Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.
Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point
People talking about pixelfed are missing a key point: Cara is super easy to find and join. You go, type your email or login with your google account and that’s it. You don’t even have to remember a password. Nobody wants to find a server, apply to join, hope to get accepted, then somehow find all other artists like you.
Also, it looks good. Like, really good. That’s a thing that grab the attention of artists.
They’re just gonna have to leave whenever Cara makes some dumb decision. It’s the capitalist app cycle.
Hopefully in a couple of cycles’ time, we’ll be ready for them
Whether it’s “capitalist” or not doesn’t matter. You could have government owned/created apps that make dumb decisions as well.
At least with capitalism you have the option to go somewhere else when a dumb decision is made.
Most capitalist apps dont allow you to fork the code.
Lemmy, for example, is not owned by anyone and can altered if the main lemmy devs did something dumb.
Of course you already know this, its why you are here. You fled capitalism (Reddit) like the rest of us.
No one flees capitalism. Stop talking like a Marxist. It’s not possible to have communism in any guise without it collapsing. Exchanging goods and services for money incentives people to produce more. What you’re talking about is corporate greed
Exchanging goods and services for money incentives(sic) people to produce more.
What you’re describing here is commerce, which existed looong before capitalism. What you describe as “corporate greed” is capitalism
Ever heard of open source?
When capitalists say nobody would work under communism, they really mean that capitalists would never work under communism.
I think you’re confusing the word “corporate” with “capitalism”, they are not the same.
Edit: If you swap the word “capitalist” with “corporate” I completely agree with you.
Pixelfed isn’t even in the App Store and isn’t geared towards artists. Cara has specific features for artists including finding jobs
This right here. I tried to join Mastodon today.
Download the most recommended app, Moshidon
Open app and get asked which instance i want to join. There are no suggestions.
Do a search for instances and pick one, go to the website and register with email and password. Requires email confirmation. Still waiting on the email confirmation link, 4 hrs later and 2 resends.
Literally haven’t been able to sign up yet.
Even if it had worked, the workflow would have been to change back to the app, type out the instance then re-login.
I’m not sure how anyone expects anyone other than the most hardcore to sign up for these services. Maybe that’s the point but if the point is to grow the user sign up process to significant overall
Biggest problems I have had with Mastodon are the fact that:
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The app I wanted to use didn’t even recognize the instance I signed up for and…
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I had to wait nearly a month and a half before being able to actuallyuse my account and access Mastodon because I joined an instance where they review people signing up or something similar.
I definitely see the appeal of a find the site, sign up, and you’re done services over the fediverse join an instance and pray service.
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If you just used the Official app, they have a simplified sign-up procedure. Dug your own grave there.
Thats not fair, since everyone says the main app suck and you’ll have a better experience with Moshidon. This is true if you’re already there, but the comment makes it clear that it still lacks for newbies.
Never heard of Moshidon, so clearly not everyone. Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me. Some apps are better than others, but always start with the official one and then, if it lacks something, look for something else. This applies not only for mastodon, but for everything. Basic stuff…
Actually, it’s not that bad
I use the official app, is not incredible but do his job.
btw. just use the official (or the web site) x sign in, is not like you can’t use the credentials elsewhere.
I hate that Pixelfed isn’t good enough to capture these users and I say this as someone who uses it over Instagram.
From the what I’ve seen (and I have been watching fairly closely), I think Pixelfed and the stretched-too-thin-can’t-prioritize-and-somewhat-monarchial dev himself might just need more time to cook. I still have hope in him and his projects but I won’t be holding my breath again. If good shit happens, it happens. And I do hope it happens because it should’ve been Pixelfed in this article like Mastodon was with Twitter or Lemmy with Reddit. Not whatever this new corp that came out of nowhere is.
I think we should not expect a volunteer (or small group of volunteers) to keep up with a billion dollar company
I personally think we have reach a point where we actually can do this. User controlled project can now keep up and sometime beat big business. Look at Asahi Linux, a small group of nerds are reverse-enginering Apple’s latest tech, and allowing us to do all kind of things Apple never wanted us to do with these machine. Mastodon, Lemmy, Nextcloud, are all open-source projects keeping up with huge company.
step one of enshittification has begun. again.
These people should create an instance on Pixelfed, a libre alternative to Instagram.
I think it would be great for new social things like this to just speak ActivityPub. They can build up their own user experience and culture while joining a larger network. I don’t have a problem with the software itself being non-free if the protocols are and they commit to supporting account migration.
Anyone have the tl,dr on Cara? Good people? Open source? Funding source?
Right now, it’s all being funded by one person, Zhang Jingna (a photographer that recently sued and won her case when someone plagiarized her work) but it’s grown so quickly she got hit with a $96K bill for one month.
I just signed up and I know it’s still centralized but I love being able to just look at art. Besides anything that is anti -AI I am in for
Meta is just going to scrub all the Cara content into their AI system anyway. They have no fear because there are no real consequences
If they do, it’s going to be a bad time for them, since Cara has Glaze integration and encourages everyone to use it. https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
Isn’t this just going to be a battle of AIs?
Train the AI on what glaze does and it’ll eventually be able to deglaze. So glaze gets better and stops it for a bit and then the deglazer gets better and wins again. Repeat forever.
If your’e telling the deglazers to giveup because we will never stop glazing ourselves then I agree.
Nah, the glazers are needed to make the AI more robust
Yeh theres a danger in that I can see. The Machine is learning from our dissent.
What are the ways that US domains can block AI? I figure pay walls, and captchas, but is there something we can add to robots.txt that has any teeth against AI scraping? I mean would we even know if they obeyed it anyway? How do we set traps and keep this shit out?
Capthchas haven’t worked against serious actors for years and companies could easily pay for a user account. Anything a normal tech illiterate person can do, companies can automate. You sort of have to trust their pinky promise of not scraping content.
Really hoping to see a surge in demand for “Anti-AI” software/services/community.
Fuck the Hype and the bubble cant pop fast enough
To get abused again by yet more anti-libre software, malware. Some people never learn.
Tell them this:
🚩 Anti-libre software, Cara, bans us from removing malicious source code. We don’t have time to waste your life repeating the same failure.
They might ask:
What is anti-libre? We don’t control. It controls us.
And:
How do we know? It fails to include a libre software license file, like the AGPL.
Say this instead:
open sourcelibre software (‘open source’ is created to subvert libre software)closedanti-libre (closed implies open, see above)We are the product.(paid stuff abuses too) With anti-libre software, we are no the user, we are used.I really appreciate your super stark pro libre software attitude. I want to support you here. You should know that the approach you are taking is ultra abrasive and would probably cause more harm than help.
People would just associate libre software with militant weirdos, if all they saw where your posts.
If you want to make meaningful change I strongly recommend taking a softer less abrasive approach.
We want libre software to be connected with safety, friendliness and personal autonomy, not militarism, chanted phrases, and dogma.
Even on Lemmy the ultra pro libre software social network (relative to non federated networks) your current approach is off putting. I want you to succeed and I think a different approach may be better.
Just my two cents.
People try that and we still get news like this but your feedback is welcome.
Every time you call a product “malware” with absolutely no facts to back it up, you make yourself (and the movement) look idiotic. Please just stop.
Please, stop making yourself look gullible. You have absolutely no proof it’s safe but we know this anti-libre software bans us from removing malicious source code.
Dude you are the one making yourself look dumb. And you still make absolutely no sense, “removing malicious source code”? Removing it from what? Your comments make no sense.
Dude you are the one making yourself look dumb. And you still make absolutely no sense, “removing malicious source code”? Removing it from what? Your comments make no sense.
What do you mean by this?:
Cara, bans us from removing malicious source code
Is there obviously malicious source code? Is there a policy that specifically says we can’t remove any source code? Is this even open source?
‘Open source’ is created to subvert libre software. The ban alone is a 🚩 red flag.
What ban?
They’re using loaded language to say that without access to the source code and the ability to modify it, Cara could start behaving in a way you don’t like and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
Waht is “libre software”? this is a totally new term to me and searching for it has turned up nothing.
You understand that search results are different for different people, right? I’ve been a dev for… an embarrassingly long time, I’ve never heard “libreware” outside of specifically the libreoffice suite. Sorry I’m not as in-tune with the slang as you are or whatever.
Maybe yours does.
And then that growth promptly blew its budget because it’s using expensive cloud AI services from Vercel and it has no means of monetization whatsoever to bring money in.
People can do whatever they want, of course. But they have to pay for the resources they consume while doing that, and it seems Cara didn’t really consider that aspect of this.
Well, now’s a great time to let them know about Pixelfed, although explosive growth like this will be a strain on any website.
I get the sense that a federated image hosting/sharing system would be counter to their goals, that being to lock away their art from AI trainers. An AI trainer could just federate with them and they’d be sending their images over on a silver platter.
Of course, any site that’s visible to humans is also visible to AIs in training, so it’s not really any worse than their current arrangement. But I don’t think they want to hear that either.
Hmm their About is all about not hosting AI images until ethical issues are resolved.
Ah! Gotta hit FAQ: “Cara Glaze”, then the linked University of Chicago Glaze FAQ:
Anti-AI cloaking. Neat!
Aside from it not really working, though.
Glaze attempts to “poison” AI training by using adversarial noise to trick AIs into perceiving it as something that it’s not, so that when a description is generated for the image it’ll be incorrect and the AI will be trained wrong. There are a couple of problems with this, though. The adversarial noise is tailored to specific image recognition AIs, so it’s not future-proof. It also isn’t going to have an impact on the AI unless a large portion of the training images are “poisoned”, which isn’t the case for typical training runs with billions of images. And it’s relatively fragile against post-processing, such as rescaling the image, which is commonly done as an automatic part of preparing data for training. It also adds noticeable artefacts to the image, making it look a bit worse to the human eye as well.
There’s a more recent algorithm called Nightshade, but I’m less familiar with its details since it got a lot less attention that Glaze and IIRC the authors tried keeping some of its details secret so that AI trainers couldn’t develop countermeasures. There was a lot of debate over whether it even worked in the first place, since it’s not easy to test something like this when there’s little information about how it functions and training a model just to see if it breaks is expensive. Given that these algorithms have been available for a while now but image AIs keep getting better I think that shows that whatever the details it’s not having the desired effect.
Part of the reason why Cara’s probably facing such financial hurdles is that it’s computationally expensive to apply these things. They were also automatically running “AI detectors” on images, which are expensive and unreliable. It’s an inherently expensive site to run even if they were doing it efficiently.
IMO they would have been much better served just adding “No AI-generated images allowed” to their ToS and relying on their users to police themselves and each other. Though given the witch-hunts I’ve seen and the increasing quality of AI art itself I don’t think that would really work for very long either.
Is DeviantArt not a thing anymore? Or is this a different niche?
Deviant Art is also trying to scrape artists’ work for AI. It what allows AI at to be posted and has prompted it.
As a European user, do I actively have to opt out or is it opt-out by default?
You have to opt-out. I got an email from meta with a link to the form. Doesn’t seem to matter really what you write. It got approved in less than a minute for me. I think they purposfully made it look like it’s more work than it’s worth.
I have an easy solution for that: I think I’ll just delete my account. I’m not using it anyways.
Why not Vero? Which has been around for years and already restricts AI and no advertising.
Because Vero has nobody on it outside of creators. I looked into it as an alternative for my photography and it’s a ghost town outside of creators posting. Nobody is liking/commenting on anything
I mean, but that’s the point? For creators? Not as a replacement for Facebook. I don’t want to share my stuff with people who are just gonna steal it and share it as their own in some Facebook group or on Reddit. Literally sharing with creators is the purpose of these apps.
Not really. Instagram is for sharing photos to more than just creators. Creators generally don’t interact, like/share, etc other creators content, they just endlessly post their own.
Well, it’s certainly better than Instagram… Who knows, maybe Cara could federate with ActivityPub in the future… Not that I’ll keep my hopes up for that.
there are several platforms better than Instagram but none of them have the reach of instagram
