Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.
Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point
And then that growth promptly blew its budget because it’s using expensive cloud AI services from Vercel and it has no means of monetization whatsoever to bring money in.
People can do whatever they want, of course. But they have to pay for the resources they consume while doing that, and it seems Cara didn’t really consider that aspect of this.
Well, now’s a great time to let them know about Pixelfed, although explosive growth like this will be a strain on any website.
I get the sense that a federated image hosting/sharing system would be counter to their goals, that being to lock away their art from AI trainers. An AI trainer could just federate with them and they’d be sending their images over on a silver platter.
Of course, any site that’s visible to humans is also visible to AIs in training, so it’s not really any worse than their current arrangement. But I don’t think they want to hear that either.
Oh no… Are they running it entirely on serverless functions? What a disaster. I’m surprised the website is still up, is the owner not worried about going bankrupt?
And now they’re asking for donations. I don’t know how that’ll work out, though