![Image 1 — [Image Generation V5 Teaser] - V5's text ability keeps improving, now with Japanese support. Still very much in training, but here's a sample showing both off. Both this and our previous English only one are pure text2image, no editing or inpainting, aside from covering a small internal watermark.](https://preview.redd.it/0f2p4qtednah1.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=14903190e7dcea8d46a749bf47cb571f5b830de6)
![Image 2 — [Image Generation V5 Teaser] - V5's text ability keeps improving, now with Japanese support. Still very much in training, but here's a sample showing both off. Both this and our previous English only one are pure text2image, no editing or inpainting, aside from covering a small internal watermark.](https://preview.redd.it/fs9ybyrfdnah1.png?width=832&format=png&auto=webp&s=2ac9ac67bd376b55ee387cd7b86f9769307a31b2)
We wanted to provide a transparent update regarding the recent behind-the-scenes work we have had to put into fraud prevention.
Recently, we identified full-scale abuse of our Free Trial one-time "Paper Tier" experience of 30 actions equivalent to our Opus subscription. We discovered tens of thousands of bad-faith accounts exploiting this system. This massive influx caused increased load on our models and rising costs, which ultimately led to genuine free trial users having a poorer, unstable experience.
For context: we do not profit from Free Trial accounts. We refuse to compromise your data with third-party advertising or banners, meaning the Free Trial is a feature we provide entirely at our own expense.
To combat this, we actively tightened our trial abuse detection rules based on our investigations. We are deeply sorry that the fallout from this widespread abuse is affecting genuine users. Please know that we are continuously reviewing and modifying our systems to ensure that new users who genuinely wish to try out NovelAI for the first time have the stable experience they deserve.
Alongside the trial tier, we have also invested internal resources into preventing payment fraud. Because we had to tighten these security rules to protect the platform, we are currently seeing a payment decline rate of less than 1%. However, we know that within a large community, even a small percentage affects real people, and we completely understand the frustration of those who have been unexpectedly experiencing issues lately.
We are actively researching alternative solutions and fine-tuning our measures to ensure legitimate users are not caught by these automated security systems by accident.
We deeply appreciate your patience, understanding, and trust as we navigate these challenges to keep the platform secure and stable for our community.
- The Anlatan team
Thank you to everyone who entered and voted! Congratulations to our amazing winners. Here's to five years of creating together and many more. Check out the winning creations across the Image and Text categories.