Cara is where creators are going to escape the scrape

The app crashed as 300K joined last weekend

It started with an Instagram post from an art director friend of mine. He was upset that Meta announced it would be scraping all photos on their platforms to train AI generators. He’d be leaving Instagram for Cara, a platform that’s declared itself more respectful of artist copyrights. The system crashed as 300,000 people signed up.

What is Cara?

An image-based platform founded by Singaporean photographer Zhang Jingna, a self-purported activist and advocate for copyright protection for artists and creatives. She created it so people can discover human-made art more easily.

How does Cara claim to protect your images?

• No AI generated images are allowed. They claim to use a third-party service to automate image detection. (Whether that service employs AI tech in its monitoring is not stated.)

• Images are flagged on their site with a tag that reads “NoAI” and supposedly repelling AI scrapers from their images.

• Cara claims to jam AI scrapers with Glaze, a surfacing technology developed by the SAND Lab at University of Chicago. While invisible, it purportedly scrambles AI receivers, making it difficult to mimic an artist’s unique style.

Glaze prevents AI scrapers from detecting and processing an artists characteristic style, resulting on less informed AI generated results.

What’s the verdict?

We may see more artists join Cara, but it doesn’t mean they are leaving Instagram. Visibility within the largest image network remains the best selling point. As a free marketing platform, the cost of being available to AI scrapers may be worth it. Cara’s claims that Glaze and NoAI technology protects images remains to be seen—and as AI scrapers get more sophisticated, it will be harder to determine which images have been used, and where they were sourced from.