CivitAI (Part 3)
What did this all mean?
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Once again, this post describes nasty stuff. Never enjoyable to discuss and describe the more graphic tidbits but needs done. For context, here’s part 1 and part 2.
The story of CivitAI rhymes with the story of the Internet, and both rhyme with the men who came to the Boise Basin looking for gold. Whenever humans stumble into a frontier of new possibility, they find room for their vices. The sagebrush and volcanic rock that George Grimes followed into the mountains looked a little dull without a saloon, a faro table, and a brothel waiting at the end of the trail. The digital frontier is no different, regulators be damned. The masses discovered that AI can undress anyone they please. Can anybody really stop them?
Justin Maier could have pulled the plug on the CivitAI project when he and his team noticed that the most popular adapters were not “scientific illustrations” or “maps of the world”, but rather tools called “ultra-realistic teen girls pissing” or “schoolgirls and HD blowjobs.” The benefit of the doubt would suggest that they wanted to step on the brakes but they had a fiduciary duty to deliver value to their venture capital stakeholders. It would simply not be ethical to violate their contractual agreement. Similarly, people entrust their livelihoods to VCs in hopes of investment returns. So, they have an obligation to do so. Imagine the horror of a portfolio that, God forbid, underperforms while managing hard-earned investor money. Could you look a retiree in the eye and tell them the Bahamas trip is off because you didn't push hard enough on a founder's ethical compass? In this country that would be negligent or criminal––at least if it’s rich people’s money at stake. Either way, they must push CivitAI to make their numbers go up, whatever it takes.
On top of that, CivitAI has to advocate fervently for the community of enthusiasts it has built. Yes, their tastes are deranged, but someone needs to fight for the underdog, amirite? Their speech is at risk of being infringed. How would YOU feel if, all of the sudden, you found out that you could not generate a picture of your naked engorged member resting in the hands of a freshly minted Olympic medalist? Her likeness became ours, to do our bidding, the moment she stepped onto that skating rink; she consented to being groped by our statistical models, whether she liked it or not. That, at least, is the opinion held by many enthusiasts in communities devoted to this sort of thing. Someone has to build the tools, and someone has to protect them, even after the press and the law decided you can’t make money off them.
So the team fought the corner they'd been backed into. Alongside crypto, they rolled out more esoteric payment methods engineered to slip the regulators' grip––gift cards and assorted digital currencies. The trick is simple. If Visa and Mastercard will not let you process payments on your website, you could instead accept something innocuous and even faintly adorable, like “stars”, or in this case “buzz.” A thousand buzz for ten dollars. Users spend buzz on services and perks. You are not selling erotic images for money, no sir, perish the thought. The website is free. The buzz is like money from an arcade, redeemable for prizes. The prizes just so happen to include the ability to undress your coworker. And, you just so happen to be able to buy these tickets outright too. Of course, all of this is entirely coincidental.
Unfortunately, once you are in the crosshairs of the public, regulators may mistakenly feel like you are still selling things that you are not supposed to, even though you are simply selling buzz. In that case, what you can do is add one extra cleaning step. You partner with another website selling magic internet money (say, a website like Kinguin). Then, you allow people to exchange Kinguin credits for buzz in your website. You see, as far as the payment processors are concerned, they merely facilitated a Kinguin purchase. If you carried that Monopoly money somewhere else and were able to exchange it for fugazi, and some other website let you convert the fugazi into an indecent depiction of Emma Watson, well, that’s none of their business. Or well, technically, it is still business for them because they captured the payment processor fee at the very beginning of the chain (the % that is owed when a credit card is used). They just do not want the bad press downstream to be their business. Terrible vibes in a headline that claims that “Visa is allowing people to purchase artificially generated nudes of teenage girls.” Much more tolerable if people talked instead about how crypto or Kinguin are facilitating these transactions and don’t interrogate how people are purchasing crypto or Kinguin cash.
Credit Card -> Buzz (on CivitAI's website) -> Lewd Images (Bad) ❌
Credit Card -> Buzz (on Kinguin's website) -> Buzz (on CivitAI's website) -> Lewd Images (Good) ✅
Credit Card -> Crypto (on an exchange's website) -> Buzz (on CivitAI's website) -> Lewd Images (Good) ✅ The situation with CivitAI instilled fear and loathing in the community. The stench of dirty laundry was too heavy to tolerate politically, so big platforms began the big cleanse, removing tools (adapters and models) that enabled deepfakes. This included direct competitors of CivitAI, like Sea.Art (June) and Tensor.Art (July). The sudden disappearance of the community’s beloved tools (i.e., adapters and models) polarized a group of users (the so-called ideologues I wrote about earlier). Through that uncertain and fetid summer of 2025, the tide seemed to be shifting and there was genuine fear by platforms (of their bottom line) and users (of their ability to continue seeing tiddies). These fears were only exacerbated when 47 state attorneys general got together and applied the full force of their powers and resources––which amounted to writing a very stern letter to payment processors and search engines.
CivitAI has found itself reconciling with its new reality, one akin to PornHub, both leaders in their industries but severely maimed. The business dynamics are quite different. PornHub owns various adult content studios through which they can still earn top dollar and, by virtue of being one of the most visited sites on the Internet, they can not only funnel users to those sites but, in the process, also make plenty of dough through advertising. PornHub’s operational costs are, at least seemingly, smaller than CivitAI’s, who has to contend with more serious issues like the geopolitics of rising energy costs or the trade of semiconductors, both of which affect how expensive it is to use artificial intelligence to satiate people’s lust. Every dollar seems to matter enormously, and CivitAI explored a variety of partners to make it easy for people to part ways with their hard earned money. Their latest foray is the creation of an alternate website named CivitAI Red, dedicated to adult content. The separation of “clean” and “tainted” buzz seems like the latest financial engineering tactic to bring back payment processors, even if just for a small segment of payments.
Last year, CivitAI still displayed a defiant tone in their announcements, citing months of runway to keep going despite the payment processors’ hiccup. This defiance seems to have subsided. The launch of CivitAI Red may just be evidence that cracks are beginning to show after all. If CivitAI were to crumble under regulatory pressure, it would be evidence that the power of the purse can indeed be used to subjugate websites that are hosting problematic content––of course, insofar as them being beholden to US laws and stakeholders. Other clever operators know better than to incorporate their business in a place like Boise; there are plenty of hustlers on the sidelines waiting for their opportunity to catch anybody who is not satisfied with merely creating images of an “artificial schoolgirl” but who need to superimpose the face of somebody they know for their fantasy to be complete. Furthermore, if CivitAI were to indeed crumble, this would be a story of how in 2026, cryptocurrency payments are not seamless enough, and that the masses are still not able to quickly procure coins to pay for online goods and services. Perhaps this is why Telegram, despite having its own cryptocurrency network, still relies heavily on something cute and easy to use, like Telegram stars.
The castration of CivitAI made it a little harder to create this stuff, on their platform and across the ecosystem––and a lot more discreet. We prefer our societal problems discreet, tucked somewhere we won't have to look at them. But the fire Justin handed down has not gone out, and it won't go easily. You can chain Prometheus to the rock and let the eagle eat his liver every day; the fire still burns where he left it. The nameless ones waiting on the sidelines will tend it, and pass the torch.