Justin Maier

Founder and CEO of Civitai, the largest community of open-source AI artists.

[Upscale Conf @upscaleconf]

📹 Panel Project Odyssey with Matty Shimura, King Willonius, James Gerde, Nik Kleverov and Justin Maier at #UpscaleConf 2025 - The new AI Film Creative Stack

[Dvrkside.ip (꧁IP꧂) @0xdvrkside]

[Project Name: Origin, Meaning & Humor]
The name CivitAI comes from the Latin word Civitas, meaning community. It reflects the platform's goal of fostering a collaborative space for AI creativity.

| “What if we have this thing be an AI community?”

When the team introduced the logo, the AI part was highlighted in blue, leading users to read the name as Civit AI.

| “Honestly, I love it too, because ‘Civit’ is easier to say than ‘Civitai’. I honestly don’t care which way they say it.”

Some users associated the name with the civet animal — a Southeast Asian mammal known for producing expensive coffee via digestion.

|“The civet animal… they poop stuff out and they use the seeds to make special coffee.”

|“Poop equals gold.”

@JustMaier expanded the metaphor:

|“The whole way a model works is it ingests… and outputs very special content. Like the civet animals create special coffee beans.”

[Upscale Conf @upscaleconf]

@JustMaier is scaling @HelloCivitai into the world’s leading platform for generative AI creators.

He’s sharing the journey and the vision at Upscale Conf SF.

📍 May 20–21 | SFJAZZZ

[Story @StoryProtocol]

This week, @JustMaier joins @WhatTheLJW @devrelius to talk about the community of open-source AI artists he’s building at @HelloCivitai 🌐

Catch it tomorrow:
Apr 24, 9:00 am PST •⁠ 12:00 pm EST

[a16z @a16z]

The cofounders of @HelloCivitai, @JustMaier and @MfHulker, noticed a problem.

Creators were making custom models and posting them disparately on forums, but "they'd just kind of vanish after that," Maier says.

That's when the idea to create a place for them to share their models and tools was born.

The cofounders share their journey from a niche concept to a thriving platform with millions of users👇

[Civitai @HelloCivitai]

🚀Flux is officially available in our onsite generator🚀

To celebrate, we’ve curated a little visual masterpiece featuring some of the most popular Flux images on the website so far!

👀 Don’t have the GPU power to run Flux locally!? Have no fear, get your Flux on here 👇🏽

https://t.co/a4uzlR9erU

Animated using @LumaLabsAI DreamMachine 👾

Sound on 🔊 😉

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

At @a16z, we're big believers in the future of AI art.

We couldn't be more excited to share a recap of our first artist retreat hosted last month in NYC.

So grateful to all of the creatives and companies who spent time with us. Hear from them 👇

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@jboogx_creative Are you gonna make a how to post on Civit?

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@cloneofsimo What does that say about the other models on the market?

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@Machinedelusion Wow. Finally the nodes we all needed 😂

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@OverPowere13959 @cloneofsimo Does it make sense to collect at the highest res possible and offer on-demand downsampling? I’m trying to focus on the long term value of the dataset.

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@cloneofsimo How high resolution? And how many would you need at a minimum?

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@InnerRefle11312 Civit Article when?!

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@drewisgooden I just watched your last video about AI ruining the internet. Any plans to cover the opposite end of the spectrum where people are using it to make awesome stuff and take memes to the next level? BBL Drizzy is a pretty good example.

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

Excited to see what this new process can do for the indie film scene.

[CoffeeVectors @CoffeeVectors]

So grateful to have helped with the AI VFX on this collaboration with actress TheOneShu and director Quinn Halleck! The footage was shot on green screen at a studio in LA and sent over to me and VFX supervisor Gavin Bedford. I helped develop the pipeline for adding backgrounds (a mix of 3D and AI placeholders) and applying different style transfers to composite shots. Final cut of the video in the comments. Special thanks to https://t.co/h1jQotHqwl for producing and Tool for advising!

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@shl Very helpful insights. Thanks for taking the time to publish it here on X.

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@FAL Awesome. Are you able to do custom nodes yet?

[Justin Maier @JustMaier]

@cloneofsimo I love what you're doing and I wonder if there is a way to have this effort be community funded. We've been planning a KickStarter style funding thing for Civitai and it'd be cool to help get you money from the community.

[Dan Wood @Dan50412374]

17fps 1280x1024 continuous RT video gen. on 4090.
Every 100 frames a new set of random tokens are used for the prompt. No polish or work. Just click go and it will endlessly evolve. You'll see my moving it with arrow keys occasionally.