Cara grew to about half a million in users within a span of a week after artists as an alternative social media platform for artists that are against Meta AI's Instagram policy where it uses an artist's copyright content for training.
Cara's Stance:
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. - source
Meta uses your information on both Facebook and Instagram for training its AI. It's free real estate considering its entire userbase is freely providing training data whether users are aware or not. It doesn't help that this small policy changes are obscured and you can just go do you own business with their apps while overlooking this small detail.
It's not like most people keep tabs on the minute changes on a platform's policy or read the terms and conditions before signing up.
I tried checking the options on my phone's Instagram app and no option for opting out for Meta AI's. As mentioned in this article, only those living in Europe have this option available due to GDPR laws.
I downloaded Cara but never bothered making an account through the app yet. It was purely out of curiosity but after a few more reading on its reviews and the broader issue, I kind of felt less compelled to sign up.
In the grand scheme of things, I'm still going to post my work on other social media and this includes Instagram. My works are just one insignificant spec over the countless training data these corporations can scrape off and they're doing damn fine on their own.
Cara's slogan as a platform for artists also gave me an idea that maybe it's not the stage I should be stepping up to yet. Since the objective is growing a name out there and maybe make some money off it, it's kind of hard to get a market for amateurs pit against already professionals.
The platform has Glaze, a project that protects your works by fooling the AI, and adding noAI tags by default to all your works there. While having the noAI tag sends a message that scrapers aren't supposed to be gathering your works for training data, it's not really a guarantee that tags get respected. There's no protection from AI if you post your art on this blockchain unless you used projects like Glaze and Nightshade prior to posting.
The chances of getting some commissions is greater when I'm just randomly posting in a public space for everyone than that niche art platform.
Thanks for your time.