#CARA

[defsiarte]

I highly recommend joining Cara right now!

It’s a new portfolio/social media hybrid website made by artists, for artists, as a way to network, find jobs, and see art. Born from ArtStation, Behance, DeviantArt, Instagram, and countless other websites’ implementing predatory AI policies, it aims to fill a gap left in the community for those who don’t wish to support that stuff.

To me at least, it really captures the better parts of being on DA in the early 2010’s. Account setup is very streamlined, your feed is all art and no ads, and the community is very active (Due to a huge exodus of users moving there from Instagram due to Meta’s new AI policy).

The app has all the same functionality as the main site too! You’re able to customize your timeline, mark your work availability, and even toggle your profile between just being a regular timeline and exclusively a portfolio of your strongest works (I have nothing up though bc I just made my acc lol).

A lot of new websites have popped up in the past couple years due to how awful and predatory tech giants have become, and personally I’m all for it. I don’t want an internet where everyone uses the same 5 websites to get all their content. Anyway yeah I highly recommend Cara.

You can see the official explanation of their features and stuff here.

Obligatory plug to own acc

[feminist-space]

"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.

“When you put [AI] so much in their face, and then give them the option to opt out, but then increase the friction to opt out… I think that increases their anger level — like, okay now I’ve really had enough,” Jingna Zhang, a renowned photographer and founder of Cara, told TechCrunch.

Cara, which has both a web and mobile app, is like a combination of Instagram and X, but built specifically for artists. On your profile, you can host a portfolio of work, but you can also post updates to your feed like any other microblogging site.

Zhang is perfectly positioned to helm an artist-centric social network, where they can post without the risk of becoming part of a training dataset for AI. Zhang has fought on behalf of artists, recently winning an appeal in a Luxembourg court over a painter who copied one of her photographs, which she shot for Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam.

“Using a different medium was irrelevant. My work being ‘available online’ was irrelevant. Consent was necessary,” Zhang wrote on X.

Zhang and three other artists are also suing Google for allegedly using their copyrighted work to train Imagen, an AI image generator. She’s also a plaintiff in a similar lawsuit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI.

“Words can’t describe how dehumanizing it is to see my name used 20,000+ times in MidJourney,” she wrote in an Instagram post. “My life’s work and who I am—reduced to meaningless fodder for a commercial image slot machine.”

Artists are so resistant to AI because the training data behind many of these image generators includes their work without their consent. These models amass such a large swath of artwork by scraping the internet for images, without regard for whether or not those images are copyrighted. It’s a slap in the face for artists – not only are their jobs endangered by AI, but that same AI is often powered by their work.

“When it comes to art, unfortunately, we just come from a fundamentally different perspective and point of view, because on the tech side, you have this strong history of open source, and people are just thinking like, well, you put it out there, so it’s for people to use,” Zhang said. “For artists, it’s a part of our selves and our identity. I would not want my best friend to make a manipulation of my work without asking me. There’s a nuance to how we see things, but I don’t think people understand that the art we do is not a product.”

This commitment to protecting artists from copyright infringement extends to Cara, which partners with the University of Chicago’s Glaze project. By using Glaze, artists who manually apply Glaze to their work on Cara have an added layer of protection against being scraped for AI.

Other projects have also stepped up to defend artists. Spawning AI, an artist-led company, has created an API that allows artists to remove their work from popular datasets. But that opt-out only works if the companies that use those datasets honor artists’ requests. So far, HuggingFace and Stability have agreed to respect Spawning’s Do Not Train registry, but artists’ work cannot be retroactively removed from models that have already been trained.

“I think there is this clash between backgrounds and expectations on what we put on the internet,” Zhang said. “For artists, we want to share our work with the world. We put it online, and we don’t charge people to view this piece of work, but it doesn’t mean that we give up our copyright, or any ownership of our work.”"

Read the rest of the article here:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/06/a-social-app-for-creatives-cara-grew-from-40k-to-650k-users-in-a-week-because-artists-are-fed-up-with-metas-ai-policies/

[meii-jasmine]

🧡 Portal x Splatoon 💙

[tentacleteapot]

every five minutes somebody is like "hey are you joining Skroink? I think when tumblr dies I'm going to move to Skroink." and then two minutes after that somebody else is like "hey don't go to Skroink it turns out that one of the people who did the HTML for Skroink's homepage regularly kills and eats endangered birds". and then ten minutes after that somebody says "twitter is dying, everybody dm me for a Turgle code, we all need to get on Turgle before they open public sign-ups" and then like a minute later somebody else says "just found out Turgle has a dedicated Nothing But Hate Speech tab ://// guess we can't move to Turgle guys". and then six minutes after that somebody else is like "hey YouTube is demonetizing every video that features the color blue or any mention of a word containing the letter e and immediately sending the uploader's home address to some kind of Murder These People list hosted on the dark web, nobody should use YouTube anymore if you can avoid it" and I'm going to go live in a hole in the swamp and bite the arms off anybody who comes near me and if my phone rings I'll smash it with this skull I found

[sarahdraws16]

Recently made an account on Cara🤍 https://cara.app/sarahpdraws 🤍

[praise-the-lord-im-dead]

Things I like about Cara (new art app) so far:

- the distinction between 'timeline' posts (reblogs from other users, sketches, text) and 'portfolio' posts (finished artwork with its own tab on your profile so you can look at all your finished pieces together WITHOUT severely restricting what you're posting about).

- reblogging other artists' stuff seems to be an expected function of the platform!!! My feed is all art!

- the search function turns up a TON of results that are relevant to what I'm looking for, and it's all art. I can spend hours scrolling through JUST ART. AAAAAAAAA

- people are being really friendly, which is probably a result of the mass exodus from Insta, but I'm hoping the culture sticks around.

- it's not AI friendly AT ALL YAY

- you can choose how your art gets cropped, so you don't post something and then find out that everyone's first impression of it is really awkward

Things I dislike, so far:

- It's still in beta and it just got a ton of new users, so it's a little slow/glitchy

- the posting process isn't super intuitive. It reminds me a little of posting on ArtStation.

- the UI is very twitter-like and I've never liked twitter.

[oddarette]

Hey guys. Just a little update to let y'all know I'll be on Cara. I'm not leaving tumblr, but I want to support apps that signal more ethical standards towards creatives. I really hope it catches on <3

[pillowfort-social]

JUNE 2024 FUNDING GOAL UPDATE: $3500 / $5000 We have 5 days remaining of June and we're only $1500 short of meeting our funding goal. If we do not meet June's goal we will only have enough funding available to keep us online & to compensate our Staff until November 2024. ⭐️WHY HELP PILLOWFORT?⭐️ We're a woman-owned independent social media platform without any corporate investors. We are entirely free to join via automatic rolling waitlist or through invitation. We've been entirely user funded since the start. We are a LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, 18+ and Kink-Friendly community for fans & creators. No AI, No NFTS, no Crypto. Pillowfort is built for you.

⭐️HOW TO HELP SUPPORT US⭐️

Subscribe to Our Al la Carte Subscription Pillowfort Premium

Donate to Pillowfort

Purchase a Registration Key

⭐️OTHER WAYS TO SUPPORT US⭐️

Talk about Pillowfort to your friends, family, mutuals, and followers wherever you're at.

Write a post about us. Also please let us know so we can read it! We love reading what our users say about us.

If you enjoy making videos: film a video about us! Please tag us so we can watch it!

[ionomycin]

Joined Cara as well ✨Very much tired of new social medias and accounts, but the plagiarism algorithm situation is getting dire and I can't pass up on a site that promises not to feed into it...

cara.app/ionomycin

[padmaddean]

Emily & Cara

Castaways (2023)

[teafoxillustrations]

Created an account over on Cara. I'm hoping it can eventually replace my IG account since it continues to go downhill over there.

[yukipri]

Some thoughts on Cara

So some of you may have heard about Cara, the new platform that a lot of artists are trying out. It's been around for a while, but there's been a recent huge surge of new users, myself among them. Thought I'd type up a lil thing on my initial thoughts.

First, what is Cara?

From their About Cara page:

Cara is a social media and portfolio platform for artists. With the widespread use of generative AI, we decided to build a place that filters out generative AI images so that people who want to find authentic creatives and artwork can do so easily. Many platforms currently accept AI art when it’s not ethical, while others have promised “no AI forever” policies without consideration for the scenario where adoption of such technologies may happen at the workplace in the coming years. The future of creative industries requires nuanced understanding and support to help artists and companies connect and work together. We want to bridge the gap and build a platform that we would enjoy using as creatives ourselves. Our stance on AI: ・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. ・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.

Should note that Cara is independently funded, and is made by a core group of artists and engineers and is even collaborating with the Glaze project. It's very much a platform by artists, for artists!

Should also mention that in being a platform for artists, it's more a gallery first, with social media functionalities on the side. The info below will hopefully explain how that works.

Next, my actual initial thoughts using it, and things that set it apart from other platforms I've used:

1) When you post, you can choose to check the portfolio option, or to NOT check it. This is fantastic because it means I can have just my art organized in my gallery, but I can still post random stuff like photos of my cats and it won't clutter things. You can also just ramble/text post and it won't affect the gallery view!

2) You can adjust your crop preview for your images. Such a simple thing, yet so darn nice.

3) When you check that "Add to portfolio," you get a bunch of additional optional fields: Title, Field/Medium, Project Type, Category Tags, and Software Used. It's nice that you can put all this info into organized fields that don't take up text space.

4) Speaking of text, 5000 character limit is niiiiice. If you want to talk, you can.

5) Two separate feeds, a "For You" algorithmic one, and "Following." The "Following" actually appears to be full chronological timeline of just folks you follow (like Tumblr). Amazing.

6) Now usually, "For You" being set to home/default kinda pisses me off because generally I like curating my own experience, but not here, for this handy reason: if you tap the gear symbol, you can ADJUST your algorithm feed!

So you can choose what you see still!!! AMAZING. And, again, you still have your Following timeline too.

7) To repeat the stuff at the top of this post, its creation and intent as a place by artists, for artists. Hopefully you can also see from the points above that it's been designed with artists in mind.

8) No GenAI images!!!! There's a pop up that says it's not allowed, and apparently there's some sort of detector thing too. Not sure how reliable the latter is, but so far, it's just been a breath of fresh air, being able to scroll and see human art art and art!

To be clear, Cara's not perfect and is currently pretty laggy, and you can get errors while posting (so far, I've had more success on desktop than the mobile app), but that's understandable, given the small team. They'll need time to scale. For me though, it's a fair tradeoff for a platform that actually cares about artists.

Currently it also doesn't allow NSFW, not sure if that'll change given app store rules.

As mentioned above, they're independently funded, which means the team is currently paying for Cara itself. They have a kofi set up for folks who want to chip in, but it's optional. Here's the link to the tweet from one of the founders:

And a reminder that no matter that the platform itself isn't selling our data to GenAI, it can still be scraped by third parties. Protect your work with Glaze and Nightshade!

Anyway, I'm still figuring stuff out and have only been on Cara a few days, but I feel hopeful, and I think they're off to a good start.

I hope this post has been informative!

Lastly, here's my own Cara if you want to come say hi! Not sure at all if I'll be active on there, but if you're an artist like me who is keeping an eye out for hopefully nice communities, check it out!

[astrolavas]

joined cara btw, if anyone wants to find me there!

same @ as always

[8pxl]

joined the cara app if anyone is interested in following me there !~ cara.app/8pxl

[incaseyouart]

I am joining the artists of the world in a migration to Cara! It's a new artists app that feels like a fusion of Instagram + ArtStation + Twitter but in the best ways. There is a Portfolio interface as well as a timeline, and a job board!

I'll still post here, since I don't want to abandon my community. And Twitter too, but I might phase out Insta. I'm fully not posting on Threads anymore. Bluesky seems okay, but I have hardly any engagement there. Cara seems like a good choice to post my "greatest hits" right now, in batches.

The app is very slow rn bc it's still in beta, and run by volunteers, so be sure to allow it some patience!

https://cara.app/incaseyouart

[i-beg-of-you]

@caracaru_