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.
The legal structure has changed, but the boards of both are still primarily comprised of executives from other major financial services institutions.
Risk averse and sensitive to regulatory pressure by nature, the issue isn’t with Visa and MasterCard directly. They’re just operating in a space.
Somewhat ironically, Hock's "chaordic" management philosophy has strong parallels with ethos of decentralization held by some crypto idealists.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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?
Honestly, I'm surprised it lasted this long. Like that was clearly egregious. 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.
If you want to argue no one should expect to have anything to hide, you'd better do it from a glass house and in the altogether if you mean to be taken seriously, don't you think? It is a radical departure. The example is therefore necessarily yours to set, else you show yourself a hypocrite.
It’s fundamentally no different from acknowledging that there may be a fanclub on the other side of the country with a stash of aeolun porn. As long as they’re not using it to advertise their services, and don’t tell me what kind of degenerate things they’re doing with it, what does that hurt me?
Now that you’ve said it I’m actually mildly curious what would happen if I fine-tune a model purely on myself. But what would I do with it even if I made it? I can’t post it on Civit any more can I?
But we make laws for the citizenry, not for you and me in particular. What news since diffusion models reached consumers suggests the citizenry can be trusted with tools this powerful? You can't buy a howitzer at Home Depot, either. These things are dangerous. I believe I recall hearing that people have died. Making the tools require some effort and skill to find seems warranted.
Or did you think they cease to exist for no longer being so openly hosted? I'm sure such things are already traded in secret, and any traffic analyst with a sufficiently privileged perspective no doubt today knows much more about where and by whom.
Just because something is possible doesn't mean it has to be allowed to happen
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.
And did they apply the detector uniformly? Like you get the detector on Emma Watson, but does it apply to Hermine Granger? Because I definitely saw that situation reoccurring. Seemed to be extremely common with cartoon characters. Especially given the explicit nature of PonyDiffusion, mixing anime generation and realsm... Just turn of NSFW filters and go look at top models and top LoRAs. Nude content dominates the charts.
Let's also be clear, there is a gender bias. I'd wager quite a lot of money that there are far fewer JD Vance nude deep fakes than many female celebrities.
Characters are a bit tricky. For example, Lara Croft could refer to the fictional video game character, or the character in the movie played by Angelina Jolie. They allowed the former, but not the latter. Or a model trained on the concept of "Hermione Granger" from fan art would be allowed, but not a LoRA trained on Emma Watson from the movies. That seemed like a pretty reasonable position to take.
I don't mean just trained on. I mean there's a ScarJo lookalike front and center.
If you're expecting the LoRA attached, I guess you can go with one of those "AI Characters" and that's at least feigning compliance. But come on, you can hide the LoRAs that were used too. But come on... the models themselves ingest a lot of porn photos and celebrity photos. You really think this is going to stop someone from just describing the celebrity and getting their nude? Don't be so dense. You aren't fooling anyone here
What exactly are you proposing here that CivitAI didn't do already? Yes, people can scrub metadata from images. This is the exact same issue that image hosts have faced for decades - people can upload abusive or illegal images. The solution has been to do automated filtering, and have users report content that slips through. The solution is not to ban Photoshop because some people use it to make fake nudes.
It is the second or third paragraph in the link.
But ... won't that happen accidentally with AI depictions?
You can probably get Stable Diffusion to violate likeness rights if you try hard enough, but there is a material difference between that and publishing a tool making it trivial for anyone to do so. These are, or I suppose were, such tools: Loras specifically trained to replicate the appearance of specific natural persons. For public figures the rules are slightly different when it comes to one's likeness, but not absent. I can't imagine anyone sensible hosting that stuff for one second, Section 230 or no. But either way, however long this was going on, only a fool would assume it would last forever.