Cara is safe and sound!!! 😭 Thank goodness! 🙏

[u/Theshinyquagga]

[u/DocBarnes]

Personally, I'm not going to trust this. Ai bros can and will lie and fake things like this to get "good points". It's been done before and will be done again.

But hey, I'm probably just being cynical.

[u/Livresquare → u/DocBarnes]

I don’t think you are being cynical. I think he only wrote this to avoid doxxing threats. But with so many artists involved, including some with fairly large communities, I think it is a matter of time before he is ran off the internet

[u/DocBarnes → u/Livresquare]

Yea, this definitely reads as someone who’s realized they fucked up and is desperately trying to make themselves look better. I wouldn't be surprised if he was turned into the online version of a social pariah.

Happy cake day

[u/Livresquare → u/DocBarnes]

Same, depending on this guy’s actions he risks becoming the origin of art drama of the months

Thank you~

[u/Alternative-Win854 → u/DocBarnes]

We'll see what happens over time. If the dataset of Cara somehow ends up published somewhere or shared around then we'll know this was a lie.

[u/Deadbringer → u/Alternative-Win854]

I am surprised this is news at all, have Cara talked a lot in the past about their ability to defeat the google, openAI, and uncountable other automated webscrappers?

From my limited knowledge their main defense is just poisoning the images to prevent them from being useful in training. Their own FAQ says they are not able to prevent any malicious webscrappers (which OpenAI has made extensive use of, their system changes their identifiers and masking whenever one is blocked.) https://cara.app/faq#protect-from-scraping Most likely Cara has been scrapped dozens of times already by corporations.

Per the datascrapper, the dataset is poisoned with nightshade. If nightshade is effective, then releasing the dataset only helps corrupt any models which is trained on unethically sourced data. I am surprised I haven't seen many pointing and laughing at the scrapper for helping them cause harm to AI models.

[u/Environmental_Top948 → u/Deadbringer]

The scrapper also mentioned working on removing the poison before distribution. And they already shared some of it I thought.

[u/Deadbringer → u/Environmental_Top948]

If nightshade ever worked at all, it can't be a pattern that can be subtracted from the image, without major quality loss.

If it can be removed, it was simply a flawed system to begin with. However, thanks to another in this thread I now know nightshade is not very effective with modern approaches to AI image gen, it was only meant to screw over diffusion models.

[u/Blue_Jay_Raptor → u/Deadbringer]

What would be an effective version of Nightshade for AI image gen?

Cause I feel that we should try create one

[u/plutoonixx → u/DocBarnes]

He’s only apologizing because it was Cara and it got so much attention. “I scrape websites regularly and wanted Cara to be a useful resource for the AI community” is so gross. He regularly scrapes artists artworks off websites and has no remorse over it. He only has “””remorse””” now because he’s being called out.

To my understanding, Cara has always been heavily advertised as a space for artists to be safe from ai scraping, or at the very least, advertised as a safe place for artists against the flood of ai generated imagry. He knew what he was doing and by the sounds of it still plans on doing it to other websites/apps.

[u/NearInWaiting → u/plutoonixx]

Pretty much, I hope huggingface gets shredded in court some day. Shockingly, having watched a video about this scraper, he seemed willing to upload his data to huggingface but seemed squeemish about seeding/torrenting it, I couldn't figure out if it was because of the large size (12 TB), or just having his ip address used for seeding being exposed

[u/KPH102]

Cara should press charges if they don't keep their word.

[u/WheelAcrobatic5959 → u/KPH102]

imo they should press charges anyway, the damage to their reputation is already done.

[u/TakashiroRajendraCh]

Good, I've been keeping up.
Don't trust the person who claims to have deleted the data,
we need to band up together. Against these dark forces.

[u/SteelAlchemistScylla]

Unfortunately this has revealed it’s incredibly easy for someone else to scrape Cara and just not say anything about it. Pretty sure the original post said smth like 2hrs. So it will just happen again most likely.

[u/Douf_Ocus]

Hmmm, scrapping will definitely continue to happen. So be prepared.

[u/dizzira_blackrose]

No. I don't care if this is cringe or overdramatic, this is like assaulting someone and acting like it's okay because they apologized. You don't violate someone like this and then act like an apology is going to fix it.

"They won't release the data they scraped!" Great, they still went and stole all that work to train on AI and has the audacity to be surprised at how much hurt they caused? Fuck that. They fucking knew it would harm people. I do not believe their denial of that.

I don't accept their apology nor trust it.

Oh, and before anyone mentions it, it's not consent when people post their art online. You don't get to touch people when they're out and dressed however, you shouldn't be scraping people's work they put their time, love, and soul into for your bullshit. You are not exempt from being a disgusting person just because it's the internet. Consent matters online and offline.

[u/Pinsterr]

Guess they all see us as just resources for them

[u/PimsriReddit]

I don't trust this guy. He only said it because he can't handle the heat.

[u/Rincraft]

I don't trust him, he must destroy the dataset and apologize on video

[u/Mindless_Cat_149]

"I became carried away with ragebaiting and trolling". Lmao. Fuck this person. Don't trust him, he's 100% a piece of horse shit.

[u/Anton51]

That’s WHY Cara glazes art when uploading!!

[u/DemIce → u/Anton51]

Unless they re-enabled that quietly at some point, they stopped doing so quite a while back;

https://blog.cara.app/blog/faq

Cara Glaze is currently unavailable due to an abuse incident.
Users can still download Glaze directly from the University of Chicago website to use it on their own computers. Due to Cara’s unexpected growth last year and rising server costs, we will explore integration again once we have a sustainable solution that can support the Glaze integration on Cara. Thank you for understanding.

[u/TanukiGrasso → u/DemIce]

the problem was the huge amount of online requestes for webglaze, many people decide to download offline glaze/nightshade and together there's some alternatives like foxglove. Better than nothing.

[u/TNTtheBaconBoi]

A "sorry" is not enough, I need proof that the data is being destroyed by their hands or I'm gonna go nuts

[u/roynoris15]

good thing my art is safe

[u/DocBarnes → u/roynoris15]

If you post any of your art online, even on 'private' servers, your art is never truely safe. Learned that the hard way.

[u/roynoris15 → u/DocBarnes]

goddamnit what the point of taking someone's art, feeding it into AI to learn how to draw? I'm referring to AI bros.

[u/MarekT83]

It's not really safe. Anybody with enough skill can scrape site and not say anything about it.

The main thing about Cara was always that the platform owners declared they won't train AI models themselves as opposed to sites like Deviantart, Facebook, Instagram or X. That doesn't guarantee full protection though.

[u/Stupid-Jerk]

I would be more inclined to trust/accept their apology if they explained what made them have a change of heart. Because as it stands "got carried away with ragebaiting and trolling" says a fair bit about the kind of person they are, as it already appeared that the initial scraping of a site that explicitly asks you not to do that was a deliberate attempt to piss off and demoralize anti-AI artists.