A social app for creatives, Cara grew from 40k to 650k users in a week because artists are fed up with Meta’s AI policies | TechCrunch ( techcrunch.com )

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

Isthisreddit ,

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

Stopthatgirl7 OP ,
@Stopthatgirl7@lemmy.world avatar

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

NotMyOldRedditName ,

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.

tigerjerusalem ,

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.

Lem453 ,

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

AceFuzzLord ,
@AceFuzzLord@lemm.ee avatar

Biggest problems I have had with Mastodon are the fact that:

  1. The app I wanted to use didn't even recognize the instance I signed up for and...

  2. 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.

Prandom_returns ,

If you just used the Official app, they have a simplified sign-up procedure. Dug your own grave there.

tigerjerusalem ,

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.

Prandom_returns ,

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...

ByteMe ,

Actually, it's not that bad

ekZepp ,
@ekZepp@lemmy.world avatar

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.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

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.

QuadratureSurfer ,
@QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world avatar

Well, now's a great time to let them know about Pixelfed, although explosive growth like this will be a strain on any website.

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

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.

brbposting ,

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:

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/3cb2b7ed-e954-4353-b4c9-f70e882483e1.jpeg

https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/f5a72730-759f-496c-9588-1e4a32accac8.jpeg

Anti-AI cloaking. Neat!

FaceDeer ,
@FaceDeer@fedia.io avatar

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.

thefrankring ,
@thefrankring@lemmy.world avatar

These people should create an instance on Pixelfed, a libre alternative to Instagram.

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

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.

autonomoususer ,

To get abused again by yet more anti-libre software, malware. Some people never learn.

autonomoususer ,

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 source libre software ('open source' is created to subvert libre software)

closed anti-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.

More in video here or text here.

QuadratureSurfer ,
@QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world avatar

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?

autonomoususer ,

'Open source' is created to subvert libre software. The ban alone is a 🚩 red flag.

Warl0k3 ,

Waht is "libre software"? this is a totally new term to me and searching for it has turned up nothing.

autonomoususer ,

Literally the first search result is here but even better is this video here.

Warl0k3 ,

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.

autonomoususer ,

Maybe yours does.

Warl0k3 ,

YES, IT DOES, THATS MY ENTIRE POINT.

QuadratureSurfer ,
@QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world avatar

What ban?

Zak ,
@Zak@lemmy.world avatar

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.

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