CivitAI Policy Update: Removal of Real-Person Likeness Content
59 comments
·May 23, 2025minimaxir
beeflet
I think this is a pretty acceptable use-case for cryptocurrency/micropayments. Credit card companies are notoriously restrictive.
tommica
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
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
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
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
> 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
> 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
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 :/
jazzyjackson
Can't force a company to do business with customers that they don't want to do business with (barring protected class discrimination laws)
throwanem
Yeah, they tend to frown on violations of property rights. So do most segments of society. Cryptocurrency advocates?
OsrsNeedsf2P
> acceptable use-case for cryptocurrency
Once in a while I think this, and then I remember what a disaster cryptocurrency became
beeflet
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
Bitcoin at its highest point in history right now but whatever
protocolture
Crypto is fine its the users that are the problem.
speedgoose
Are the reasons a dislike for porn, pornographic deep fakes of real people, or pedophilia?
rnd0
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
I have no beef against porn, but what makes you think the other two use cases at acceptable ???
speedgoose
I don’t think deep fakes of real people and pedophilia are acceptable.
aussieguy1234
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
> 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 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.
sinuhe69
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
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
> 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
It's fun for these dorks to fantasize. Knowing things is for nerds.
userbinator
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
Deepfakes are already becoming a mess to handle.
Joel_Mckay
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
Agree!!
sureIy
What has been the problem exactly? Just generic "fake news" or did the platform generate porn?
altairprime
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]
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.)
v5o
[dead]
Aeolun
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
> 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
> 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
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
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
> 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
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
Hopefully these LoRAs invigorate bittorrent again.
Waterluvian
It’s ambiguous but I have a sense that it’s the latter. The former would be quite the change.
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.