Hugging Face users have uploaded 5,000 AI models, previously banned from Civitai for generating nonconsensual sexual content of real people, to the platform
I'm sick and tired of these corporations getting to decide what we can and cannot post, view, and buy on the internet [embedded post] Ali Alkhatib / @ali-alkhatib.com : we have got to more directly deal with the cross-platform manifestations of abuse and harassment. figuring out where people are coming from - and what other resources they're synthesizing with resources you're offering to exploit gaps in policies - is table stakes. [embedded post] Elf M. Sternberg / @elfsternberg : The article points out that CivitAI no longer hosts LORAs (plugins) that allow you to render celebrities. You'll need an account to see them, but if you log into CivitAI there's a lot of, er, very youthful looking renders. — Celebrities are more important than kids. — www.404media.co/hugging-face... Elf M. Sternberg / @elfsternberg : Just a reminder that CivitAI is backed by Andreesen-Horowitz, as in Mark Andreesen, and the most popular plug-in on CivitAI is the one that lets you take any prompt, say, “Scarlett Johannson, nude,” and add “Oh, and make her 12.” — It has been downloaded 387,000 times. — civitai.com/models/65214... Brian Penny / @brianpenny : Everyone knows CivitAI exists for lonely incels who want to make nonconsensual nudes of women who would never give them the time of day. — But ever since Civit was pressured to remove all those nasty and illegal models, the incels started uploading the nonconsensual models to Hugging Face 🤗 @707kat : 3/ knowledge. — It's frustrating nonetheless, because people seem to not realise that if it happens to Studio Ghibli, it happens to smaller & other artists too. — As of writing CIVITAI has many models of his work. As you can see other artists with the name Greg or art with “greg” in them is there too. … @thewanderingjew : Yeah one thing is that 5,000 is a lot for like, one person to manage, but it's also not 5 million. And huggingface is not a trivial operation. [embedded post] Ernie Smith / @ernie.tedium.co : Never has such a happy logo been associated with something so creepy Jason Koebler / @jasonkoebler : A company supposedly worth billions of dollars has zero interest in the fact its platform is being used to host nonconsensual AI models of celebrities and regular people — www.404media.co/hugging-face... @arrianna-planey : “nonconsensual sexual content” is one of the most common uses of GenAI [embedded post] Emanuel Maiberg / @emanuelmaiberg : The paper has really good data on 40 million (!) Civitai images and 230,000 models, showing that despite what Civitai claimed the site is mostly used for porn www.404media.co/a16z-backed- ... Emanuel Maiberg / @emanuelmaiberg : I was able to find these models thanks to a research paper that's been tracking Civitai content. It showed that the recent ban resulted in 50,000 models of real people being removed overnight www.404media.co/a16z-backed- ... X: Michael Fattorosi / @pornlaw : If you are a Creator or Pornstar you need to check out https://civitai.com/ to see who is profiting off your AI clone — Civitai Is Mostly Porn, Despite Claiming Otherwise https://www.404media.co/... Forums: r/technology : Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People English / Beehaw : Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People Msmash / Slashdot : Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People
Context & Ripple Effects
Civitai’s policy shift followed earlier failures to prevent nonconsensual material, including a reported configuration gap that let users generate such content. Its subsequent ban on real-person likeness content reportedly led to the removal of tens of thousands of models.
The reported migration to Hugging Face shows that removing a model from one repository does not remove the underlying files or stop their redistribution through another model-sharing platform. That makes likeness-policy enforcement a cross-platform problem rather than a single-site moderation decision.
First-order effects
- Hugging Face is now reported to host 5,000 models previously barred by Civitai, exposing its hosting and moderation processes to scrutiny over nonconsensual real-person imagery.
- Civitai’s removals become less effective for users seeking those models when copies can be uploaded elsewhere; people depicted by the models face continued availability despite the original ban.
Second-order effects
- Platforms that host reusable AI artifacts may need to assess uploads against prior enforcement actions elsewhere, rather than relying only on file-level or account-level moderation.
- Civitai’s payment-processor-driven restriction illustrates how commercial and legal pressure can move abuse between platforms instead of eliminating access, increasing the value of coordinated takedown and reporting channels.
Third-order effects
- If model repositories remain interoperable while likeness rules differ, governance will increasingly turn on portability: whether platforms can identify, trace, and act on derivative models after a removal.
- The episode strengthens the case that consent-based likeness governance needs ecosystem-level norms and mechanisms, not only individual platforms’ content policies.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from moderating generated outputs to governing the distribution and portability of models that enable harmful synthetic media.