Cara, the art and photo app built as a refuge from AI scraping, says its whole library was scraped. Founder Jingna Zhang, a photographer who launched it in 2023, posted on Instagram after a Reddit user boasted in r/DefendingAIArt of taking over 12 million works, about 12 terabytes, for under $10, PetaPixel reports.
Zhang said Cara already blocked bots, refused AI crawlers in robots.txt and even stayed out of federated services, unpopular as that was, to make its position on scraping clear. She asked what artists are meant to do when neither laws nor governments help them. The Reddit post, which called the job a fun project, has since been deleted.
PetaPixel notes 12 million images is far too few to build a base model, suggesting Cara was hit for being anti-AI. Zhang has joined class actions against tech firms, including Google, over the use of artists' work.
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