Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI…and yet these people just won’t leave them well enough alone.
Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI…and yet these people just won’t leave them well enough alone.
Sure we can. You don’t need to either use Instagram or never use the net. That’s precisely what Cara is for. Promote open source tooling and use friendly communities that don’t promise to scrape your life’s work.
Now how we deal with mass scrapers downloading images; that’s a legal issue. One that even physical venues isn’t immune to (it just adds a lot of friction).
I think there’s a difference between “this person took a few images and edited them” and “I scraped an entire website to use for training AI slop”.
That’s the point!
The friction is the key.
If you post images on the internet, how accessible they are directly correlates to how “downloadable” they are. Trying to imitate social media while fighting all scraping is a infinite, costly battle; that’s a service trying to make posts viral and inaccessible. Such a fight takes Facebook money to sustain.
And it’s not necessarily some script kiddie troll that’s boasting about it on Reddit who will eventually get access.
…But add fundamental friction? That raises the bar.
I think the fallacy is artists believe they need an gigantic amalgamation of online people exposed to their art, a large fraciton of the internet. That’s not true. And its a deception, anyway. Smaller niches or smaller communities are fine, and they won’t be such high profile targets.
you really can’t. If it is online it will be scrapped. You can’t prove it was scrapped, and you can’t stop it. If it is offline it WILL still be scrapped it it just significantly harder to do so.