFW -detection API and would get automatically blocked if it failed. So no, no one was posting deepfaked nudes.
Meanwhile I used a couple LoRAs to make JD Vance memes when that was the craze a few weeks ago, and now those are getting nuked... No fun allowed, thanks payment processors.
Aeolun · 5h ago
> At least pretend to not be a deep fake porn generator
Why? Like, people are going to do it anyway. Whether in their minds or with some tool. Public or behind closed doors. That genie is very firmly out of the bottle, and it’s not going to go back in. At least when it’s on Civit it’s abundantly clear it is fake content.
You can run any of these models on a consumer GPU.
jazzyjackson · 5h ago
Because we live in a society and so get to have some influence on what behaviors we deem acceptable from our peers, and creating sexual images with the faces of your neighbors, acquaintances and even your foes is considered by some of us unacceptable, degenerate behavior
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it has to be allowed to happen
rustcleaner · 4h ago
Hopefully these LoRAs invigorate bittorrent again.
Waterluvian · 7h ago
It’s ambiguous but I have a sense that it’s the latter. The former would be quite the change.
I suspect the company will be operating more conservatively policywise for the foreseeable future.
However, as for crypto and banks, I don't really blame them they don't want to have anything to do with these. Its really easy to scam people, lose money and so on. Who is to blame then? With crypto, you have nobody to blame. Except if there is a terminal, in this case a bank. They become a scapegoat for everyone, including lawmakers. So they decided not to play the game. Want to cash out crypto? Deal with the ones that are willing to accept the risk.
That's not why they do it. The reasons are regulatory compliance and risk. Processors would be in big trouble if they facilitate payments when they shouldn't, or broke due to rampant fraud in certain sectors.
I get that you might not like it, but take it up with the US government. The processors would be happy to move as much money as possible to make as much money as possible.
Mastercard and Visa don't block companies from processing because of morals, they block them because they lose them money. They will happily process your payments for all kinds of shady schemes that are - to them - low risk.
There are already laws (from actual governments) against human trafficking and illegal transactions. The issue is not about credit card companies obeying the law.
Once in a while I think this, and then I remember what a disaster cryptocurrency became
When buying a pizza today can cost you a house in 10 years, you have a failed currency.
Seems like bad currency, but maybe you're aware of something meaningful that crypto contributes.
Well humans are regulated so I dont know what you are driving at here.
>Traceable
The core concept was built on traceability. Privacy coins are the aberration. Like crypto was developed by people who want provable auditing of banks online.
Actually if you compare Bitcoin to later standards, Bitcoins biggest weakness is that it wants to track coins individually instead of just balances. Literally invented by goldbugs.
>Slower
Depends on both parties. I can go Crypto -> Crypto -> Fiat in like 15 minutes. Osko can be faster.
>History can and has been rewritten
Thats a fail state but its done rather less than traditional currency
>Seems like bad currency, but maybe you're aware of something meaningful that crypto contributes.
My fondest memory was watching a whole bunch of libertarian crypto guys using it to donate to Venezuelans who would pop up in crypto spaces to talk about how hard their lives were and how bad government had screwed up their lives. I liked to think the libertarians were getting scammed but it didnt really matter, because there werent many other onramps into VZ at the time.
Really its best feature is that its largely unpreventable. Sure you can police the on and off ramps to an extent. But if I need to evade financial censorship, I can. Mostly I see people against crypto throw up a big smokescreen but at the end of the day they tend to be in favor of the financial censorship that crypto is avoiding at the moment. Be that donations to wikileaks, purchasing services without a credit card or what have you.
Visa and co are a cartel, a lot of the pressure Civitai is facing is unreasonable, but even a broken clock is right twice a day: and they had a lot of problematic content.
Even if they turn to crypto, this is a change they shouldn't walk back, or other providers are probably going to turn on them too.
Also they are using a ridiculous definition of "NSFW" to achieve the correlation they want to find. They are putting the prompt (not the image) into ChatGPT and applying an arbitrary metric of NSFW-ness sentiment analysis that returns false positives. Actually NSFW content of real people was always banned on CivitAI.
And it was just in April (less than a month ago) that they stepped up moderation of celebrity NSFW content: the study is from June of 2024.
The study was an attempt to avoid someone immediately trying to argue about a really obvious truth, but some people will still try to argue about the study about the really obvious truth.
I'm sure some people do generate porn with celebrity LoRAs, but there are also plenty of legitimate uses such as parody, criticism, transformative art, etc. If people do post inappropriate content, there are civil remedies and now also federal criminal remedies via the TAKE IT DOWN Act. CivitAI is fully legally compliant, but they are being held hostage by an unelected, unaccountable payment processor cartel.
Yep
Porn isn't the only worry; there's also getting sued by the estates of dead celebrities, being misused for misinformation purposes.
Things are going to become increasingly restrictive until it is not worth using unless you're a corporation or a state actor. But for hobbiests? Resources are going to become thin on the ground and no, that is not a good thing.
I'm aware of a site that was blocked by credit card companies due to some controversial content, but survived and kept growing with a high rate of paying members.
The payments space is now a bit more compilcated than just credit cards. There's alot of country/region specific methods i.e. SEPA in Europe, PayID in Australia, QR payments in Thailand and of course crypto. Many of these options are just as easy or easier to use than credit cards.
Basically, the site started accepting lots of these different payment methods, you see different options depending on your country. Free members kept upgrading to paid members using these new options. This was more than 6 years ago and they still are blocked from taking credit cards.
the credit card companies executives like money, this isn't originating with them.
It originated in the US federal government. (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Choke_Point )
It works quite similar to the great firewall in China. ISPs are not so much told what they are to block, they're told Do Not Embarrass the Party or Else.
So even as the pressure has come off in this administration, the memory of the or Else remains, and processors will continue to swat random shit in the hopes of appeasing an uncommunicative but clearly spiteful god.
I guess open source models for image diffusion will get a huge boost then.
Is this somehow a novel question? We've had the same issue since at least the invention of cameras.
It is an odd part of US copyright well known to figures who sue already, and it is good normal citizens now have similar rights.
Some folks took things way to far already, and unfortunately copyright enforcement on the web has always been ridiculous. =3
> This particular bank did not, at the time, have a small business practice within its personal banking division. Very many banks do, but this particular bank did not. And thus this bank had not built out the higher degree of policies and procedures [required]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371476
Most likely, the payment processor does not wish to invest operational spending into the necessary banking and processing policies that continuing to transact with CivitAI without restrictions that reduce legal risk would have demanded of them. And then when CAI encouraged everyone to spend money rapidly and fast, it massively spiked their transaction volume, leading the bank to kill services a day early due to the additional risk flag that sort of processing behavior carries on an everyday basis.
(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice.)
Count the number of days until models that are capable of generating real-person likeness content are banned too.
So any images that look real, or images that look like specific real people?
It is the second or third paragraph in the link.
Honestly, I'm surprised it lasted this long. Like that was clearly egregious. At least pretend to not be a deep fake porn generator...
Meanwhile I used a couple LoRAs to make JD Vance memes when that was the craze a few weeks ago, and now those are getting nuked... No fun allowed, thanks payment processors.
Why? Like, people are going to do it anyway. Whether in their minds or with some tool. Public or behind closed doors. That genie is very firmly out of the bottle, and it’s not going to go back in. At least when it’s on Civit it’s abundantly clear it is fake content.
You can run any of these models on a consumer GPU.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it has to be allowed to happen