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.
Gross
Recently I’ve been embedding metadata into pictures I upload which include the cost to license out the image for AI training: 1 million dollars. Then, if an AI company scrapes my picture, I can take that company to court and have a concrete dollar amount for how much that company owes me for damages.
Its a bit delusional to think you can sue them. For a number of reasons, not least of which is that you don’t have the funds for a protracted legal battle and that the burden of proof that your work was used is pretty much impossible to prove.
I hope shitty things like this motivate people to organize into alternative networks, like local meshnets and more in-person community interactions. The internet may be hopelessly broken at this point.
We used to have those in Eastern Europe. I miss those days.
The video redistribution scene was amazing
Tell us more about it !
Does anyone have a self hosted social media, where all of the media on my profile would be on my server (even a phone) and somebody viewing my profile would literally have to pull thumbnails and data straight from my device in a peer to peer kind of fashion?
Actually. I have a hot take.
Forgive me… But the solution is not to replicate Instagram. Which is what Cara does.
Nor DeviantArt, either.
That’s never going to work, for precisely the above reason, and many others.
This is something that’s bothered me immensely about photography (which I’m getting back into as a hobby). Because, for all the “taking a stand” the community does, what do they do en masse?
-
Subscribe to Adobe
-
Live on Instagram
-
Worship corporate influencers.
-
Upload stuff to clouds that the privacy policy says will be used to train.
Just to start.
It infuriates me.
I’m all for the anti-slop stands, but the bulk of the community has precisely zero leg to stand on, if they’re just going to fork over cash hand-and-fist to feed the beasts, and spend all their time on those platforms.
So what do we do?
Make prints. Display them! It can be in museums, festivals, meet ups, in your place, on the street, literally anywhere you want. Even if its on digital screens; as long as its in person, and the digital copy is squirreled away.
And that’s if you feel strongly about the training thing. Personally, I’m more inclined to just post stuff under a permissive license places like Wikipedia could use (albeit not on Instagram).
To be clear, I don’t mean to lump everyone into that. There’s tons of photographers outside that bubble.
…But there are a ton in it, and they happen to be the loudest complainers.
The mass amount of morons wearing pervert glasses will probably just end up copying those prints
Not putting the work online slashes accessibility and discoverability though
How about Low res and watermarked images?
Yep.
Pick one:
-
Permissive, open visibility.
-
More intimate viewing, restricted usability.
Can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
People thought they could, posting on Instagram or Reddit or wherever, but that was a lie from day one.
You either post online, where people can and will do stuff you don’t like with your content, or you keep it private. This applies to code, writing, communication, everything, not just visual art.
Can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
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).
You either post online, where people can and will do stuff you don’t like with your content, or you keep it private.
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”.
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.
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).
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.
-
Or self-host a website, there’s bunch of public FOSS CMS, blog software that can be deployed in a single line of code.
-
Mildly hot take:
It really points to these people just having really bad moral compasses.
In other words, these people are actually just bad people, as weird as that is to realize.
Like if you don’t understand that what you’re doing is wrong, that does not entirely excuse you from moral judgement of the rest of society; if you fundamentally disagree with the premise of something being good or bad with another person, it does follow that they’re a bad person. Which then does mean that people doing shit like this are objectively bad people, doing objectively bad things.
Which brings back to question of how bad something needs to be for it to constitute being “evil”. I’m not religious, but there’s a certain level of how something bad impacts others, intent, and context, that I believe most people would classify as evil. Not demons and hell and that nonsense, but effectively something worth crusading against and being extremely hostile towards. Something that threatens life and peace, and of a certain scale, I would call “evil”.
So these bad people doing stuff like this, with the intent of stealing on a massive scale, directly against the autonomy and will of artists… Not exactly evil, at first… but if it results in actual harm, and if that harm is intended… that, I would define as an act of evil.
So yeah, just a topic or perspective I think worth discussing. We all know something’s really wrong right now in society, and I think there’s a level of even language and ethics that hasn’t caught up or isn’t in full view. I also realize the dangers of proposing this and it being a slippery slope to what it may even advocate. That being said, again, I think it’s a perspective worth entertaining at least from a philosophical perspective and discussion.
They absolutely understand that it’s evil and immoral, they just simply don’t care. This is becoming really prevalent on the internet, people think of others on the internet as not human so it’s easier for evil to become rampant even if these people aren’t be malicious in real life.
Cara uses third-party content moderation services from Hive (an AI company) to prevent AI-generated art from being uploaded onto the site.
Hahahahaha so this friendly™ Chinese platform basically feeds every uploaded image into an AI to determine if it’s AI.
Just self host your own personal blog/art or use a proper website and not that shitshow.
The idea I believe it to prevent your art from being scraped. Self-hosting Isn’t a solution
To keep my art from being scraped by AI, I only display it in a physical gallery. The gallery is equipped with AI-based automated machine gut turrets programmed to paste anyone that tries to take a photo of the art.
You can tell just by their tone that they know what they’re doing is immoral and wrong, but they still do it. Hard to not become a misanthrope living in this society.
It’s amazing how disrespectful these idiots can be. They’ll destroy and steal people’s work, feed it to Big Corpo™ Slopinator 4.7, get shit-tier content in return, just because they chugged the kool-aid that this tech with billions of dubious investments is the future of everything.
And all because they didnt get into art school.
Who would have thought not getting into art school would be such a major cause of issues for humanity.
Let’s start an art school and let everybody in. I think we could get a Nobel peace prize.
Couldn’t they have just wiped out a bunch of Jews like a normal art school dropout?
They can’t they have to do every thing slopily
Well I was gonna go tell them to off themselves in a plethora of colorful ways on reddit, but it seems their account was banned lol.
This asshole is testing some deep waters when it comes to contributory liability of copyright infringement in the US: https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2026/2026-03-26-supreme-court-confirms-limits-on-contributory-liability-for-copyright-infringement
The fact they also claim they can disable nightshade tells me this is a shyster looking to make a quick payday from a zip file of jpegs
An app like Cara, that positions itself as an Anti-AI art platform, would obviously be targeted by anyone who’s offended simply by its existence.
Not only its a honey-pot of art, it’s also a challenge for any self proclaimed ai “prompt kiddie” to hurt the other side.
They need to apply better protections to at least make mass scraping by bots a bit more difficult and expensive.
It’s kind of an intractable problem though. The more “protected” the art is, aka restricted from the public, the harder it is to actually show human beings.
I think the only practical solution would be “prints only.” Archive the digital copy, display the prints in museums… not to replicate Instagram.
“defending AI art”… jesus, that’s sad.
Imagine having so little talent that you consider AI generated slop “art”
Edit*
Well that’s not very nice. I’m sure some Australians are talented artists.
I thought they were talking about gold.
I thought they were trying to get the attention of someone across the street.
Yeah good luck asshole.
PSA to anyone who uploads art online, anywhere. Poison it first. Use the latest version. I’m sorry but you are in an arms race now. Dickhead over here is full of shit, but even if they’re not, Nightshade is updated fast.
Nightshade and Glaze only run on Windows. Cara has a partnership with them so that your work automatically gets Glazed before being published, hence the anti-AI fame.
Poisoning it is sadly an Arms Race, one that will inevitably be lost
And then won, and then lost, and then won. That’s how an arms race works. And we have the advantage in numbers. There are far more people who don’t want their shit scalped than people working for the morons at OpenAI, or Google or Anthropic. And yes, they ARE morons. The battle is only lost when one side gives up. You only lose when you accept defeat.
The problem there is that every cycle the old ‘protected’ images become useable in training.
The issue is that they can just reuse the existing art once they’ve “removed” the poison that was used on it. The artworks with poison in them aren’t forever inaccessible to them, they just get them slightly later.
That doesn’t mean we should stop, but it still is a war that we ultimately can’t win. Even if the poison technology advances faster than the AI companies are, they can simply use slightly older art with a less sophisticated version of poison.
I mean, is the goal to prevent training or poison training. Yes nightshade will never prevent your work from being trained on, but hopefully models don’t know it’s poisoned and it sows model dysfunction.
There is no numbers advantage when less than .001% of images are poisoned and of those 99.99% are using outdated tools.
Besides, what’s the goal? Slow its progress down by a few weeks? The inevitable will happen regardless. Do you think people who edited their reddit comments before coming to lemmy made any difference? It’s laughably easy for an AI to tell is garbage data, even easier when you’re using a tool whose source the AI can view.
An Arms Race always reaches an end, and sadly there’s more money and resources on the side of AI (but less people) than the side of anti (which has lots of people, but barely any money, and barely any resources)
It will end in defeat, but a slow gradual one at least
2 things.
-
Master locks are the easiest to pick and still the most popular. I don’t see you advocating for leaving your bike unlocked because it’s inevitable that the bike thieves win.
-
That money is fake and recirculated like the air in an airplane. That’s literally what people mean when they talk about the AI bubble. All these companies are incestuous as fuck. Google invests in Nvidia who invests in Anthropic who invests in Microsoft who invest in OpenAI who invest in Nvidia who invest in Google. There’s no NEW money coming in. That has ALREADY dried up. They’re literally passing money in a circle. That’s WHY it’s a bubble, and that’s how it’s already popping.
Personally I think we should watch Oracle. They’re by far the most over leveraged. At least publicly. When they fall over, everyone else will follow. The big ones like Microsoft and Google are at least diversified and might survive, but the bubble pop will eventually catch up. OpenAI already spend $1.22 for ever $1 they make, and their expenses grow in lock step with their demand. Sam Altman’s plan to make it all profitable is to build AGI and ask it to figure it out for him because, and I cannot stress this enough, he. is. a. moron.
Your defeatist attitude is what they want because the more people that believe that, the longer the bubble is sustained.
Take heart. They are weaker than you realise. They are not infallible, their armor is paper.
I’m drunk and apologize for my flowery language.
Happy Friday, the fight is winnable.
I love you all.
I admire your optimism, and I really do hope you’re right!
Also I’m a fan of flowery language, so keep it up
I agree we are in a bubble, but I think we should look at what is allowing us to be in a bubble.
My best guess is that, as a society, we are completely structured around greed. If you have a way to make money, nobody is going to tell you to stop it. Obvious things that previous generations would have put a kabosh on that we are unable to, things that make some individuals money, put are socially parasitic: cryptocurrency and online gambling (that is GAMBLING spelled G-A-M-B-L-I-N-G: GAMBLING. In a sentence: Audrey spent her entire retirement GAMBLING at the casino).
In the run up to the subprime mortgate crisis, Senator Diane Warren tried to raise the alarm that these loans were structurally unsound. She got calls back from colleagues all basically saying the same thing:
We talked to our guys and they say it’s fine–they’re all making money.
They’re all making money! Therefore, the system is working as intended.
If you want to look at it more structurally, we are also ruled an elite group of mega-rich. They have more to gain and less to lose by keeping the AI train going, but they are going to crash the world economy in doing so: a great opportunity to snap up real estate for cheap for them. The rich never lose.
I could not agree more. I’ve been having conversations with people about this since late last year and predicted that the bubble would burst some time in 2026 but I’m thinking I may be off and it could be early 2027 now. This accounting nonsense makes up a very significant portion of the US stock market, so the bubble bursting is gonna have some pretty big flow-on effects as well. I’d recommend anyone with any form of investment look into what they have and plan for a significant market event.
You are delusional to think next year is gonna be curtains for a trillion dollar industry backed by billionaire CEOs, military and government influence. The AI bubble won’t pop, if it ever does, until well into beyond the next decade.
For the AI bubble to not pop, an AI company needs to make money off of AI first. Not raising investments. They need to actually make at least $1 off of using/selling AI services.
This hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t think it ever will. The AI machines simply cost more to run than they produce, so when the investment money runs out, they’ll be shut down.
In 2007: “How could the housing bubble pop? After all, the real estate industry is backed by billionaire CEOs, military, and government influence.”
In 1999: “How could the dot com bubble pop? After all, the internet is backed by billionaire CEOs, military, and government influence.”
In 1929: “How could the Stock Market crash? After all, international capitalism is backed by millionaire CEOs, military, and government influence.”
Paper armor and glass cannons.
This rocks and you’re 100% correct. Bless you.
-
Which is why I take a completely different direction. I poison my artwork I post online through the one technique they can’t account for.
See, I’m not super great at drawing, and in order to protect their precious models, they’d literally have to go take a look and say “yeah, that drawing wasn’t very good”. They can’t detect that automatically yet!
/sorry for a very predictable joke btw
This isn’t just about scraping the images, it’s about sending the message
That he’s a modern script kiddie.
But, isn’t this just a demonstration that Cara isn’t doing what it’s built for? If one person, who is honest about what they did, is able to scrape all the art for $10, wouldn’t the major AI companies also be able to scrape it?
And not only would they not be honest about it, it seemed like this went completely unnoticed by Cara.
They claim they may have a way to remove Glaze and Nightshade, two of the tools protecting images hosted on Cara from being used as training data. Which means right now they don’t have a way to remove it, which means Cara is still working, which I’m not implying is going to forever be true nor am I particularly informed; I just read the whole post.
From reading a bit more through various linked posts, I don’t think they downloaded the artwork for the claimed $10, but scraped the site for a list of URLs from which to download it.
There are a number of references to the “dataset” (implied to just be this list) becoming useless if Cara were to implement stricter rate limiting.
Fuck, just change a directory name
Does CARA implement protections on scraping? Or is it meant to be a platform where even if scraped, the images are protected via Nightshade and other tech?
An individual being able to specifically target an Anti-AI site is different that crawlers being automated to do the same thing to every site ignoring robot.txt files etc.
So it took an individual to go and specific target this platform which I think means that CARA isn’t really breaking its promises so much as it just needs to continue to update the techniques it uses to protect the artworks housed there. Web security has always been a game of cat and mouse.
