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
I just signed up and I know it’s still centralized but I love being able to just look at art. Besides anything that is anti -AI I am in for
As a European user, do I actively have to opt out or is it opt-out by default?
You actively have to opt-out as far as I know
You have to opt-out. I got an email from meta with a link to the form. Doesn’t seem to matter really what you write. It got approved in less than a minute for me. I think they purposfully made it look like it’s more work than it’s worth.
I have an easy solution for that: I think I’ll just delete my account. I’m not using it anyways.
AFAIK, they only offer the opt-out form in the EU and UK
Anyone have the tl,dr on Cara? Good people? Open source? Funding source?
Right now, it’s all being funded by one person, Zhang Jingna (a photographer that recently sued and won her case when someone plagiarized her work) but it’s grown so quickly she got hit with a $96K bill for one month.
It has potential, with good marketing strategy I believe more users will know this.
What are the ways that US domains can block AI? I figure pay walls, and captchas, but is there something we can add to robots.txt that has any teeth against AI scraping? I mean would we even know if they obeyed it anyway? How do we set traps and keep this shit out?
Capthchas haven’t worked against serious actors for years and companies could easily pay for a user account. Anything a normal tech illiterate person can do, companies can automate. You sort of have to trust their pinky promise of not scraping content.
step one of enshittification has begun. again.
Meta is just going to scrub all the Cara content into their AI system anyway. They have no fear because there are no real consequences
If they do, it’s going to be a bad time for them, since Cara has Glaze integration and encourages everyone to use it. https://blog.cara.app/blog/cara-glaze-about
Isn’t this just going to be a battle of AIs?
Train the AI on what glaze does and it’ll eventually be able to deglaze. So glaze gets better and stops it for a bit and then the deglazer gets better and wins again. Repeat forever.
If your’e telling the deglazers to giveup because we will never stop glazing ourselves then I agree.
Nah, the glazers are needed to make the AI more robust
Yeh theres a danger in that I can see. The Machine is learning from our dissent.
People talking about pixelfed are missing a key points: Cara is super easy to find and join. You go, type your email or login with your google account and that’s it. You don’t even have to remember a password. Nobody wants to find a server, apply to join, hope to get accepted, then somehow find all other artists like you.
This right here. I tried to join Mastodon today.
Download the most recommended app, Moshidon
Open app and get asked which instance i want to join. There are no suggestions.
Do a search for instances and pick one, go to the website and register with email and password. Requires email confirmation. Still waiting on the email confirmation link, 4 hrs later and 2 resends.
Literally haven’t been able to sign up yet.
I’m not sure how anyone expects anyone other than the most hardcore to sign up for these services. Maybe that’s the point but if the point is to grow the user sign up process to significant overall
If you just used the Official app, they have a simplified sign-up procedure. Dug your own grave there.
Thats not fair, since everyone says the main app suck and you’ll have a better experience with Moshidon. This is true if you’re already there, but the comment makes it clear that it still lacks for newbies.
Never heard of Moshidon, so clearly not everyone. Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first is beyond me. Some apps are better than others, but always start with the official one and then, if it lacks something, look for something else. Basic stuff…
Can you point me to the email official app? Or at least official site that explains how to register an email? Fediverse tends to think that it should be like email, sure it needs some getting used to , but the beauty is that defaults aren’t really necessary.
Why would anyone try to register via a non-official app first (especially for a procedure like signin-up) is beyond me.
You may or may not have heard this before, but the app is not the instance is not the platform. I registered both my Mastodon account and this Lemmy account via their respective instance websites. I used mastodon in the browser for literally over a year before installing an app for it on my phone.
Apps are alternative front-ends to the fediverse, even “official” ones.
“Basic stuff” is very weird to read for me when many of the internet services I have accounts for don’t have apps - and I would rather they never make an app for it. My electricity bills, my hosting costs, my home internet, all are done through web pages that I can access from any internet-connected device, unlike an app.
Not to mention I appreciate being able to type things on a bigger screen and physical keyboard when I register for things.
Lastly, it is much easier for me to deal with a sloppily made website than a sloppily made app. I can use extensions, and if need be can open up the network tab to see if the registration request was accepted or not before the website malfunctioned on my end.
You assumed I don’t do this. Of course, number 1 place I go to if I want to sign up, is the website.
I was saying that it’s weird to blame Mastodon for “complex sign-up”, when you’re using a “3rd-party” tool to do so. That’s completely down to the app.
I’ve never, ever signed up to something via an unofficial app.
I was saying that it’s weird to blame Mastodon for “complex sign-up”, when you’re using a “3rd-party” tool to do so. That’s completely down to the app.
Ah, I understand now. Thanks for the correction.
I use the official app, is not incredible but do his job.
btw. just use the official (or the web site) x sign in, is not like you can’t use the credentials elsewhere.
Biggest problems I have had with Mastodon are the fact that:
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The app I wanted to use didn’t even recognize the instance I signed up for and…
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I had to wait nearly a month and a half before being able to actuallyuse my account and access Mastodon because I joined an instance where they review people signing up or something similar.
I definitely see the appeal of a find the site, sign up, and you’re done services over the fediverse join an instance and pray service.
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A decentralized system with cryptographic identities wouldn’t even require that. All these rituals about “dragging your mouse around for 2 minutes” and overloaded UIs, like in Retroshare and Freenet, were simply aimed at people who felt more comfortable, not less, seeing them.
Needs sybil attack protection.
A few solutions:
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Federated identity services. Like old Skype had identity service as its only centralized part, one can make the same thing, but federated. Would require registration and finding one just like the comment I was answering to complains.
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F2F and trust elements - people can trust each other via QR codes or something, with 1 trusted peer beating any number of untrusted peers.
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Reputation system elements (like Kad network has), which is not enough a protection, but makes them more expensive.
Federated identity services
Like an SSO system?
Yes. I meant specifically something like old Skype authentication servers, sharing identities via ActivityPub. So that one person is registered on one server, another on another server, but they’ll both find each other in contact directory and will be able to communicate.
But that’s only for contact info, the actual content of the network should be decentralized and not stored on federated servers. Again, like old Skype (in the point of division between what’s centralized and what’s not).
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Aside from that, people spamming about Pixelfed are missing the point that this is also a deviantart alternative. The landing page showing tons of art you might be interested in is great.
It’s still a centralized system
That’s the thing, nobody cares. Its even better to be centralised because there’s someone you can sue for damages if that’s the case.
Well that’s just not true
Yeah, of course not. Oh, wait…
Thanks for being reasonable
I think they meant the “no one cares” part
Posted to the fediverse
Ooohhh… I see, my bad. But a little disclosure would help…
Not only does nobody care, but they prefer centralized services. Tbh I still prefer centralized services and Lemmy is the only federated anything I use, because the others don’t do anything better than their alternatives.
They’re just gonna have to leave whenever Cara makes some dumb decision. It’s the capitalist app cycle.
Hopefully in a couple of cycles’ time, we’ll be ready for them
Whether it’s “capitalist” or not doesn’t matter. You could have government owned/created apps that make dumb decisions as well.
At least with capitalism you have the option to go somewhere else when a dumb decision is made.
Most capitalist apps dont allow you to fork the code.
Lemmy, for example, is not owned by anyone and can altered if the main lemmy devs did something dumb.
Of course you already know this, its why you are here. You fled capitalism (Reddit) like the rest of us.
No one flees capitalism. Stop talking like a Marxist. It’s not possible to have communism in any guise without it collapsing. Exchanging goods and services for money incentives people to produce more. What you’re talking about is corporate greed
Exchanging goods and services for money incentives(sic) people to produce more.
What you’re describing here is commerce, which existed looong before capitalism. What you describe as “corporate greed” is capitalism
Ever heard of open source?
When capitalists say nobody would work under communism, they really mean that capitalists would never work under communism.
But communism is a replacement for capitalism, just like capitalism replaced feudalism. It’s something that will come with time and technology, not something that can be forced to happen.
I think you’re confusing the word “corporate” with “capitalism”, they are not the same.
Edit: If you swap the word “capitalist” with “corporate” I completely agree with you.
Pixelfed isn’t even in the App Store and isn’t geared towards artists. Cara has specific features for artists including finding jobs
Fuck a buncha Google SSO though. Hopefully that’s not the only option
It’s not
Really hoping to see a surge in demand for “Anti-AI” software/services/community.
Fuck the Hype and the bubble cant pop fast enough
I’m all for replacing the s at the beginning of words with z so you read it in an exaggerated German accent, but you gotta be consistent
Really hoping to zee a zurge in ze demand for “Anti-AI” zoftware/zervices/community
Fixed that for you there, Goebbels
There’s a big inky black spot in my screen where i dropped it and i cant afford a new one and mobile keyboards are ass, so typos in the first idk 50 chars are common. 🪦
Fck Nzis
I meant it in jest only. Sorry about your phone, bro
Not bro. Nbd.
To get abused again by yet more anti-libre software, malware. Some people never learn.
Tell them this:
🚩 Anti-libre software, Cara, bans us from removing malicious source code. We don’t have time to waste your life repeating the same failure.
They might ask:
What is anti-libre? We don’t control. It controls us.
And:
How do we know? It fails to include a libre software license file, like the AGPL.
Say this instead:
open sourcelibre software (‘open source’ is created to subvert libre software)closedanti-libre (closed implies open, see above)We are the product.(paid stuff abuses too) With anti-libre software, we are no the user, we are used.I really appreciate your super stark pro libre software attitude. I want to support you here. You should know that the approach you are taking is ultra abrasive and would probably cause more harm than help.
People would just associate libre software with militant weirdos, if all they saw where your posts.
If you want to make meaningful change I strongly recommend taking a softer less abrasive approach.
We want libre software to be connected with safety, friendliness and personal autonomy, not militarism, chanted phrases, and dogma.
Even on Lemmy the ultra pro libre software social network (relative to non federated networks) your current approach is off putting. I want you to succeed and I think a different approach may be better.
Just my two cents.
People already try that and we still get malware like Cara. But feedback is appreciated.
Every time you call a product “malware” with absolutely no facts to back it up, you make yourself (and the movement) look idiotic. Please just stop.
Please, stop making yourself look gullible. You have no proof it’s safe but we know this anti-libre software bans us from removing malicious source code.
Dude you are the one making yourself look dumb. And you still make absolutely no sense, “removing malicious source code”? Removing it from what? Your comments make no sense.
Dude you are the one making yourself look dumb. And you still make absolutely no sense, “removing malicious source code”? Removing it from what? Your comments make no sense.
What do you mean by this?:
Cara, bans us from removing malicious source code
Is there obviously malicious source code? Is there a policy that specifically says we can’t remove any source code? Is this even open source?
‘Open source’ is created to subvert libre software. The ban alone is a 🚩 red flag.
Waht is “libre software”? this is a totally new term to me and searching for it has turned up nothing.
This essay may help clearing things up
You understand that search results are different for different people, right? I’ve been a dev for… an embarrassingly long time, I’ve never heard “libreware” outside of specifically the libreoffice suite. Sorry I’m not as in-tune with the slang as you are or whatever.
Maybe yours does.
What ban?
They’re using loaded language to say that without access to the source code and the ability to modify it, Cara could start behaving in a way you don’t like and you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it.
Meta uses loaded language to takeover our computing.
Source, or did they include an AGPL, libre software license?
What does copyright law have to do with a ban on removing malicious code?
What do you think bans it? Copyright law, unless they include, for example, a libre software license.
Love your ethos.
You familiar with the Curse of Knowledge?:
Using the two words “source code” with a developer is expected.
With a random artist? Or like 20 or 40 or 75% of artists? Potential dead end.
Keep up the core mindset for sure buddy. Approaches can always be refined and I see you gave it a shot in your edit!
Thanks, I assume they can web search it. Not saying ‘source code’ give attackers too much space. Feedback is welcome.
You may be interested in running a little experiment. The next few times you see a Lemmy post that is best understood with additional context, you can try posting a relevant Wikipedia link.
The next few times after that, you can try posting not only a link but also your own summary, a quoted paragraph, and/or a screenshot.
I would be shocked if you do not have significantly more engagement from simply taking an extra 10 to 15 seconds to screenshot, crop, and embed.
Now, remember, your point of comparison is against where you were already providing a DIRECT LINK to information. It’s a simple fact (in my eyes) that fewer people click than scroll. Translate this to IRL: you want to preach the good word, right? How high do you want the barrier to be: hope someone will
DuckDuckGo(naw Google obviously) that term you didn’t understand, or know that there’s barely a barrier thanks to meeting the person where they are by pre-translating to normie?We can always let the perfect be the enemy of the good, if we care more about minority perfection than real widespread results.
I should help work on this pitch with you later, will leave a final thought for now:
Excellent comment, bookmarked, thank you!
These people should create an instance on Pixelfed, a libre alternative to Instagram.
Don’t focus on specific apps or you will start all over again from the beginning when every new piece of anti-libre software, malware, appears.
People chose Cara because they identify with the art aspect of this social network. They don’t care if it’s anti-libre. They probably don’t even know what it means.
The purpose of a federated instance like Pixelfed is to be a blank state. You can do anything with it. Any niche. Art in this case.
The issue here is to bring these people to Pixelfed and make them feel at home within their niche.
They don’t care if it’s anti-libre.
And that’s why keep getting abused again and again. So, this is what we must target. Unless we like wasting all of our time just to restart when the next malware arrives because they don’t see the difference, see it’s anti-libre.
Yes and no, you and me both value software freedom so we both understand that.
Education is obviously part of the process.
But I think most people don’t really care if libre or not. Libre or anti-libre is mostly tech jargon for non-tech people.
They just want to be part of their own communities and be where the party is.
They care if it abusive, malware. So, we show them why, it’s anti libre software.
is mostly tech jargon
That’s the problem to solve.
Libre/anti-libre is one of the problem to solve.
Cara seems to be working for them and for now.
For how long? I don’t know.
Another problem is related to the instance creation, management and promotion.
From my understanding, only tech people can do that, there aren’t many companies providing those services and it’s not something average users are interested in.
Does libre just mean “free?” The way I have been seeing it used in context, I assumed it was a platform of some kind. This thread made me not so sure of that.
Libre means free as in freedom rather than free as in cost. A service that costs money to use, but communicates using open protocols, gives you full control over your data, and allows you to easily migrate to competitors and self-hosted solutions might be described as “libre”.
Libre is free and open
Libre is open, but not necessarily no cost.
It’s not illegal to charge for a derived product.
I think it would be great for new social things like this to just speak ActivityPub. They can build up their own user experience and culture while joining a larger network. I don’t have a problem with the software itself being non-free if the protocols are and they commit to supporting account migration.
This would be a good approach to improve growth of the community.
Does the ActivityPub protocol support copyright for user content? E.g. an artist releases some picture and they explicitly prompt a license. Each client should accept that they are obligated to prompt this license when using the content… Something like this
Not found anything on send license or agree before receive for protocol.
But could maybe do with federation: federate only with instance that agree on license for all user content, make all user read and sign license. Turn off access without account.
People can always break license, so can never be perfect.
Would this again segregate the users? Some attribute on a submission which refers to a license would be nice though
Pixelfed already does support the image import from Instagram.
Mastodon doesn’t seem to support any import from Twitter/X.
I’m assuming account migration from the main social media platforms to be an important feature.
But I don’t think supporting ALL social media is realistic unless they all follow the same norms. Which I really doubt.
ActivityPub supports alsoKnownAs and movedTo so that users can migrate their social graphs to a different server or software. Of course that doesn’t work for migrating from networks that don’t support ActivityPub.
Content import is a separate issue, but I can imagine it being helpful as well.
ActivityPub supports alsoKnownAs and movedTo so that users can migrate their social graphs to a different server or software.
The annoying thing with ActivityPub is that your username/handle is tightly coupled to a particular server, and moving server requires you to change your handle. Everywhere you’ve mentioned/documented your old handle is now out of date.
Bluesky handles this a lot better. If you own a domain, you can use it with any Bluesky server by creating a TXT record for validation. Your username is the domain name - if you own
example.com, you can be@example.comon Bluesky, without having to self-host it. If you move server, you don’t have to change your username. Currently there’s just one main Bluesky server but they plan to introduce federation at some point, and their protocol is already mostly designed for it.
Artist published on meta? 😶
Instagram
Ah. Thanks.
From Cara:
We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form, and we won’t host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation
Okay I wanted to talk real quick about this aspect. Lot’s of folks want AI to require things only held in copyright. And fine, let’s just run with that for sake of brevity. Disney owns everything. If you stick AI to only models which the person holds copyright, only Disney will generate AI for the near future.
I’m just going to tell you. The biggest players out there are the one who stand to profit the most from regulation of AI. And likely, they’ll be the one’s tasked by Congress to write drafts of the regulation.
In the event that legislation is passed to clearly protect artists, we believe that AI-generated content should always be clearly labeled, because the public should always be able to search for human-made art and media easily
And the thing is, is Photoshop even “human-made art”? I mean that was the debate back in the 90s, when a ton of airbrush artist lost their jobs. And a large amount of Photoshop that was done, was so bad back then we had the whole Ralph Lauren, Filippa Hamilton thing go down.
So I don’t disagree with safe from AI places. But the justification of Cara’s existence, is literally every argument that was leveled at Photoshop back in the 90s by airbrush artist who were looking to protect their jobs and failed because they focused way too heavily on being anti-Photoshop that the times changed without them. When they could have started learning Photoshop and kept having a job.
I think AI presents a unique tool for artist to use to become more creative than they have ever been. But I think that some of them are too caught up in how CEOs will eventually use that tool as justification to fire them. And there’s a lot of propensity to blame AI when it’s the CEO’s writing the pink slips, just like the airbrush artists blamed Photoshop, when it was newspapers, the magazines, and so on that were writing the pink slips.
I just feel like a lot of people are about to yet again get caught with their pants down on this. And it’s easy to diss on AI right now, because it’s so early. Just like bad Photoshop back in the 90s led to the funny Snickers ad.
Like I get that people building models from other people’s stuff is bad. No argument there. But, open models, things built from a community of their own images, are things too but that’s all based on the community and people who decide to be in a collaborative effort to provide a community model. And I think folks are getting so hung up on being anti-AI, that it’s going to hurt their long term prospects, just like the airbrush folks who started picking up Photoshop way too late.
There’s not a stopping Disney and the media companies from using AI, they’re going to, and if you enjoy getting a paycheck, having some skill in the thing they use is going to be required. But for regular people to provide a competitor, to fight on equal footing, the everyday person needs access to free tools. Imagine if we had no GIMP, no Kitra, no Inkscape. Imagine if it was just Adobe and nothing else and that was enforced by regulation because only Adobe could be “trusted”.
I’ve heard the “big guys are the only ones that will profit from AI regulation” and I haven’t ever heard an actual argument as to why.
And in my mind the biggest issues with AI image generation have nothing to do with using it as a tool for artists. That’s perfectly fine. But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation.
The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”.
Ah. No problem. So the notion behind the “big guys are the ones that stand to profit from AI regulation” is that regulation curtails activity in a general sense. However, many of the offices that create regulation defer to industry experts for guidance on regulatory processes, or have former industry experts appointed onto regulatory committees. (good example of the later is Ajit Pai and his removal of net neutrality).
AI regulation at the Federal level has mostly circled “trusted” AI generation, as you mentioned:
But what it is doing is making it infinitely easier to spread enormous amounts of completely unidentifiable misinformation, due to being added with indistinguishable text to speech and video generation
And the talk has been to add checks along the way by the industry itself (much like how the music industry does policing itself or how airline industry has mostly policed itself). So this would leave people like Adobe and Disney to largely dictate what are “trusted” platforms for AI generation. Platforms that they will ensure that via content moderation and software control, that only “trusted” AI makes it out into the wild.
Regulation can then take the shape of social media being required to enforce regulation on AI posts, source distributors like github being required to enforce distribution prohibitions, and so on.
This removes the tools for any AI out of the hands of the public and places them all in the hands of Adobe, Disney, Universal, and so on. And thus, if you wanted to use AI you must use one of their tools, which may in turn have within the TOS that you can not use their product to compete with their product. Basically establishing a monoploy.
This happens a lot in regulatory processes which is why things like the RIAA, the MPAA, Boeing, and so on are so massive and seemingly unbreakable. They aren’t enshrined in law, but regulatory processes create a de facto monopoly that becomes difficult to enter because of fear of competition.
The big guys, being the industry leaders, in a regulatory hearing would be the first to get a crack at writing the rules that the regulatory body would debate on. In addition to the expert phase, regulatory process also includes a public comment, this would allow the public to address concerns about the expert submitted recommendation. But as demonstrated back in the public comment of the debate to remove rules regulating ISPs for net neutrality, the FCC decided that the comments were “fake” and only heard a small “selected” percentage of them.
side note: in a regulatory hearing, every public comment accepted must be debated and rationale on the conclusion of the argument submitted to the record. This is why Ajit Pai suspended comments on NN because they didn’t want to enter justification that can be brought up in a court case to the record.
The barrier is no longer “you need to be an artist”. It’s “you need to have an internet connection”
And yeah, that might be worth locking AI out of the hands of the public forever. But it doesn’t stop the argument of “AI taking jobs”. It just means that small startups will never be able to create jobs with AI. So if the debate is “AI shouldn’t take our jobs, let’s regulate it”, that will only make it worse in the end (sort of how AWS has mostly dominated the Internet services and how everyone started noticing that as not being incredibly ideal around 2019-2021 when Twitter started kicking people off their service and people wanting to build the next Twitter were limited to what Amazon would and would not accept).
So that’s the argument. And there’s pros and cons to each. But we have to be pretty careful about which way to go, because once we go a direction, it’s pretty difficult to change directions because corporations are incredibly good at adapting. I distinctly remember streaming services being the “breath of fresh air from cable” all the way up till it wasn’t. And now with hard media becoming harder to purchase (it’s not impossible mind you) we’ve sort of entrenched streaming. Case in point, I love Pokémon Concierge, it is not available for purchase as a DVD or whatever (at least not a non-bootleg version), so if I ever want to watch it again I need Netflix.
And do note, I’m not saying we shouldn’t have regulation on AI, what I am saying is that there’s a lot for consideration with AI regulation. And the public needs to have some unified ideas about it for the regulatory body’s public comment section to ensure small businesses that want to use AI can still be allowed. Otherwise the expert phase will dominate and AI will be gone from the public’s hands for quite some time. We’re just now getting around to reversing the removal of net neutrality that started back in 2017. But companies have used that 2017 to today to form business alliances (Disney + Hulu Verizon deal as an example) that’ll be hard to compete with for some time.
I’m very wary of the measures that could potentially pass if the some of the anti-AI art people get their way. I know how messy and difficult putting fair-use material in YouTube can be. There would be more of that in more platforms.
I agree unregulated AI is problematic. At the same time, I’m cynical on what the actual measures would look like.
I agree unregulated AI is problematic. At the same time, I’m cynical on what the actual measures would look like.
OMG, Thank you, this is the correct take.
Well, it’s certainly better than Instagram… Who knows, maybe Cara could federate with ActivityPub in the future… Not that I’ll keep my hopes up for that.
there are several platforms better than Instagram but none of them have the reach of instagram
Is DeviantArt not a thing anymore? Or is this a different niche?
Deviant Art is also trying to scrape artists’ work for AI. It what allows AI at to be posted and has prompted it.
