Civitai Faces Angry Users After Banning Kinky Content From its AI Art Site

Civitai, once considered the Wild West of AI-generated art—and one of the last remaining havens where almost anything goes— triggered a community-wide meltdown after rolling out stringent new content guidelines last week.

While the site wasn’t explicitly a porn site, it did cater to several NSFW communities including furries, adult-oriented anime, extreme BDSM and more.

“We’re updating our policies to comply with increasing scrutiny around AI content. New rules ban certain categories of content, including incest, self-harm, diaper, and a number of bodily excretions. All NSFW uploads now require metadata to stay visible. A new moderation system aims to improve content tagging and safety,” Civitai wrote in a post last week.

These rules effectively ban content that was popular among certain user segments. Additionally, the new policies have effectively neutered the monetization options for images featuring real people, particularly celebrities.

And, of course, creators aren’t exactly thrilled about losing the ability to download resources to generate characters satisfying their most explicit—and weirdest—fantasies. Civitai’s post currently has over 950 adverse reactions vs. 375 supporting votes.

Complaints have rapidly multiplied across Reddit and X, with users lamenting the abrupt disappearance of their content and bemoaning the lack of clear explanations.

“It makes no sense,” Dario Hernandez, one of the 3.2 million users of the platform, told Decrypt. “I mean, the characters in these generations don’t exist, don’t hurt anyone, and nobody should care about them.”

“Anyone else completely lost motivation to engage with Civitai and share models?” Reddit user TitanUranus wrote in Reddit, mirroring the broader community’s irritation.

Civitai has introduced stricter guidelines around “Buzz,” its virtual currency, meaning creators can now say goodbye to easily earning revenue from their more… questionable creations.

Many users suspect that these policy clampdowns are due to external pressures, especially from payment giants like Visa and Mastercard, which have historically taken a hard line on adult content.

Coupled with mounting legal concerns over AI-generated imagery, Civitai seems caught between keeping payment processors happy and appeasing a creative but sometimes provocative community.

“The issue is 100% caused by Visa, and any company that accepts Visa cards will eventually add these restrictions,” Alex Cardinel, CEO of AI platform Nomi, wrote in a lengthy Reddit post. “There is currently no way around this, although I personally am working very hard on sustainable long-term alternatives.”

Civitai did not immediately respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.

To protect their right to generate weird stuff and safeguard their precious LoRAs—small but highly personalized models trained on a specific concept or style—many users have taken proactive measures.

Panic-downloading has become a pastime, with communities like r/CivitaiArchives sprouting up to archive potentially endangered content.

Others, fed up with escalating costs and limited creative freedom, are shifting toward local AI generation tools.

“Just create your own degen images locally if you’re into that stuff,” Reddit user BlackdragonBE wrote Wednesday. “Your first mistake was thinking Civitai was a porn site.”

Others took the decentralized route, advocating for sharing their LoRAs, models, and resources via torrents.

The best two sites to search for deleted models right now seem to be TensorArt (basically a Civitai clone,) DiffusionArc and the Civitai Archive.

Despite understanding the necessity of compliance with external demands, users feel betrayed by the seemingly endless stream of restrictions, fearing the day when even mildly risqué content might be next on the chopping block.

“It’s always just one more screw tightened. ‘Oh, that’s not that bad.’ Another screw tightens,”Civitai user SneakyStoat complained. “Eventually, there’s no screws left to tighten because the whole thing is dead from all the compounding regulations and censorship.”

Edited by Josh Quittner and Sebastian Sinclair