The day ice cubes became ice cream - A ToS related rant...

The stuff I make is pretty tame, so I was surprised when ran into the censorship wall. The experience reminds me of when you try to quickly go outside, thinking an overly clean glass door is open.

Rather than name the specific ToS offense I’m going to speak using analogies

The CivitAI ToS says “no ice cream”, but you can find an abundance of frozen yogurt on the page.

I posted ice cubes, and they got flagged and deleted for violating the “no ice cream” section of the ToS. When I asked for clarification I was told that anything that’s cold is put into the “no ice cream” category. This is a very abnormal definition for ice cream that is not clarified in the ToS or consistently applied to the moderation of this page.

To CivitAI’s credit, they did explain how they define “ice cream” when I asked. It was also stated that cold things still existing on the page (and there are a lot of them) are also considered a ToS violation. Showing this intent to eventually uniformly apply their rules is also respectable.

That said, until I actually see the rules uniformly applied it’ll feel like I received a jaywalking ticket, nobody receives a jaywalking ticket, and many people are still getting away with murder.

I’ve never wanted to create ice cream, or frozen yogurt, so I had the sense that whatever idea came to mind was allowed here. That was exciting. Now I know that is not true, and I’m still somewhat unsure of what is OK..

Again, I do appreciate CivitAI staff for providing me with some clarification to work with. Their definition of ice cream is so radical that without it I’d be left with only confusion and misunderstandings, which would lead to animosity. That said, the definition is complicated. When I asked “what about snow?” I’m told that snow is OK only as long as it isn’t touching a car’s headlights, but it can touch a car’s headlights if it’s fresh powdered snow that has fallen in the last hour... and so it went. Helpful, but also still somewhat confusing.

Now when I sit down to create images I’m left feeling tense and second guessing what is OK. You might be thinking - why not just avoid cold things? I really like images that contain cold things. About 20% of what I post contains cold things. I agree that there should be no ice cream, as the ToS states, but this confusion was never about ice cream, and some cold things are OK... so rather than making images I’m now venting and writing this rant...

Also to be clear, I’m not against CivitAI creating rules for “their house”. I just wish the rules were more clear, and I’m also a bit disheartened to find out that one of my favorite themes is a razors edge away from an overly broad and complicated definition of ice cream.