Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI…and yet these people just won’t leave them well enough alone.
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Antagonises people who want to stay away from AI
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Cries when people hate AI
Such a cognitive dissonance
There has to be a word for people, who when they hear someone hates X, but they personally like the X, so they decide to do the X even harder out of spite or as a defiance.
Toddlers, Republicans, Mentally Challenged, Idiots… Lots of words take your pick
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These are the most deeply insecure people
Recently I’ve been embedding metadata into pictures I upload which include the cost to license out the image for AI training: 1 million dollars. Then, if an AI company scrapes my picture, I can take that company to court and have a concrete dollar amount for how much that company owes me for damages.
I think you should also include the text somewhere reachable so no-one can claim that license wasn’t obscured. Its totally fair to strike back with your own type of EULA!
Its a bit delusional to think you can sue them. For a number of reasons, not least of which is that you don’t have the funds for a protracted legal battle and that the burden of proof that your work was used is pretty much impossible to prove.
I don’t think so. First of all, if a lawyer thinks that I have a strong case, they could agree to be paid after I win, so I don’t need to pay out of pocket up front. Second, it is easy to prove that an AI company used my pictures, since they would need to download the pictures to train on them. Alternatively, if a platform sells it to the AI company, there is a record that it was sold for the purposes of AI training.(In that case, we don’t have to prove that the image was used for training, since the crime is the sale.) Lastly, since the license and purchase info is contained within the metadata of the picture, they can’t argue that the license was unavailable or something. They have it right there in their servers!
I’m not a lawyer, but as an artist, bravo. You’ve changed how I look at this. No sarcasm here. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Second, it is easy to prove that an AI company used my pictures, since they would need to download the pictures to train on them.
The problem is the AI isn’t going to use exactly the original image it will take parts of it and use it to create a new image that does not include the metadata. Just proving they downloaded it wouldn’t be actionable since they would need to download the image to get your metadata which contains the terms. You would need to prove that they applied the transferred the data to the training algorithm which would be an internal process.
Also there’s the concept of consideration to… uh… consider. Is a million dollars reasonable consideration?
But that being said, it’s worth a shot. Worst case is you get nothing, but you’d get nothing if you didn’t put licensing terms in the metadata anyway. Just seems very unlikely you’ll get a million dollars by doing this.
If this were to go to trial, the AI company would have to turn over all the information that could potentially incriminate them, the most important part is the manifest for their training data, which would include my images. If they refuse to turn over this evidence which 1) would immediately prove themselves guilty and 2) they must have, hey could be held in contempt of court.
Also, regarding the licensing price: I would argue it’s completely reasonable if you look at it from the perspective of how much the AI company makes, how much I could make if the art was not used for AI, and the cost of creating the art in the first place.
If I was a fully employed artist, who painted 1000$ dollar portraits, then, over the course of my life, I could create maybe 1,000,000$ worth of portraits. This would only be possible if my unique style is not replicated, however. If an AI company perfectly duplicated my style, and sold the results with a 30$ a month subscription I er the course of 50 years, (and we assume 1000 people have that subscription) then the company could make 125030*1000=18 million dollars. Furthermore, there is also a cost to the development of an art style. At the age of 25, assuming the cost of living is 40k a year, the amount of money used to raise me and develop me into an adult that developed that art style would be 1 million dollars.
So, from the perspective of lost revenue, I would be owed 1 million dollars. From the perspective of the AI company’s addition revenue as a result of the crime, I would be owed 18 mil, and from the perspective of the cost to develop my art, I’d be owed 1 mil as well. In total, that would mean I lost 20 million dollars as a result of the AI company’s crime. A 1 million dollar licensing fee is a 95% discount.
Eagerly awaiting updates on your progress.
How will you poof that there was this high of a damage?
It’s not for damage, it’s the cost to use the art. If they don’t want to pay for it then they’re free to simply not use it.
Its art, the artist is saying if you want it you have to pay x amount and they are taking it so the presumption is that they both know the value put on it by the artist and decided to use it.
Gross
Anyone know the ways one might remove Glaze and Nightshade? It’d be good to figure out how to make them permanent or show that it’s been tampered with, maybe?
I hope shitty things like this motivate people to organize into alternative networks, like local meshnets and more in-person community interactions. The internet may be hopelessly broken at this point.
We used to have those in Eastern Europe. I miss those days.
The video redistribution scene was amazing
Tell us more about it !
Does anyone have a self hosted social media, where all of the media on my profile would be on my server (even a phone) and somebody viewing my profile would literally have to pull thumbnails and data straight from my device in a peer to peer kind of fashion?
I’ve been keeping an eye on Diaspora, but no clue how good it really is.
Actually. I have a hot take.
Forgive me… But the solution is not to replicate Instagram. Which is what Cara does.
Nor DeviantArt, either.
That’s never going to work, for precisely the above reason, and many others.
This is something that’s bothered me immensely about photography (which I’m getting back into as a hobby). Because, for all the “taking a stand” the community does, what do they do en masse?
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Subscribe to Adobe
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Live on Instagram
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Worship corporate influencers.
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Upload stuff to clouds that will explicitly be used to train.
Just to start.
It infuriates me.
I’m all for the anti-slop stands, but the bulk of the community has precisely zero leg to stand on, if they’re just going to fork over cash hand-and-fist to feed the beasts, and spend all their time on those platforms.
So what do we do?
Make prints. Display them! It can be in museums, festivals, meet ups, in your place, on the street, literally anywhere you want. Even if its on digital screens; as long as its in person, and the digital copy is squirreled away.
And that’s if you feel strongly about the training thing. Personally, I’m more inclined to just post stuff under a permissive license places like Wikipedia could use (albeit not on Instagram).
To be clear, I don’t mean to lump everyone into that. There’s tons of photographers outside that bubble.
…But there are a ton in it, and they happen to be the loudest complainers.
The mass amount of morons wearing pervert glasses will probably just end up copying those prints
Real people are actually wearing those out in the world?
Morons? Yeah
Not putting the work online slashes accessibility and discoverability though
Yep.
Pick one:
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Permissive, open visibility.
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More intimate viewing, restricted usability.
Can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
People thought they could, posting on Instagram or whatever, but that was a lie from day one.
Can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
Sure we can. You don’t need to either use Instagram or never use the net. That’s precisely what Cara is for. Promote open source tooling and use friendly communities that don’t promise to scrape your life’s work.
Now how we deal with mass scrapers downloading images; that’s a legal issue. One that even physical venues isn’t immune to (it just adds a lot of friction).
You either post online, where people can and will do stuff you don’t like with your content, or you keep it private.
I think there’s a difference between “this person took a few images and edited them” and “I scraped an entire website to use for training AI slop”.
Now how we deal with mass scrapers downloading images; that’s a legal issue. One that even physical venues isn’t immune to (it just adds a lot of friction).
That’s the point!
The friction is the key.
If you post images on the internet, how accessible they are directly correlates to how “downloadable” they are. Trying to imitate social media while fighting all scraping is a infinite, costly battle; that’s a service trying to make posts viral and inaccessible. That takes Facebook money to sustain.
And it’s not necessarily some script kiddie troll that’s boasting about it on Reddit who will eventually get in.
…But add fundamental friction? That raises the bar.
I think the fallacy is artists believe they need an gigantic amalgamation of online people exposed to their art, a large fraciton of the internet. That’s not true. And its a deception, anyway. Smaller niches or smaller communities are fine, and they won’t be such high profile targets.
you really can’t. If it is online it will be scrapped. You can’t prove it was scrapped, and you can’t stop it. If it is offline it WILL still be scrapped it it just significantly harder to do so.
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How about Low res and watermarked images?
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“defending AI art”… jesus, that’s sad.
Imagine having so little talent that you consider AU generated slop “art”
Well that’s not very nice. I’m sure some Australians are talented artists.
I thought they were talking about gold.
I thought they were trying to get the attention of someone across the street.
Yeah good luck asshole.
PSA to anyone who uploads art online, anywhere. Poison it first. Use the latest version. I’m sorry but you are in an arms race now. Dickhead over here is full of shit, but even if they’re not, Nightshade is updated fast.
Poisoning it is sadly an Arms Race, one that will inevitably be lost
And then won, and then lost, and then won. That’s how an arms race works. And we have the advantage in numbers. There are far more people who don’t want their shit scalped than people working for the morons at OpenAI, or Google or Anthropic. And yes, they ARE morons. The battle is only lost when one side gives up. You only lose when you accept defeat.
Unfortunately the anti-AI side is guaranteed to lose eventually, because there’s a definitive lower bound: humans must be able to view and understand the image, ideally with no perceptible loss in quality compared to the original.
This severely limits how far poisoning can go, whereas the theoretical limit for those stealing the art is at least the same level of understanding that humans have (in the sense that our universe physically allows such a mechanism to be implemented, as demonstrated by our bodies).
At the very least it makes the case that the artist believed strongly enough to prevent people from using their art without permission that they use increasingly radical methods.
It makes it so crystal clear that these shitheads are acting in bad faith when they’re circumventing custom made solutions to keep them from using the art.
As if a sign on your website saying “not for use in AI training” shouldn’t be enough. Like imagine I posted art with the message “not for use in movies” and then it got used in a movie. Open and shut.
This. I don’t believe it’s a losing battle like some in this thread, but even if it is, it’s still worth doing.
Yeah, I’m with you there. IMO things like
robots.txtshould have legal weight.
The problem there is that every cycle the old ‘protected’ images become useable in training.
There is no numbers advantage when less than .001% of images are poisoned and of those 99.99% are using outdated tools.
Besides, what’s the goal? Slow its progress down by a few weeks? The inevitable will happen regardless. Do you think people who edited their reddit comments before coming to lemmy made any difference? It’s laughably easy for an AI to tell is garbage data, even easier when you’re using a tool whose source the AI can view.
You know we could just upload an unedited photo to a platform, and then that platform keeps it unedited on a server. Then before exposing to web uses the latest poisoning service periodically. Remove the old edited photo, and apply again to the “raw” with the new updated service. Problem solved. Not super efficient, but still a solution made while shitting on the toilet. I’m sure there’s better.
Yeah fuck this defeatism. Anything you can do you do it. Same thing with anything you strongly disagree with.
Even if you’ve failed don’t give the impression that this was something you went along with. Don’t make it seem like this was just the natural zeitgeist and no one fought it.
Hopefully there will be history in the future, and if there is it should record the fact that there were once humans who tried to be a nuisance over what they believed in even when all the money in the world was against them.
The issue is that they can just reuse the existing art once they’ve “removed” the poison that was used on it. The artworks with poison in them aren’t forever inaccessible to them, they just get them slightly later.
That doesn’t mean we should stop, but it still is a war that we ultimately can’t win. Even if the poison technology advances faster than the AI companies are, they can simply use slightly older art with a less sophisticated version of poison.
I mean, is the goal to prevent training or poison training. Yes nightshade will never prevent your work from being trained on, but hopefully models don’t know it’s poisoned and it sows model dysfunction.
An Arms Race always reaches an end, and sadly there’s more money and resources on the side of AI (but less people) than the side of anti (which has lots of people, but barely any money, and barely any resources)
It will end in defeat, but a slow gradual one at least
2 things.
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Master locks are the easiest to pick and still the most popular. I don’t see you advocating for leaving your bike unlocked because it’s inevitable that the bike thieves win.
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That money is fake and recirculated like the air in an airplane. That’s literally what people mean when they talk about the AI bubble. All these companies are incestuous as fuck. Google invests in Nvidia who invests in Anthropic who invests in Microsoft who invest in OpenAI who invest in Nvidia who invest in Google. There’s no NEW money coming in. That has ALREADY dried up. They’re literally passing money in a circle. That’s WHY it’s a bubble, and that’s how it’s already popping.
Personally I think we should watch Oracle. They’re by far the most over leveraged. At least publicly. When they fall over, everyone else will follow. The big ones like Microsoft and Google are at least diversified and might survive, but the bubble pop will eventually catch up. OpenAI already spend $1.22 for ever $1 they make, and their expenses grow in lock step with their demand. Sam Altman’s plan to make it all profitable is to build AGI and ask it to figure it out for him because, and I cannot stress this enough, he. is. a. moron.
Your defeatist attitude is what they want because the more people that believe that, the longer the bubble is sustained.
Take heart. They are weaker than you realise. They are not infallible, their armor is paper.
I’m drunk and apologize for my flowery language.
Happy Friday, the fight is winnable.
I love you all.
I’m with you, Kraiden.
I agree we are in a bubble, but I think we should look at what is allowing us to be in a bubble.
My best guess is that, as a society, we are completely structured around greed. If you have a way to make money, nobody is going to tell you to stop it. Obvious things that previous generations would have put a kabosh on that we are unable to, things that make some individuals money, put are socially parasitic: cryptocurrency and online gambling (that is GAMBLING spelled G-A-M-B-L-I-N-G: GAMBLING. In a sentence: Audrey spent her entire retirement GAMBLING at the casino).
In the run up to the subprime mortgate crisis, Senator Diane Warren tried to raise the alarm that these loans were structurally unsound. She got calls back from colleagues all basically saying the same thing:
We talked to our guys and they say it’s fine–they’re all making money.
They’re all making money! Therefore, the system is working as intended.
If you want to look at it more structurally, we are also ruled an elite group of mega-rich. They have more to gain and less to lose by keeping the AI train going, but they are going to crash the world economy in doing so: a great opportunity to snap up real estate for cheap for them. The rich never lose.
I admire your optimism, and I really do hope you’re right!
Also I’m a fan of flowery language, so keep it up
I could not agree more. I’ve been having conversations with people about this since late last year and predicted that the bubble would burst some time in 2026 but I’m thinking I may be off and it could be early 2027 now. This accounting nonsense makes up a very significant portion of the US stock market, so the bubble bursting is gonna have some pretty big flow-on effects as well. I’d recommend anyone with any form of investment look into what they have and plan for a significant market event.
You are delusional to think next year is gonna be curtains for a trillion dollar industry backed by billionaire CEOs, military and government influence. The AI bubble won’t pop, if it ever does, until well into beyond the next decade.
For the AI bubble to not pop, an AI company needs to make money off of AI first. Not raising investments. They need to actually make at least $1 off of using/selling AI services.
This hasn’t happened yet, and I don’t think it ever will. The AI machines simply cost more to run than they produce, so when the investment money runs out, they’ll be shut down.
In 2007: “How could the housing bubble pop? After all, the real estate industry is backed by billionaire CEOs, military, and government influence.”
In 1999: “How could the dot com bubble pop? After all, the internet is backed by billionaire CEOs, military, and government influence.”
In 1929: “How could the Stock Market crash? After all, international capitalism is backed by millionaire CEOs, military, and government influence.”
This rocks and you’re 100% correct. Bless you.
Paper armor and glass cannons.
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Which is why I take a completely different direction. I poison my artwork I post online through the one technique they can’t account for.
See, I’m not super great at drawing, and in order to protect their precious models, they’d literally have to go take a look and say “yeah, that drawing wasn’t very good”. They can’t detect that automatically yet!
/sorry for a very predictable joke btw
Nightshade and Glaze only run on Windows. Cara has a partnership with them so that your work automatically gets Glazed before being published, hence the anti-AI fame.
Oh cool! Didn’t know that!
It’s amazing how disrespectful these idiots can be. They’ll destroy and steal people’s work, feed it to Big Corpo™ Slopinator 4.7, get shit-tier content in return, just because they chugged the kool-aid that this tech with billions of dubious investments is the future of everything.
And all because they didnt get into art school.
Who would have thought not getting into art school would be such a major cause of issues for humanity.
Let’s start an art school and let everybody in. I think we could get a Nobel peace prize.
Couldn’t they have just wiped out a bunch of Jews like a normal art school dropout?
They can’t they have to do every thing slopily
Cara uses third-party content moderation services from Hive (an AI company) to prevent AI-generated art from being uploaded onto the site.
Hahahahaha so this friendly™ Chinese platform basically feeds every uploaded image into an AI to determine if it’s AI.
Just self host your own personal blog/art or use a proper website and not that shitshow.
The idea I believe it to prevent your art from being scraped. Self-hosting Isn’t a solution
To keep my art from being scraped by AI, I only display it in a physical gallery. The gallery is equipped with AI-based automated machine gut turrets programmed to paste anyone that tries to take a photo of the art.
I hope you programmed it to also target anyone wearing Meta glasses. If so can we just have these turrets placed everywhere?
Mildly hot take:
It really points to these people just having really bad moral compasses.
In other words, these people are actually just bad people, as weird as that is to realize.
Like if you don’t understand that what you’re doing is wrong, that does not entirely excuse you from moral judgement of the rest of society; if you fundamentally disagree with the premise of something being good or bad with another person, it does follow that they’re a bad person. Which then does mean that people doing shit like this are objectively bad people, doing objectively bad things.
Which brings back to question of how bad something needs to be for it to constitute being “evil”. I’m not religious, but there’s a certain level of how something bad impacts others, intent, and context, that I believe most people would classify as evil. Not demons and hell and that nonsense, but effectively something worth crusading against and being extremely hostile towards. Something that threatens life and peace, and of a certain scale, I would call “evil”.
So these bad people doing stuff like this, with the intent of stealing on a massive scale, directly against the autonomy and will of artists… Not exactly evil, at first… but if it results in actual harm, and if that harm is intended… that, I would define as an act of evil.
So yeah, just a topic or perspective I think worth discussing. We all know something’s really wrong right now in society, and I think there’s a level of even language and ethics that hasn’t caught up or isn’t in full view. I also realize the dangers of proposing this and it being a slippery slope to what it may even advocate. That being said, again, I think it’s a perspective worth entertaining at least from a philosophical perspective and discussion.
Incredibly cold take, freezing even. Most people learn bad people exist before they even hit puberty. You’d have to be insanely naive and sheltered for this to be your first exposure to evil.
They absolutely understand that it’s evil and immoral, they just simply don’t care. This is becoming really prevalent on the internet, people think of others on the internet as not human so it’s easier for evil to become rampant even if these people aren’t be malicious in real life.
People have become generally corrupt. Voted for a President convicted of like 34 counts of fraud, investigations into fraud have disappears, people convicted of fraud have been pardoned, corporations openly bribing the government. Social media is filled with training courses on how to scam people and most of those courses are themselves a scam.
AI (and crypto before that) are just technological expressions of deep rooted corruption. And laziness… all a part of the get rich quick mentality that considers hard work to be for suckers.
Funny thing is, these things only work well because there aren’t too many people doing it. The more corrupt we get, the less corruption will be worth it. Who will the scammers scam if nobody generates income to scam away? Who’ll reap the benefits of dirt cheap items if everyone who wants to buy it is dead? Once there’s no hardworkers, there’s no fruit of hardwork to steal away…
I hate intentionally malicious people. I mean I understand if a poor family steals fruits to eat, I don’t understand when someone steals to be able to buy a third or fifth luxury car.
There’s no long term plan for corruption, it’s just I’m gonna make mine right now.
The more corrupt we get, the less corruption will be worth it.
Actually it’s the opposite. You have no choice but to engage in corruption when everyone else is corrupt. You need to pay the bills so you do the corrupt thing that your company tells you to do.
Things just start falling apart. That’s already happening. We have terms like “enshittification” for it, but it’s essentially corruption. It’s becoming less common to simply buy a decent product for a reasonable price. It used to be if a product is bad it’s because the people at that company were incompetent. Now it’s more of a problem that the product is designed to be bad so they can collect data and advertise to you. Political discourse isn’t so much about discussing the issues, it’s about figuring out a way to manipulate others so you benefit. We’re all a part of it.
That’s what I mean. The more corruption there is, the less corruption will reward, so you need to do more of it; It will exponentially increase.
I think their goal was to get to autonomous robots and AI and whatnot before global warming starts killing off people in the millions and damages the global economy to the point that all that money is worth a lot less, but I also think they don’t understand that that kind of thing only works in a healthy, continuous society.
“They” generally referring to the ultra wealthy. Maybe they watch too many movies and think once you make an intelligent robot it just does its own maintenance.
An app like Cara, that positions itself as an Anti-AI art platform, would obviously be targeted by anyone who’s offended simply by its existence.
Not only its a honey-pot of art, it’s also a challenge for any self proclaimed ai “prompt kiddie” to hurt the other side.
They need to apply better protections to at least make mass scraping by bots a bit more difficult and expensive.
It’s kind of an intractable problem though. The more “protected” the art is, aka restricted from the public, the harder it is to actually show human beings.
I think the only practical solution would be “prints only.” Archive the digital copy, display the prints in museums… not to replicate Instagram.
This asshole is testing some deep waters when it comes to contributory liability of copyright infringement in the US: https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2026/2026-03-26-supreme-court-confirms-limits-on-contributory-liability-for-copyright-infringement
The fact they also claim they can disable nightshade tells me this is a shyster looking to make a quick payday from a zip file of jpegs
Cunt
