He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them
Since early 2023, photographer Jingna Zhang and a small crew of volunteers have worked tirelessly to maintain an image-sharing social media and portfolio app called Cara. So far, it has attracted about 1.5 million artists. What drew them to the platform? A shared opposition to the unauthorized use of their work to train AI models and a desire to publicize their art while avoiding exploitation by Big Tech.
But while Cara filters out AI images and offers protective features—including Glaze, a tool meant to mask the style of the images picked up by scrapers in order to disrupt AI mimicry—preventing scrapes themselves is nearly impossible. And just this month, beginning on August 13, Cara was subjected to three major scrapes, which spiked its server fees and alarmed creators who had migrated there from platforms like Instagram, where all content is explicitly available to Meta as training data.
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