Let's talk economics. To make NSFW images on Civitai, you need yellow buzz. You can buy yellow buzz at the rate of 1,000 yellow buzz for $1.00 USD. I buy yellow buzz in ten dollar increments, and 10,000 yellow buzz lasts me well over a month ordinarily. It's not expensive for doing images (videos are pricier).
Typically the way it works with the inexpensive image generators is, you create your prompt (or download your starting image if you are doing image to image generation like I did in my previous post with the Second Life avatars) and you ask for four iterations, generally at a cost of between 16 and 40 yellow buzz, mostly around 30 buzz. This gives you four varying images, some of which may work well, some of which may not. Most of the time the first iteration is not particularly successful, and another iteration may be called for. Even when you get a usable image, that doesn't mean you're finished most of the time.
Very frequently you get malformed hands/feet/faces or you get weird objects where they don't belong, or you get deformed genitals or ropes and chains going where they should not go, bonds not working, and ball gags... don't get me started on ball gags! NONE of the cheap models get ball gags right, most of the time.
There are fixes for all of these issues. There are programs called loras that work with the models (the programs that create the entire image) to solve specific problems. For examples, there are loras designed to create realistic ballgags, and loras that allow you to pose the images in various kinds of bondage and loras that create characters with certain traits, etc. The loras and models are free to use, but to see if/how they'll work means you have to create the images on Civitai and that takes yellow buzz ka-ching!
And not only are there loras, there are also programs that can improve images. The costs can vary on these: there is "hires fix" one of my favorites that creates the image at a higher resolution and generally spruces it up and fixes minor details (but not deformed hands or anything like that, though it often helps with wonky eyes) but it costs about 16 buzz for a single iteration. (Fortunately, if you do four iterations, all of them look pretty much the same, so there's no point in doing more than one hires fix iteration.) There's also facefix, which replaces the face of your subject if it comes out wonky as they often do. Facefix is relatively cheap, it costs the same as a simple prompt iteration so it's not expensive, but it's very hit or miss so you tend to do four iterations when you do facefix, which works wonders sometimes and does nothing useful other times.
What's more, the cheap Civitai models (and just about every AI art program on the Web) are TERRIBLE at following prompts. Part of it is flaws in all LLM art programs. For example:
In addition, Civitai's cheaper models will fight like hell to keep from putting female models in some submissive poses. They'll make female characters kneel on their knees as shown above, no problem. But they will be DAMNED if they will show a female character with her hands tied behind their backs. Or kneeling with her head pressed against the ground and her ass hiked up in the air. (Do NOT use the words "doggie style" in your prompt because you'll probably get a furry image.)
Beyond the helper programs (I have no idea what they're called) there are sliders you can push: Denoise, which controls how closely your image follows the prompt (more about the prompt later), CFG which controls how closely your image follows the model/loras, and each lora has its own slider too.
And every time you run an iteration with the models and the loras and the sliders and the helper programs it costs more buzz. And you tend to do that a lot, because the dopamine response when you get a usable image out of all that mess is pretty good. And even if you don't get exactly what you want from an image, you sometimes get images that you can save and use for future projects.
So you can see how it's VERY easy to spend more money on the cheaper models, and have a great time doing it. I know I have. But there's another expense as well: time. It takes a lot of time to generate those iterations, to write and rewrite prompts, to figure out which loras/sliders/helper programs to use.
The near one-and-done nature of Flux and the other programs are matched or even outmatched in price by the cheaper models, to get an often inferior image, and they take a LOT more time.
Mind you, you can still play with the sliders and the prompts with the more expensive models to get just the result you want, or some approximation of it, but you don't HAVE to in order to get a usable image. But it will cost more money. And you can save all that money and more importantly, time and use it for stuff like... writing fiction.
But there's one reason I stick to Civitai. And that's the lack of censorship. Every other AI art service I have tried, it feels like wrestling an octopus to create NSFW or even NSFW-adjacent artwork. On Civitai if I want a ballgag or a blowjob or even a woman dressed in a skimpy thong, I can ask for it, and Civitai will attempt to deliver it. When I wanted to get a ballgagged woman on Leonardo or Tensor Art (don't even talk to me about MageSpace!) I'd have to describe the woman as having a ball in her mouth, not a ball gag. Then I'd have to draw in the straps, if I got anything close to looking right. Sigh.
Civitai is the place to go if you want to do NSFW or even NSFW-adjacent stuff.
In my next post I'll talk more about the censorship that threatens to engulf the AI art world.
