Not feeling great about the new creator program, or the direction of CIVITAI

So it's another yet another rant.

Allow me to preface with this: there is at least a new reddit thread every day about the platform being broken, slow, or the gens being costly, and a whole lot of bitching and moaning. This is not one of those posts.

I'm more concerned about the long-term effects of the creator program and the "bank buzz" idea.

I've reached the necessary amount of 'impact score' overnight yesterday.

Don't ask me how I did, because I don't know, which is potentially another issue. This means I could theoretically bank 10k buzz, that I got by paying Civitai a sub for 10$, and get an estimated amount of... 6$ at the end of the month. If everyone else doesn't bank more buzz in the meantime.

So - pretty useless, you'd agree. And mark my words: I understand completely that CIVITAI needs money (whether they come from subs or elsewhere) to keep the site running and give (hopefully) a living wage to their engineers. That is to say: I understand that buzz could never be cashed out for the same price of the sub.

But this kind of change has already had a noticeable effect on the community (at least to the small fraction of the community I am exposed to since I joined). This subtle 'buzz for grabs' is pushing creators towards one of the most toxic aspects of nowadays' AI: hustle culture.

In the urge to make a quick buck, we're seeing more and more models being pushed out, paywalls, donations to reach a certain quotas, and a general turn toward a more close, hostile environment.

What good is it to have dozens of new models retraining known concepts or art styles? What's the point of recreating the structure of other social medias, where you need to push out content to stay relevant?

That can only promote hastely made models. Let's also not ignore the fact that among the most successful LORAs you have the ones mimicking a specific, often living, artist. If this trend continues, we're just gonna see more and more of that from big creators and small fishes alike.

And that will hurt the platform more than any small pricing update ever could.

I don't blame people with possible a worse economic situation than me trying to cash-in on their hobbies. It may as well be an obligated choice. But I think we can probably find a way to allow that without also uplifting all the cheap content making.

We need to get better, instead of getting closer and closer to the stereotypical "techbro" strawman people often build when talking about AI.