Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI...and yet these people just won't leave them well enough alone.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Sure we can. You don't need to either use Instagram or never use the net. That's precisely what Cara is for. Promote open source tooling and use friendly communities that don't promise to scrape your life's work.
Now how we deal with mass scrapers downloading images; that's a legal issue. One that even physical venues isn't immune to (it just adds a lot of friction).
I think there's a difference between "this person took a few images and edited them" and "I scraped an entire website to use for training AI slop".
That's the point!
The friction is the key.
If you post images on the internet, how accessible they are directly correlates to how "downloadable" they are. Trying to imitate social media while fighting all scraping is a infinite, costly battle; that's a service trying to make posts viral and inaccessible. Such a fight takes Facebook money to sustain.
And it's not necessarily some script kiddie troll that's boasting about it on Reddit who will eventually get access.
...But add fundamental friction? That raises the bar.
I think the fallacy is artists believe they need an gigantic amalgamation of online people exposed to their art, a large fraciton of the internet. That's not true. And its a deception, anyway. Smaller niches or smaller communities are fine, and they won't be such high profile targets.
Yeah, and for most people they won't be bolting their windows and investing in bulletproof glass. A lock is enough detterent. I see sites like Cara as a lock in your metaphor and you're worried it's not good enough.
I was thinking in a different dimension and thinking more about community and control. That isn't something feasible to replicate in the physical world, and its not something we inevitably have to reliquish to billionaire corporations. Community is something you build and cultivate, not something that needs a million dollar investment.
If you're a professional, you do. more exposure is more leverage for deals that will pay you. more views correlates with more funding for your paid works, or crowdfunding, or commissions, etc. That's just how stiff competition is. There's an old school rule of getting 1000 "true fans" to pay you 100 dollars a year in order to make a good living. Well, we're in an age where even 10 million impressions may not convert into 1000 true fans. That's why reach is so important.
Its always been rough being an artist. The kind of rough simply evolved overtime.
you really can't. If it is online it will be scrapped. You can't prove it was scrapped, and you can't stop it. If it is offline it WILL still be scrapped it it just significantly harder to do so.
That's literally why Cara exists. Makes it easier to prove it was scraped and harder for AI to profit off the data it scapes.