A social app for creatives, Cara, grew 10x as artists tire of Meta's AI policies
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Personally I never thought Instagram was ideal for artwork on a technical level (compression and size/shape limits), but the audience is there, so I guess that is all there is to it.
Cara looks pretty standard, but it'll be interesting to see how well it copes with scaling up (technically and socially) and keeping the lights on. It seems to be mostly self-funded by the founder at the moment, so they're probably going to have to implement ads or a membership system.
I don't fully understand why other sites/apps that already serve this market did not absorb most of the Instagram artist exodus. I know DeviantArt kicked the door open for training AI models (and questionable content) a while back, but I thought ArtStation was still kicking around. I can only assume Cara looking practically identical to Instagram and X had something to do with it.
I do feel for artists who have spent so much time honing their craft to have it put into an art slot machine, as the Cara owner stated in the article. I've seen the countless hours my wife has put into developing herself and pieces through multiple mediums, way longer hours than I work as a dev, and much more perfectionist (even to the point of what I'd call "art dysmorphism", most artists seem blind to how talented they are and how good their work is). Frankly it would be upsetting if her digital or scanned physical work were scraped and could be recreated for free by adding "in the style of [her name]" to a text prompt.
Companies like OpenAI, Google and other private actors have gone across a red line in the way they've scraped content, and I hope those who have had years of their work scraped in seconds get some legal recompense for it. I'm sure all of this won't change Meta's direction, and Instagram will still be full of influencers, celebrities and such. Unfortunately I think it will weaken the already small visibility many artists get online, as a separate website devoted to art is only going to be sought by those looking for art.
Even if you are not an artist and being able to create AI art/illustrations/videos benefits you or your own work, one day these systems will scrape your lifes work (including programmers) and the years or decades you put into honing your craft will be reduced to a text prompt your boss/clients will use instead of you. And the kicker will be that it will be piggy backing on all of the time and work that you put in. That should concern anybody who takes pride in their work.
The current systems are very far from reducing your work to a prompt. There are many problems that are unsolved, a lot of curation is necessary, and in the end the flaws in the details will still be visible. If that was good enough for your client, too bad, but they never needed your work to begin with. The first skill commercial artists (and developers) need to develop is to live up to someone elses standard, not theirs.
But in both cases, the writer is actively inviting people to consume what they have made. Those people will plagiarise to a greater or lesser extent on a large spectrum from drawing personal inspiration on a subconscious level to AI powered supercharged fraud.
I believe the grandparent comment is saying that an expectation of privacy and freedom from plagiarism is incompatible with the act of publishing, be it through traditional third parties (publishing houses) or modern ones (social media).
I would tend to agree. Publishing is primarily a commercial action.
Exactly. The current systems are very far from reducing your work to a prompt.
However, I'm sure the current state of these AI models isn't the end goal of those working on them. And therein lies the reason why they're continuously consuming more training data, including in this context, art scraped from social media sites like Instagram that artists have published there.
Most artists are concerned about what's to come, not what is here now. Even then, what is here now is already viable for commercial use, and is already being used as such (in ads, articles, illustration work). Somebody starting out from zero probably wouldn't bother looking at art as a job given the current state of the AI models and rate of progress, and many very talented artists (who are always developing) are probably concerned about being overtaken.
A commercial artist needs to publish their work online to get visibility. Of course that opens their work up to being plagiarised. They'd be open to plagiarism showing their work anywhere. Before, there was a natural defence to this, which entailed somebody being able to actually recreate the work to a similar or better standard (something that requires talent in its own way). Now the defensive barrier is much lower, and continually getting lower.
If somebody told me that writing a text prompt to paint a waterfall was as difficult as actually painting a waterfall, I'd think they're either delusional, or ignorant/spiteful towards creatives and their work/ability.
Some people come across very unsympathetic to those already affected by AI models. It will be interesting to see if these same people can cope in the same manner if/when AI models can replace years of their own learning and work, especially if it does so by training on their own work.
Others come across very naïve about where this is headed. Personally, I don't think we're heading for an AI driven utopia where nobody has to work and AI can do everything. More likely we're heading for many people losing their jobs, insufficient numbers of jobs to meet demand, and monopoly of power in the hand of even less people/organisations than today.
I am no more sympathetic to illustrators losing work to AI than I am to baristas losing work to a vending machine.
I also expect no sympathy should software development jobs be automated away, that would only be fair considering the colossal amount of resources we waste, just because we can.
We have never and will never run out of jobs, and there will be no AI monopolies unless we let regulators create them.
I think artists are used to humans using their art as “inspiration” but automated mass scraping is not cool with them in the same way web scraping is not cool with devs/admins. It’s the same fear some devs have of GitHub being scraped for GPTs