Everything you need to know about the AI-free social media platform for artists.
Key points:
Cara’s Rapid Growth: The app gained 600,000 users in a week
Artists Leaving Instagram: The controversy around Instagram using images to train AI led many artists to seek an alternative
Cara’s Features: The app is designed specifically for artists and offers a ‘Portfolio’ feature. Users can tag fields, mediums, project types, categories, and software used to create their work
While Cara has grown quickly, it is still tiny compared to Instagram’s massive user base of two billion.
Glaze Integration: Cara is working on integrating Glaze directly in the app to provide users with an easy way to protect their work from be used by any AI
It pollutes the data pool. The rule of gigo (garbage in garbage out) is used to garbage the AI results.
Basically, it puts some imperceptible stuff in the image file’s data (somebody else should explain how because I don’t know) so that what the AI sees and the human looking at the picture sees are rather different. So you try and train it to draw a photorealistic car and instead it creates a lumpy weird face or something. Then the AI uses that defective nonsense to learn what “photorealistic car” means and reproduce it - badly.
If you feed a bunch of this trash into an AI and tell it that this is how to paint like, say, Rembrandt, and then somebody uses it to try to paint a picture like Rembrandt, they’ll end up getting something that looks like it was scrawled by a 10-year-old, or the dogs playing poker went through a teleporter malfunction, or whatever nonsense data was fed into the AI instead.
If you tell an AI that 2+2=🥔, that pi=9, or that the speed of light is Kevin, then nobody can use that AI to do math.
If you trained Chat GPT to explain history by feeding it descriptions of games of Civ6 them nobody could use it to cheat on their history term paper. The AI would go on about how Gandhi attacked Mansa Musa in 1686 with all out nuclear war. It’s the same thing here, but with pictures.
Right but, AFAIK glaze is targeting the CLIP model inside diffusion models, which means any new versions of CLIP would remove the effect of the protection
It’s not. It’s supposed to target certain open source AIs (Stable Diffusion specifically).
Latent diffusion models work on compressed images. That takes less resources. The compression is handled by a type of AI called VAE. For this attack to work, you must have access to the specific VAE that you are targeting.
The image is subtly altered so that the compressed image looks completely different from the original. You can only do that if you know what the compression AI does. Stable Diffusion is a necessary part of the Glaze software. It is ineffective against any closed source image generators that have trained their own VAE (or equivalent).
This kind of attack is notoriously fickle and thwarted by even small changes. It’s probably not even very effective against the intended target.
If you’re all about intellectual property, it kinda makes sense that freely shared AI is your main enemy.
I’ll be watching this curiously from a safe distance for now. I am interested in a new platform without AI, but this stinks of early-stage enshitification.
Pixelfed looks like they are doing a huge push to get up to speed. It has been an immature app/platform for a long time and slow to get the features that people need from a photo sharing social media.
According to their mastodon, they are working for better AI management features, and launching an app that will make it a genuinely positive experience.
I really want Pixelfed to take off and this really could have been a moment, but after using it for more than a year now, I just can’t see it. Development is very slow - it feels like a one-man show (it might not be). We do need an alternative to Instagram, but yeah…
Cara is popular because of it’s anti ai stance. They have a detector to not allow ai images to be on the platform. Pixelfed allows it and also lack active users that are not artists.
Why did you specifically not put in bold this part and are the property of Cara. Clearly you saw it off you took the time to avoid putting stars around it.
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I don’t understand how this Glaze thing is supposed to stop AI being trained on the art.
It pollutes the data pool. The rule of gigo (garbage in garbage out) is used to garbage the AI results.
Basically, it puts some imperceptible stuff in the image file’s data (somebody else should explain how because I don’t know) so that what the AI sees and the human looking at the picture sees are rather different. So you try and train it to draw a photorealistic car and instead it creates a lumpy weird face or something. Then the AI uses that defective nonsense to learn what “photorealistic car” means and reproduce it - badly.
If you feed a bunch of this trash into an AI and tell it that this is how to paint like, say, Rembrandt, and then somebody uses it to try to paint a picture like Rembrandt, they’ll end up getting something that looks like it was scrawled by a 10-year-old, or the dogs playing poker went through a teleporter malfunction, or whatever nonsense data was fed into the AI instead.
If you tell an AI that 2+2=🥔, that pi=9, or that the speed of light is Kevin, then nobody can use that AI to do math.
If you trained Chat GPT to explain history by feeding it descriptions of games of Civ6 them nobody could use it to cheat on their history term paper. The AI would go on about how Gandhi attacked Mansa Musa in 1686 with all out nuclear war. It’s the same thing here, but with pictures.
Right but, AFAIK glaze is targeting the CLIP model inside diffusion models, which means any new versions of CLIP would remove the effect of the protection
It’s not. It’s supposed to target certain open source AIs (Stable Diffusion specifically).
Latent diffusion models work on compressed images. That takes less resources. The compression is handled by a type of AI called VAE. For this attack to work, you must have access to the specific VAE that you are targeting.
The image is subtly altered so that the compressed image looks completely different from the original. You can only do that if you know what the compression AI does. Stable Diffusion is a necessary part of the Glaze software. It is ineffective against any closed source image generators that have trained their own VAE (or equivalent).
This kind of attack is notoriously fickle and thwarted by even small changes. It’s probably not even very effective against the intended target.
If you’re all about intellectual property, it kinda makes sense that freely shared AI is your main enemy.
I’ll be watching this curiously from a safe distance for now. I am interested in a new platform without AI, but this stinks of early-stage enshitification.
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I knew that C looked familiar!
They actually seem quite a bit different. The one for Cara isn’t perfectly round and seems to suggest a person in the middle.
Yeah, they’re different, but “white circular C on a black background” just made me think of the CN one.
So what happend when this app needs to pay server costs for 600,000 people?
This is why twitter will never die.
Nice try feds
uhuh, no thanks
you can use your email
So much bad faith, I logged in just fine with a regular e-mail.
It’s just a quote from the article, but good to know.
You have a problem with oauth?
Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Pixelfed looks like they are doing a huge push to get up to speed. It has been an immature app/platform for a long time and slow to get the features that people need from a photo sharing social media.
According to their mastodon, they are working for better AI management features, and launching an app that will make it a genuinely positive experience.
I really want Pixelfed to take off and this really could have been a moment, but after using it for more than a year now, I just can’t see it. Development is very slow - it feels like a one-man show (it might not be). We do need an alternative to Instagram, but yeah…
The official app is available in beta. I’m very impressed w it
Join Pixelfed instead!
Cara is just another fucking centralized social media that’s gonna get run to the ground the moment they can monetize their user base.
Cara is popular because of it’s anti ai stance. They have a detector to not allow ai images to be on the platform. Pixelfed allows it and also lack active users that are not artists.
For now.
Ai support or not it will still be aggressively monetized the moment enough users are locked in.
Fomo is a hell of a drug eh.
…until they decide to sell their company. Or their user data. Or the shareholders say so. Or…
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Its Instagram mashed up with artstation
According to their terms and service, everything uploaded to their website is then owned by them. Doesn’t seem very artist friendly to me.
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Why did you specifically not put in bold this part and are the property of Cara. Clearly you saw it off you took the time to avoid putting stars around it.