He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them
The art platform Cara is struggling to protect its users' work from unauthorized AI data scraping after a massive 12-terabyte archive was leaked. While the individual responsible has since agreed to collaborate on protective tools, the incident highlights the ongoing legal and ethical tensions between artists and AI developers.
Why it matters
The conflict underscores the vulnerability of creative platforms to mass data harvesting and the lack of clear legal protections for artists against AI training.
But while Cara filters out AI images and offers protective features—including Glaze, a tool meant to mask the style of the images picked up by scrapers in order to disrupt AI mimicry—preventing scrapes themselves is nearly impossible. And just this month, beginning on August 13, Cara was subjected to three major scrapes, which spiked its server fees and alarmed creators who had migrated there from platforms like Instagram, where all content is explicitly available to Meta as training data.
The first of these incidents came to light when the individual responsible posted a 12-terabyte archive of 12 million works from Cara—more or less its entire library of publicly available images—on the subreddit r/DefendingAIArt. “It was a fun project,” wrote the redditor, MandarinDawnPoppy994, in his since-deleted post, saying the process cost him less than $10.
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