Key points:
-
Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
-
Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
-
Cara’s Features: The app is designed specifically for artists and offers a ‘Portfolio’ feature. Users can tag fields, mediums, project types, categories, and software used to create their work
-
While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
-
Glaze Integration: Cara is working on integrating Glaze directly in the app to provide users with an easy way to protect their work from be used by any AI
more about: https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
Join Pixelfed instead!
Cara is just another fucking centralized social media that’s gonna get run to the ground the moment they can monetize their user base.
Artists are mostly not going to figure out the fediverse. There really needs to be some kind of way of accessing it that is more layman friendly if we ever want it to be adopted by non-nerds
Idk I hear misskey (activitypub micro blogging software, compatible but distinct from mastodon) is really big in Japan, used by lots of artists. lots of Japanese users on bluesky as well
It’s really not that complicated and with shit like Threads, companies are introducing the concept to the masses while the enshittification of Instagram and the like will force people to look for alternatives.
We need to welcome people with open arms and not push them away the moment someone has a question about how federation works.
Artists are perfectly able to use the fediverse, that is not what is stopping them.
They don’t come because they need to be where their fans are. That is why Cara will only be a splash: their niche is artists who place more value on the anti-AI slant than on meeting their audience where it lives. By definition that is not conducive to a lot of organic growth.
You say that like this shit is hard to use.
Nah. But anything more complicated than a MacBook scares most people away. Most people aren’t down with anything that isn’t a turnkey experience
It’s good. It acts as a filter.
If only there were a filter to filter out gatekeepers like you . You do know your sabotaging your favorite platforms by being like this right ?
I’m not gatekeeping anyone. Everyone’s welcome.
Well you do sound a lot like a gatekeeper for someone who isn’t gatekeeper .
Cara is popular because of it’s anti ai stance. They have a detector to not allow ai images to be on the platform. Pixelfed allows it and also lack active users that are not artists.
This will be the headline a month later:
Cara’s monthly active users down to a few thousands. Here’s why.
Cara has no passwords: you log in via Google or Apple
uhuh, no thanks
So much bad faith, I logged in just fine with a regular e-mail.
It’s just a quote from the article, but good to know.
you can use your email
You have a problem with oauth?
A lot of people are trying to de-google.
This is why twitter will never die.
I knew that C looked familiar!
According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn’t seem very artist friendly to me.
Ok, the lady behind Cara just WON a f-ing copywrite lawsuit against some dick that stole her artwork. I’m 100% sure the wording is so if you *think* about stealing from Cara, she will come after your ass with both guns blazing.
Regardless, their terms of service let’s Cara not only sell prints and your artwork to third parties but also let’s them sell your artwork for AI training if they wanted to.
Instagram for all it’s fault specifically says that they don’t own your artwork and only get a license to show it.
I don’t really care what she won, people tend to cave really fast if given proper financial incentive.
No, it doesn’t. It states that the copyrighted works are the property of Cara and/or the artist who created the Works, except where otherwise noted. This specifically would cover cases where someone attempts to claim that a Work they found on Cara isn’t copyrighted because a copyright notice wasn’t explicitly stated, and doesn’t make explicit claims over the ownership of any arbitrary Work. For it to work in the way you’re claiming, the “or” cannot be present as it being there implies the existence of Works on the site which Cara does not have property rights to. Who actually possesses the property rights to any given Work is left, apparently intentionally, ambiguous.
cases where someone attempts to claim that a Work they found on Cara isn’t copyrighted because a copyright notice wasn’t explicitly stated
In what country is that a thing?
None that I’m aware of, but for a copyright to be asserted in the US a human must be associated with it as a consequence of the monkey selfie case. My reading is that this would cover the edge case of an anonymous, unknown poster submitting the work, allowing Cara to act as the default rights holder unless otherwise asserted by a person or user.
Why are you twisting it to make it seem like Cara is doing a good thing? What’s your motive? What is the difference between Cara owning it by default and the uploader owning it by default? Why can’t it just be the owners property?
Because “anonymous” isn’t necessarily a person who can answer for copyright. They literally gave you a use case where it could help in the content you’re arguing against…
I’m no federated-nazi and I welcome projects like Cara, but at the beginning there are always lots of subscriptions
Yet another centralised social network. That pinky-promises they’ll never go bad.
Join now! Bring your friends! No ads! Everything’s free! We’re indie!..
Moments later… enshitification ensues.
Solves the problem for a few years until Meta buys their users and data back.
Assuming they don’t own them already as a sort of pressure valve. Yeah I’m getting that cynical.
Pixelfed looks like they are doing a huge push to get up to speed. It has been an immature app/platform for a long time and slow to get the features that people need from a photo sharing social media.
According to their mastodon, they are working for better AI management features, and launching an app that will make it a genuinely positive experience.
I don’t understand how this Glaze thing is supposed to stop AI being trained on the art.
It’s not. It’s supposed to target certain open source AIs (Stable Diffusion specifically).
Latent diffusion models work on compressed images. That takes less resources. The compression is handled by a type of AI called VAE. For this attack to work, you must have access to the specific VAE that you are targeting.
The image is subtly altered so that the compressed image looks completely different from the original. You can only do that if you know what the compression AI does. Stable Diffusion is a necessary part of the Glaze software. It is ineffective against any closed source image generators that have trained their own VAE (or equivalent).
This kind of attack is notoriously fickle and thwarted by even small changes. It’s probably not even very effective against the intended target.
If you’re all about intellectual property, it kinda makes sense that freely shared AI is your main enemy.
Not only is this kind of attack notoriously unstable, finding out what images have been glazed is a fantastic indicator for finding high-quality art that is the stuff you want to train on.
I doubt that. Having a very proprietary attitude towards one’s images and making good images are not related at all.
Besides, good training data is to a large extent about the labels.
deleted by creator
I’m sure it works fine in the lab. But it really only targets one specific AI model; that one specific Stable Diffusion VAE. I know that there are variants of that VAE around, which may or may not be enough to make it moot. The “Glaze” on an image may not survive common transformations, such as rescaling the image. It certainly will not survive intentional efforts to remove it, such as appropriate smoothing.
In my opinion, there is no point in bothering in the first place. There are literally billions of images on the net. One locks up gems because they are rare. This is like locking up pebbles on the beach. It doesn’t matter if the lock is bad.
Saw a post on Bluesky from someone in tech saying that eventually, if it’s human-viewable it’ll also be computer-viewable, and there’s simply no working around that, wonder if you agree on that or not.
Sort of. The VAE, the compression, means that the image generation takes less compute; ie cheaper hardware and less energy. You can have an image generator that works on the same pixels, visible to humans. Actually, that’s simpler and existed earlier.
By Moore’s law, it would be many years, even decades, before that efficiency gain is something we can do without. But I think, maybe, this becomes moot once special accelerator chips for neural nets are designed.
What makes it obsolete is the proliferation of open models. EG Today Stable Diffusion 3 becomes available for download. This attack targets 1 specific model and may work on variants of it. But as more and more rather different models become available, the whole thing becomes increasingly pointless. Maybe you could target more than one, but it would be more and more effort for less and less effect.
So what happend when this app needs to pay server costs for 600,000 people?
Re: the hosting company
Your account does not appear to have spend management enabled, which would allow you to pause your project entirely if you hit a certain level of spend.
So, this is something of a devil’s bargain. Either shut down your website just as it’s catching fire and gaining traction. Or get billed a year’s server budget in a matter of days because of exploding costs.
In a saner world, this might be used as an argument for treating the Internet as a public utility and not a for-profit rent. Perhaps more companies could grow and sustain large pools of customers if they weren’t kneecapped by their own momentum.
Instead, I’m sure we’re going to see more exotic insurance and finance services designed to siphon money out of websites as a hedge against unexpected growth.
Who. The fuck. Cares