Key points:
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Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
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Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
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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
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While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
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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
What is their monetisation plan? Currently they don’t seem to have anything other than donations?
What’s a “plan”?
You’ll have to ask the company that eventually buys them out!
I did and they said selling user data, promoting certain content, targeted ads, superchats, and a checkmark thing that costs five dollars a month that only 4 people get.
This will be the headline a month later:
Cara’s monthly active users down to a few thousands. Here’s why.
This is why twitter will never die.
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.
If Pixelfed actually siloed itself into its own network it would make a lot of sense. As is, it’s chock full of pictures and text from Mastodon and other federated platforms that are not remotely artistic in nature.
The whole idea of IG, in it’s infancy, before being taken blatantly and completely off the rails by Meta, was to have photographers and artists and beautiful content.
On top of that, it’s just a copy-paste of IG, including all the dumb shit.
And on top of all of that, it lacks any of the copyright and AI protections that Cara is squarely aimed at.
I tried but there is no app for it.
Fdroid has pixeldroid which is apparently incompatible with my android 12 phone?
The pixelfed app isn’t downloadable on Fdroid and is only available for “pre-download” on the play store.
I couldn’t find out how to access pixelfed through a mastodon app.
If it isn’t easily accessible through mobile, it simply won’t be picked up.
There are multiple third party apps and the official versions are available in open beta. For both android and iOS.
If they keep burning $100k/w on their Vercel bill they might not be around that long anyway!
The main problem with all the alternatives is for me (as a hobby photographer) the lack of models on these platforms. When looking for models, I find them on Instagram and no other platform. As with WhatsApp the majority of “normal” people have decided to use that, so if I’m telling them to contact me on Signal, they shy away from that (and stillI I refuse to use it as much as possible).
So looking at Signal, it’s free and very, very close to WhatsApp and yet still people don’t want to use that. Getting them to use pixel fed would be much, much harder.
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
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 .
Most of these artists use fairly complicated, or difficult to master, software to create and/or edit their art.
Signing up for and uploading images to a website isn’t really complicated.
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.
I didn’t even know what it was till yesterday. Not sure it’s the bastion of the public.
…and for that reason, I’m out
I wonder if any of the other sharks will make an offer
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Pixelfed is pretty damn easy.
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.
Threads is only federated in name. It’s simply Meta’s taking advantage of Twitter’s downfall. It’s as centralized and under Meta’s thumb as they come.
Threads is federated though. You can follow Threads accounts on Mastodon. It’s still a work in progress though, and not everything is implemented yet.
Yep. I bet good money federation remains unidirectional and opt-in. All to pretend to comply with DMA, just like they are with WhatsApp.
Still introduces the concept and will make people aware of other instances.
Definitely avoid it but it’s still publicly for federation.
Idk I hear misskey (activity pub micro blogging software) is really big in Japan, used by lots of artists. lots of Japanese users on bluesky as well
The artist and nerd Venn diagram is practically a circle around my parts.
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.
For now.
Ai support or not it will still be aggressively monetized the moment enough users are locked in.
Fomo is a hell of a drug eh.
According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn’t seem very artist friendly to me.
The Cara Site and all works of art (“Art”) and/or other user generated content (including without limitation commentary, images, third-party links, and similar content and/or works) (collectively the “Art And Other User Generated Content”), text, data, and other materials contained in the Cara Site are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist who created any individual piece of Art And Other User Generated Content (the “Artist”). No such materials may be copied, reproduced, republished, modified or used in any way except as provided in these Terms and Conditions.
the property of Cara and/or the individual artist
This seems worded to muddy the waters about who actually has the copyright.
Monetization plan might be to sell prints of platformed artists work, with out any need for pesky royalties.
Why did you specifically not put in bold this part and are the property of Cara. Clearly you saw it off you took the time to avoid putting stars around it.
That’s not true
???
The clause is literally a comment or so down and available on their website.
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.
It doesn’t work like that. The monkey selfie case did not set any kind of precedence. Animals cannot own property, including copyrights.
For a work to be under copyright in the US, it has to be an “original work of authorship” and contain “a modicum of creativity”. Some countries allow broader copyrights. Photographs that are accidentally triggered are public domain. CCTV footage is a gray area. Setting up a camera and luring animals into triggering it, might produce copyrighted images. A court would have to decide if the individual circumstances constitute authorship and a modicum of creativity. An animal snagging a camera and triggering it certainly doesn’t. The monkey selfie case did nothing to advance the law.
A public domain image is just that. Attempting to assert ownership over one is either an error or fraud. I don’t know what the US rules are when a rights-owner can’t be found. I doubt that you can just become the default owner of some property just by writing something on a website.
The monkey selfie case did not set any kind of precedence.
literally next sentence.
Animals cannot own property, including copyrights.
This sounds like a precedent…
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…
Cara has no passwords: you log in via Google or Apple
uhuh, no thanks
you can use your email
You have a problem with oauth?
A lot of people are trying to de-google.
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.
Is it federated and open source? If not, I’ll pass.
Pixelfed is the alternative we want
…until they decide to sell their company. Or their user data. Or the shareholders say so. Or…
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.
The official app is available in beta. I’m very impressed
I really want Pixelfed to take off and this really could have been a moment, but after using it for more than a year now, I just can’t see it. Development is very slow - it feels like a one-man show (it might not be). We do need an alternative to Instagram, but yeah…
I’ll be watching this curiously from a safe distance for now. I am interested in a new platform without AI, but this stinks of early-stage enshitification.
They have huge bills to pay already. It can totally lead to enshittification.
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.
Does it seem odd… This is a crowd that is all about “hands off muh property”. And yet they see nothing suspicious about someone giving them a free service.
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.
Yep, this is just instagram again with a little anti ai image filter on top. And a portfolio, not a photo album !
If it’s not as interoperable as email, it belongs in the trash
So what happend when this app needs to pay server costs for 600,000 people?
Do you mind telling what this says ? it seems Firefox doesn’t load twitter anymore. Or maybe you need an account ? I’m not sure, but it says “error”
Twitter no longer loads newer tweets if you’re logged out. Instead of showing a proper message, it either fails to load or redirects to the login page. They did that to prevent scraping.
“Jingna Zhang @ cara.app/zemotion @zemotion So freaking speechless right now. Seen many @vercel functions stories but first time experiencing such discrepancy vs request logs like, this is cannot be real??”
I’ve heard from many ppl that vercel is pretty nasty that way, and to only use them for learning and toy projects.
So what happens now? I doubt they have figured monetization right?
They basically have to just move off vercel. There’s a lot of other much cheaper alternatives though
OK, but they have a 90k bill now?
Can probably be massaged a bit
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
I’m no federated-nazi and I welcome projects like Cara, but at the beginning there are always lots of subscriptions
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.
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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.
if it’s human-viewable it’ll also be computer-viewable
Sort of. If you raise a person to look at thousands pictures of random pixels and say “that’s a fox” or “that’s not a fox” eventually they’ll make up a pattern to say if the random pixels are a fox or not. Meanwhile someone raised normally will take one look and go “that’s just random pixels it’s not a picture of anything”. AI is still in that impressionable stage. So you feed it garbage and it doesn’t know it’s garbage.
It pollutes the data pool. The rule of gigo (garbage in garbage out) is used to garbage the AI results.
Basically, it puts some imperceptible stuff in the image file’s data (somebody else should explain how because I don’t know) so that what the AI sees and the human looking at the picture sees are rather different. So you try and train it to draw a photorealistic car and instead it creates a lumpy weird face or something. Then the AI uses that defective nonsense to learn what “photorealistic car” means and reproduce it - badly.
If you feed a bunch of this trash into an AI and tell it that this is how to paint like, say, Rembrandt, and then somebody uses it to try to paint a picture like Rembrandt, they’ll end up getting something that looks like it was scrawled by a 10-year-old, or the dogs playing poker went through a teleporter malfunction, or whatever nonsense data was fed into the AI instead.
If you tell an AI that 2+2=🥔, that pi=9, or that the speed of light is Kevin, then nobody can use that AI to do math.
If you trained Chat GPT to explain history by feeding it descriptions of games of Civ6 them nobody could use it to cheat on their history term paper. The AI would go on about how Gandhi attacked Mansa Musa in 1686 with all out nuclear war. It’s the same thing here, but with pictures.
Right but, AFAIK glaze is targeting the CLIP model inside diffusion models, which means any new versions of CLIP would remove the effect of the protection
