Cara, an image-focused social media app designed to be a safe space for photographers to share their work without fear of being scraped for generative AI, has reportedly had all of its content scraped by a bad actor.
Cara was started by photographer Jingna Zhang in 2023 as a direct result of big tech firms not taking action against AI bots scraping content from websites. In some cases, the platforms are scraping their users’ data for their own benefit, including Meta platforms.
Zhang took to Instagram this morning to share news of the scrape, which was done by a Reddit user who posted about his exploits to a subreddit called r/DefendingAIArt.
“Artists just want a place online where platforms don’t feed their work to AI. So I built Cara. But people just won’t leave us alone,” Zhang says.
“The laws don’t help us, the governments don’t help us. What are artists supposed to do? We already have anti-bot and anti-scraping measures. We already set robots.txt telling bots not to scrape for AI. We even opted out of federated services when it made us unpopular with artists, just so it’s clear we don’t want our users’ data scraped.”
The Reddit user, u/MandarinDawnPoppy994, crowed on a now-deleted post that he scraped over 12 million works, which is just over 12 terabytes of data. The Redditor says it cost under $10 and called it a “fun project.”
It’s not clear what this person’s intention was: while 12 million images sounds like a lot, it takes billions of images paired with text captions to make a base AI image model. It seems like this Redditor targeted Cara simply because it’s an anti-AI app.
“People just want a safe space, but AI users go out of their way to destroy it,” adds Zhang. “Maybe scraping is welcomed on X, FB, IG, TT, Bsky. But we have said no. Over and over.”
Zhang has taken a stand against AI technology scraping the work of artists: joining class-action lawsuits against tech firms, including Google.
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