We’ve all seen the Cara profile’s flooding Instagram over the past week. First one, then two, then dozens all over your for you page and stories. Artist’s seemingly jumping ship after Meta’s announcement last week about policy changes coming into effect on the 26th of June. Meta plans to use any publicly available information on their products, Facebook, and Instagram, to train Meta AI. This includes any posts, comments, audio, and photos you have shared, to name a few. There is an opt out feature where you can plead your case and hope you are not denied, but many artists are sharing they have been declined this privilege.
So what is Cara? The social media and portfolio website launched last year in response to the surge of generated art, and the subsequent uproar against it, on the well-known and industry-recognised artist platform ArtStation. It has since grown in popularity for its strong artist-first stance. It feels as though a combination of Twitter before Musk and Tumblr before Yahoo, with none of the toxicity. In its current state, Cara is an Eden for artists. A rapidly budding community for all creatives to come together and reclaim an online space that puts them first. It is rare to see but it is not without its challenges.
When I joined Cara on the 3rd of June it had 300k total users, a huge influx on the small team behind the app. The following day it went up to 500k users. After Adobe’s announcement of their own policy changes that include the right to train their own generative AI off of any work produced using their products, Cara has now hit 700k users with no sign of slowing down. The app is still in beta, and therefore teething problems are to be expected.
One of the founders, Jingna Zhang, posted on X a notification from Vercel, the front-end cloud that makes the website possible, “this is your daily notification that your team [redacted] has used 24166% of your monthly included Serverless Function Execution amount which has added $96,280 to your bill thus far.” This post was responded to by Lee Robinson, the VP of product at Vercel, stating how to reduce the function use considerably and, as it is a valid usage due to the surge in traffic, he suggested “pausing the project entirely if you hit a certain level of spend”. The platform is currently free to use, with no subscription packages or advertisements present. However there is a page to donate to Cara on https://buymeacoffee.com/cara.app - a website dedicated to supporting creators financially through one-off or monthly donations.
This week Angelo Sotira, co-founder of 2000’s art platform DeviantArt and CEO until 2022, reached out to the Cara team on X to congratulate them on creating a community for human only art and offered some advice for the future. “You should demand that Cara.app not be free to use. Value like this does not come around often, and $5 a month per account is not a lot to ask for that kind of value. Cara should not be free. And Cara is NOT free. The costs are going to pile up”. He suggests making Cara a tiered subscription service, where members could sponsor other users who cannot afford a membership. There is some discourse about the pros and cons of hiding this community behind a paywall, and while I love seeing an online space that is free of ads I think that would be the easier way to go for the developers. You don’t alienate a portion of your customer base through mandatory fees, but are still finding a way of paying for the hike in bills.
Users are also reporting being unable to sign up for an account or being unable to access their account (every login requires an OTP sent to your emails and these have been unexpectedly timing out), as well as reports of users' art being falsely flagged as created with AI, and their glaze feature is temporarily disabled. All of these issues have been addressed on their developers blog and they are working against these problems.
The response to the app has been largely positive in the artist community, with prominent artists in the fight against AI such as Kelly McKernan and Jon Lam pointing creators towards the app. (https://www.createdontscrape.com/ is a brilliant collection of articles around said fight and subsequent lawsuits, which also features a detailed way of poisoning your work against AI and protecting it, for those unfamiliar with Nightshade and Glaze.)
A popular artist on instagram known as Luztapiaart who struggles often with her work being stolen and sold on sites such as Temu and Shoppee, posted about the website https://haveibeentrained.com/ - a tool to search for yourself and your own work to see if you have been scraped for AI data training. I was happy to find that my name, and my online name, provided no results. Still curious though, I decided to search for my old username.
I had an account on DeviantArt for many years in the mid 2000s and 2010s, before moving to Tumblr, and later Instagram. One such painting I had submitted 15 years ago was a watercolour impressionism of a sunset. The caption read “my teacher gave me an image of a sunset and told me to ‘make it Van Gogh’ and I’m pleased with the results”. This image was in AI databases, presumably for my tags and title including Van Gogh’s name, without my knowledge. I have since deleted this image but it had 6.9k views. The highest view count of the 144 submissions I had on the site, and a staunch difference to the couple hundred views I was used to getting, so the damage is already done. It is out there for people to use and there is nothing I can do about it without trawling through the vastness of the internet to try and claim copyright.
DeviantArt’s community guidelines state that every member can claim DMCA strikes against other users, and with a paid subscription you have the privilege of being notified when someone has potentially ripped your work. There is not, however, a feature to prevent people from using your work in the first place, and this is the fear creatives have with Meta’s new policy update. Google, OpenAI, StableDiffusion, Midjourney, these are names we have seen popping up in the news for the past two years over their misuse of our data. DeviantArt, ArtStation, Instagram, Facebook, these are places that are cultivating generative AI. I urge you to educate yourself on these topics, as it is happening now and it is happening fast.
The phrase ‘it is better to ask for forgiveness rather than permission’ seems to be the prevailing warcry for GenAI users. As an emerging artist and writer in an increasingly troubling ethical debate, I have a message to every brand and job listing I see centred around AI training and AI generated work: You’re showing the world you cannot finance your projects, you cannot finance creativity and the human beings behind it, and artists are sick of seeing it. If you do not value our work then you cannot have it.
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With Adobe’s update artist’s are looking for alternatives, and Affinity seems to have struck gold as they are having a 50% off flash sale of their entire suite while many Adobe users are cancelling their subscriptions. I used Clip Studio before starting my degree as a much more affordable option to Photoshop and Illustrator, and it seems I will be sticking with my choice in the coming months. Procreate, Photopea, and Inkscapes are other alternatives. Adobe has published a response to try and subdue the masses but with many users flooding to X with evidence of their work being stolen for Adobe Firefly’s stock it does little to soothe fears.
Cara is certainly not the only platform to have been created in response to the many issues artists are having with AI, but it is the one in the limelight at the moment and one that I am looking forward to seeing grow.
Below is a link to further anti-AI spaces. Places to sell work, showcase work, tools to use such as references and commission sites.
There are many growing communities on Facebook, such as Artists Against AI Art that, at the time of posting, has 132.9k members.
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