5,000 AI models banned by Civitai for generating sexual content without the consent of real people have been re-uploaded to Hugging Face

It has been revealed that Hugging Face, an AI development platform, is hosting at least 5,000 AI models created to reproduce the appearances of real people without their consent. It has been pointed out that this issue is not just about the existence of the models, but also about the serious background to the deliberate concealment and systematic sharing of these models.

Hugging Face Is Hosting 5,000 Nonconsensual AI Models of Real People
https://www.404media.co/hugging-face-is-hosting-5-000-nonconsensual-ai-models-of-real-people/

The AI models discovered this time were originally published on an AI model sharing website called Civitai .

Adult content generation using image generation AI is becoming outrageous, with 'free distribution of models trained on pornography' and 'paid services that can easily generate pornographic images' - GIGAZINE

However, after Civitai's models were widely used to generate sexualized images of celebrities and other people created without their consent, the company came under pressure from payment processors such as credit card companies and announced in May 2025 that it would completely ban AI models based on real people.

Civitai users rebelled against this decision, communicating with each other on Discord and organizing a coordinated 'data archiving campaign' by downloading the models in question from Civitai en masse and re-uploading them to Hugging Face before they were banned.

The models uploaded to Hugging Face are cleverly hidden from view, obfuscating their malicious intent: they are renamed with seemingly nondescript names like 'LORA' or 'Test model,' so that even if you search for a specific celebrity's name on Hugging Face, you won't be able to find them. You'll have to go through a completely separate website created by the people behind the preservation effort.

Using a list provided by researchers containing the names, original URLs, and SHA256 hashes of models removed from Civitai, and this archive site, online media 404 identified models hosted on Hugging Face. The majority of the models in question were female celebrities and online influencers, and were shown to be used to create non-consensual sexual content.

Hugging Face's terms of service clearly prohibit 'harassment, bullying, or sexual content created without explicit consent.' However, there is a gray area in which the AI model itself would not generate sexual content unless a user used it in that way, so the existence of the model itself does not immediately violate the terms of service.

On the other hand, Hugging Face's ethics and social affairs department has a high ethical standard that 'AI should be a consentful technology.' 404 pointed out that the existence of models that reproduce the person's appearance without the person's consent is clearly in contradiction to this ethical guideline.