Once a new technology hits the scene built on a foundation of open source - the race begins-
"how can I take something popular and free and turn a quick buck"
History
We've all seen some first stabs at this. Billy and his two hackerbro friends start training a model for an afternoon and then quickly host a SaaS portal that charges a premium to generate images.. usually their model is shit and open source usually eclipses them before they even leave beta.
MidJourney is the one who is probably most successful - largely because they had a head start.
But hey, there's always a new con around the corner.
Where we are now
The hucksters have a new strategy.
Why bother training their own models and compete.. just take models already created off free platforms like Civitai.. and monetize those!
Enter Fantasy AI & Skin AI
[Fantasy AI] Who are outright bribing:
And probably illegally claiming ownership on stolen / leaked data from NAI
[Skin AI] or just outright stealing:
then paying Bot farms to downvote / upvote on Stable Diffusion Reddit:
Our good coomer friend "HassanBlend" making a plea to the community about why his free models should now cost money.
AKA - Chinese platforms are making EZ money - why can't I?!?!
--Hi all,Hassan here and I just thought it would be good to share the other side of the perspective here. The thread seems to be focusing on as if users won't have our models and need to find alternative ways to use our models, that's not true.
My #1 has always been to make something that the community find useful. I started with my rentry page which gained traction with the photorealism tips and tricks and the models I made were popular.As time went on and I moved towards finetuning from HassanBlend1.3 up, it took more and more time as I manually caption my images, I train multiple runs and try to get great results that the community want.This takes time and I moved to Patreon based on community suggestions as a way to support my time.Even my patreon grew and I have many consultations taking place with members, many custom requests but mostly multiple feedback on my models that I am trying to incorporate into my newer models..
Eg - *Stable Diffusion isn't great at male to male, why can't I have X y Z ethnicity etc, any NSFW 2.1 model Hassan?*So I'm scraping data to try make what our community wants and it takes shitloads of time.
In the meantime we have platforms, commercial platforms using our models for txt2img and finetuning on their platforms, gaining huge revenue turnover each month, but not one of them reached out to bring us content creators on that journey or help us grow. They take what we spend countless hours training and they slap it on a platform with a price tag.
Now we have Fantasy.ai , who's first pitch to me was simply we want to reward you for your work and time, while allowing users to have many features of AI all in one place.Of course it sounded great but I was sceptical because my #1 question was- What about my community, what about my patreons, what about users just using my models in the WebUI?
They aren't concerned about that, in fact they support us and want to integrate our patreons and still allow users to free use our models locally. They are only asking for commercial rights so they are the sole platform users of our model.
Now in return us model creators have a reward incentive on their platform, this is a continuous stream of support to help us grow and evolve and keep creating releases.
On top of that, this platform has brought us together so now content creators are talking together more, we're in groups looking at seeing how we can create awesome stuff for our communities.
There's barely any difference to you users of our models, but yes there is a difference to the platforms who use our content for months making a tonne of $$$
If anything spicy or funny happens - I'll keep posting.
