Civitai robotically tags bounties requesting deepfakes and lists a means for the individual featured within the content material to manually request its takedown. This method signifies that Civitai has a fairly profitable means of figuring out which bounties are for deepfakes, nevertheless it’s nonetheless leaving moderation to most people slightly than carrying it out proactively.
An organization’s authorized legal responsibility for what its customers do isn’t completely clear. Typically, tech corporations have broad authorized protections towards such legal responsibility for his or her content material underneath Part 230 of the Communications Decency Act, however these protections aren’t limitless. For instance, “you can’t knowingly facilitate unlawful transactions in your web site,” says Ryan Calo, a professor specializing in expertise and AI on the College of Washington’s regulation college. (Calo wasn’t concerned on this new examine.)
Civitai joined OpenAI, Anthropic, and different AI corporations in 2024 in adopting design principles to protect towards the creation and unfold of AI-generated little one sexual abuse materials . This transfer adopted a 2023 report from the Stanford Web Observatory, which discovered that the overwhelming majority of AI fashions named in little one sexual abuse communities had been Steady Diffusion–based mostly fashions “predominantly obtained by way of Civitai.”
However grownup deepfakes haven’t gotten the identical stage of consideration from content material platforms or the enterprise capital companies that fund them. “They aren’t afraid sufficient of it. They’re overly tolerant of it,” Calo says. “Neither regulation enforcement nor civil courts adequately defend towards it. It’s evening and day.”
Civitai obtained a $5 million funding from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in November 2023. In a video shared by a16z, Civitai cofounder and CEO Justin Maier described his purpose of constructing the primary place the place individuals discover and share AI fashions for their very own particular person functions. “We’ve aimed to make this area that’s been very, I assume, area of interest and engineering-heavy an increasing number of approachable to an increasing number of individuals,” he mentioned.
Civitai will not be the one firm with a deepfake downside in a16z’s funding portfolio; in February, MIT Know-how Overview first reported that one other firm, Botify AI, was internet hosting AI companions resembling actual actors that acknowledged their age as underneath 18, engaged in sexually charged conversations, provided “scorching pictures,” and in some cases described age-of-consent legal guidelines as “arbitrary” and “meant to be damaged.”
