Cara (app)

Cara is an image sharing platform and social network for artists and creatives to share portfolios. It is available both as an app and as a website, and is run by founder Zhang Jingna and a group of volunteers. Cara states that it is "creators-first" and was founded to protect human artists from rapidly-proliferating AI-generated art on larger social media platforms such as Instagram and Facebook.

Creation
Cara was founded by Zhang Jingna for artists against AI-scraping. Zhang has also stated that she has purposely avoided venture funding for Cara, as she does not want outside influence from investors to interfere with the interests of the platform and the artists on it. Zhang is among a group of many creators, including George R. R. Martin and The New York Times, who have filed lawsuits against large tech companies like Google over freely scraping the internet for content to use in their AI training data, much of which is copyrighted.

Cara opened for public testing on January 2, 2023. After Meta announced its decision to train its AI on all user-created content starting June 26, 2024, Cara quickly rose in popularity, growing from around 40,000 users to 650,000 in a single week, as artists migrated to avoid having their art trained on without proper procedures for compensation.

Features
User accounts on Cara can be "portfolio" or "community" accounts. Community accounts are the default. All accounts have the same user experience, but portfolio accounts receive a status badge.

Cara uses third-party content moderation services from Hive to prevent AI-generated art from being uploaded onto the site. Its "About" page states that Cara will not "host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation."

Cara automatically tags its art with "NoAI" tags, a form of voluntary exclusion protocol to discourage AI scrapers.

On December 1, 2023, Cara introduced support for Glaze, a tool developed by SAND Lab at the University of Chicago. Artists could "glaze" their art during upload to disincentivize style mimicry by AI image generators. The images are subtly altered to data-poison any AI models trained on them, increasing the rate of output errors. On May 29, 2024, the feature was paused for community accounts over "security and access issues" concerning "abnormal usage patterns where people are creating multiple Cara accounts and maxing out daily Glaze credits uses".

Reception
Miles Klee at Rolling Stone noted Cara as an example of a broader public backlash against over-hyped low-quality generative AI products. The Independent interviewed a tattoo artist who believed the growth of Cara was also driven by "general dissatisfaction with existing platforms and their lack of engagement," an issue that existed before social media platforms announced their plans to train generative AI on user data.

Tom May at Creative Boom interviewed artists who felt cautious optimism but also exhaustion at the prospect of rebuilding their audiences on a small platform. Some interviewees expressed concerns that Cara may be too "artist-centric," and that one of its weak points is a lack of a non-artist audience to gain exposure to artists. May also pointed out that companies such as Google and OpenAI started out with good intentions just as Cara did, but later reneged on their mottos and mission statements in the name of profit.