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.
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
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.
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.
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…
Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me.
You may or may not have heard this before, but the app is not the instance is not the platform. I registered both my Mastodon account and this Lemmy account via their respective instance websites. I used mastodon in the browser for literally over a year before installing an app for it on my phone.
Apps are alternative front-ends to the fediverse, even “official” ones.
“Basic stuff” is very weird to read for me when many of the internet services I have accounts for don’t have apps - and I would rather they never make an app for it. My electricity bills, my hosting costs, my home internet, all are done through web pages that I can access from any internet-connected device, unlike an app.
Not to mention I appreciate being able to type things on a bigger screen and physical keyboard when I register for things.
Lastly, it is much easier for me to deal with a sloppily made website than a sloppily made app. I can use extensions, and if need be can open up the network tab to see if the registration request was accepted or not before the website malfunctioned on my end.
You assumed I don’t do this. Of course, number 1 place I go to if I want to sign up, is the website.
I was saying that it’s weird to blame Mastodon for “complex sign-up”, when you’re using a “3rd-party” tool to do so. That’s completely down to the app.
I’ve never, ever signed up to something via an unofficial app.
I was saying that it’s weird to blame Mastodon for “complex sign-up”, when you’re using a “3rd-party” tool to do so. That’s completely down to the app.
Ah, I understand now. Thanks for the correction.
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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Pixelfed isn’t even in the App Store and isn’t geared towards artists. Cara has specific features for artists including finding jobs
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.
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.
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.
But communism is a replacement for capitalism, just like capitalism replaced feudalism. It’s something that will come with time and technology, not something that can be forced to happen.
Aside from that, people spamming about Pixelfed are missing the point that this is also a deviantart alternative. The landing page showing tons of art you might be interested in is great.
Also Pixelfed would straight up share their images to other servers that might allow web scraping bots which is part of the reason they made this website.
A decentralized system with cryptographic identities wouldn’t even require that. All these rituals about “dragging your mouse around for 2 minutes” and overloaded UIs, like in Retroshare and Freenet, were simply aimed at people who felt more comfortable, not less, seeing them.
Needs sybil attack protection.
A few solutions:
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Federated identity services. Like old Skype had identity service as its only centralized part, one can make the same thing, but federated. Would require registration and finding one just like the comment I was answering to complains.
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F2F and trust elements - people can trust each other via QR codes or something, with 1 trusted peer beating any number of untrusted peers.
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Reputation system elements (like Kad network has), which is not enough a protection, but makes them more expensive.
Federated identity services
Like an SSO system?
Yes. I meant specifically something like old Skype authentication servers, sharing identities via ActivityPub. So that one person is registered on one server, another on another server, but they’ll both find each other in contact directory and will be able to communicate.
But that’s only for contact info, the actual content of the network should be decentralized and not stored on federated servers. Again, like old Skype (in the point of division between what’s centralized and what’s not).
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It’s still a centralized system
That’s the thing, nobody cares. Its even better to be centralised because there’s someone you can sue for damages if that’s the case.
Not only does nobody care, but they prefer centralized services. Tbh I still prefer centralized services and Lemmy is the only federated anything I use, because the others don’t do anything better than their alternatives.
step one of enshittification has begun. again.
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.
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 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.
It has potential, with good marketing strategy I believe more users will know this.
Really hoping to see a surge in demand for “Anti-AI” software/services/community.
Fuck the Hype and the bubble cant pop fast enough
I’m all for replacing the s at the beginning of words with z so you read it in an exaggerated German accent, but you gotta be consistent
Really hoping to zee a zurge in ze demand for “Anti-AI” zoftware/zervices/community
Fixed that for you there, Goebbels
There’s a big inky black spot in my screen where i dropped it and i cant afford a new one and mobile keyboards are ass, so typos in the first idk 50 chars are common. 🪦
Fck Nzis
I meant it in jest only. Sorry about your phone, bro
Not bro. Nbd.
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
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.
I was hyped for non-shitty artstation for all of 15 minutes, damn. This is some ridiculously shitty planning.
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.
And now they’re asking for donations. I don’t know how that’ll work out, though
From Cara:
We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation
Okay I wanted to talk real quick about this aspect. Lot’s of folks want AI to require things only held in copyright. And fine, let’s just run with that for sake of brevity. Disney owns everything. If you stick AI to only models which the person holds copyright, only Disney will generate AI for the near future.
I’m just going to tell you. The biggest players out there are the one who stand to profit the most from regulation of AI. And likely, they’ll be the one’s tasked by Congress to write drafts of the regulation.
In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily
And the thing is, is Photoshop even “human-made art”? I mean that was the debate back in the 90s, when a ton of airbrush artist lost their jobs. And a large amount of Photoshop that was done, was so bad back then we had the whole Ralph Lauren, Filippa Hamilton thing go down.
So I don’t disagree with safe from AI places. But the justification of Cara’s existence, is literally every argument that was leveled at Photoshop back in the 90s by airbrush artist who were looking to protect their jobs and failed because they focused way too heavily on being anti-Photoshop that the times changed without them. When they could have started learning Photoshop and kept having a job.
I think AI presents a unique tool for artist to use to become more creative than they have ever been. But I think that some of them are too caught up in how CEOs will eventually use that tool as justification to fire them. And there’s a lot of propensity to blame AI when it’s the CEO’s writing the pink slips, just like the airbrush artists blamed Photoshop, when it was newspapers, the magazines, and so on that were writing the pink slips.
I just feel like a lot of people are about to yet again get caught with their pants down on this. And it’s easy to diss on AI right now, because it’s so early. Just like bad Photoshop back in the 90s led to the funny Snickers ad.
Like I get that people building models from other people’s stuff is bad. No argument there. But, open models, things built from a community of their own images, are things too but that’s all based on the community and people who decide to be in a collaborative effort to provide a community model. And I think folks are getting so hung up on being anti-AI, that it’s going to hurt their long term prospects, just like the airbrush folks who started picking up Photoshop way too late.
There’s not a stopping Disney and the media companies from using AI, they’re going to, and if you enjoy getting a paycheck, having some skill in the thing they use is going to be required. But for regular people to provide a competitor, to fight on equal footing, the everyday person needs access to free tools. Imagine if we had no GIMP, no Kitra, no Inkscape. Imagine if it was just Adobe and nothing else and that was enforced by regulation because only Adobe could be “trusted”.
Good comment. Thanks.
I’ve heard the “big guys are the only ones that will profit from AI regulation” and I haven’t ever heard an actual argument as to why.
And in my mind the biggest issues with AI image generation have nothing to do with using it as a tool for artists. That’s perfectly fine. But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation.
The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”.
Ah. No problem. So the notion behind the “big guys are the ones that stand to profit from AI regulation” is that regulation curtails activity in a general sense. However, many of the offices that create regulation defer to industry experts for guidance on regulatory processes, or have former industry experts appointed onto regulatory committees. (good example of the later is Ajit Pai and his removal of net neutrality).
AI regulation at the Federal level has mostly circled “trusted” AI generation, as you mentioned:
But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation
And the talk has been to add checks along the way by the industry itself (much like how the music industry does policing itself or how airline industry has mostly policed itself). So this would leave people like Adobe and Disney to largely dictate what are “trusted” platforms for AI generation. Platforms that they will ensure that via content moderation and software control, that only “trusted” AI makes it out into the wild.
Regulation can then take the shape of social media being required to enforce regulation on AI posts, source distributors like github being required to enforce distribution prohibitions, and so on.
This removes the tools for any AI out of the hands of the public and places them all in the hands of Adobe, Disney, Universal, and so on. And thus, if you wanted to use AI you must use one of their tools, which may in turn have within the TOS that you can not use their product to compete with their product. Basically establishing a monopoly.
This happens a lot in regulatory processes which is why things like the RIAA, the MPAA, Boeing, and so on are so massive and seemingly unbreakable. They aren’t enshrined in law, but regulatory processes create a de facto monopoly that becomes difficult to enter because of fear of competition.
The big guys, being the industry leaders, in a regulatory hearing would be the first to get a crack at writing the rules that the regulatory body would debate on. In addition to the expert phase, regulatory process also includes a public comment, this would allow the public to address concerns about the expert submitted recommendation. But as demonstrated back in the public comment of the debate to remove rules regulating ISPs for net neutrality, the FCC decided that the comments were “fake” and only heard a small “selected” percentage of them.
side note: in a regulatory hearing, every public comment accepted must be debated and rationale on the conclusion of the argument submitted to the record. This is why Ajit Pai suspended comments on NN because they didn’t want to enter justification that can be brought up in a court case to the record.
The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”
And yeah, that might be worth locking AI out of the hands of the public forever. But it doesn’t stop the argument of “AI taking jobs”. It just means that small startups will never be able to create jobs with AI. So if the debate is “AI shouldn’t take our jobs, let’s regulate it”, that will only make it worse in the end (sort of how AWS has mostly dominated the Internet services and how everyone started noticing that as not being incredibly ideal around 2019-2021 when Twitter started kicking people off their service and people wanting to build the next Twitter were limited to what Amazon would and would not accept).
So that’s the argument. And there’s pros and cons to each. But we have to be pretty careful about which way to go, because once we go a direction, it’s pretty difficult to change directions because corporations are incredibly good at adapting. I distinctly remember streaming services being the “breath of fresh air from cable” all the way up till it wasn’t. And now with hard media becoming harder to purchase (it’s not impossible mind you) we’ve sort of entrenched streaming. Case in point, I love Pokémon Concierge, it is not available for purchase as a DVD or whatever (at least not a non-bootleg version), so if I ever want to watch it again I need Netflix.
And do note, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have regulation on AI, what I am saying is that there’s a lot for consideration with AI regulation. And the public needs to have some unified ideas about it for the regulatory body’s public comment section to ensure small businesses that want to use AI can still be allowed. Otherwise the expert phase will dominate and AI will be gone from the public’s hands for quite some time. We’re just now getting around to reversing the removal of net neutrality that started back in 2017. But companies have used that 2017 to today to form business alliances (Disney + Hulu Verizon deal as an example) that’ll be hard to compete with for some time.
I’m very wary of the measures that could potentially pass if the some of the anti-AI art people get their way. I know how messy and difficult putting fair-use material in YouTube can be. There would be more of that in more platforms.
I agree unregulated AI is problematic. At the same time, I’m cynical on what the actual measures would look like.
I agree unregulated AI is problematic. At the same time, I’m cynical on what the actual measures would look like.
OMG, Thank you, this is the correct take.
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
Artist published on meta? 😶
Instagram
Ah. Thanks.
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.
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.
how does cara compare to pillowfort?
well for starters it sounds less stupid
If adults can’t make pillowforts they’re basically dead inside
i didn’t say that. i meant it’s a stupid name for this.
just like duckduckgo; i like ddg but that’s a terrible name for a search engine.
