A critique of Cara.app: the 'No AI' Instagram and Artstation copycat child.
blog post: https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1032/a-critique-of-caraapp-the-no-ai-instagram-and-artstation-copycat-child

#cara #caraapp

@davidrevoy What are your thoughts on Newgrounds?

@MagotrapTheArchmage No idea, it's the first time I read the name. You can quickly apply this method to any social media product:
- Is it owned by a commercial entity?
- Is the source code closed?
- What's the license?
- Is the network centralized?
Check also the terms of services, the code of conduct, and you'll get quickly a big picture or where things will logically goes. Good luck!

@davidrevoy Thanks for taking the time to write this. I won't be going for cara as I'm very hesitant to just join a site willy nilly these days. It'll be interesting to see where this place will be in a year, assuming they make it this far.

It's also nice to see someone provide their thoughts on it. Many people are jumping in from what I can see and while I wish them all the best, I haven't seen them talk about it.

I'm just gonna stick to the few places I'm at for the time being

@pineaura I'm envious at your capacity to resist the FOMO effect. I must work on that. 😆

@davidrevoy at least it allows you to glaze images, preventing ai from copying your style.

@the1goit As I said in the article, I still need proof that the Glaze method is effective against AI scraping.

Some thread shows it is not effective at all: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/19ecsj7/ive_tested_the_nightshade_poison_here_are_the/ , and we have here a proprietary and closed source product running on Windows and Mac (and already monetized with "Cara credits" on the platform.

Difficult to buy, for me it's another "NO AI" commercial hype: they are building the habit.

@davidrevoy I made an account to be easily found. But I am tired of being on every social media/platform page possible. I wonder if it is not better to focus on your favorites and interact more there with people who truly appreciate your work.

@sylvia_ritter I totally agree. 💯

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org @MagotrapTheArchmage@blob.cat Newgrounds existed since at least 1999 and as far as I know has been with the same management since then, so I guess it's a pass so far... until they don't

@Yuki @MagotrapTheArchmage Thank you for the information. I see they have a page on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrounds , I'll read it.

@davidrevoy This is exactly my thoughts on it, better said than me 🤯

(By the way, you have a typo in the first "key selling point". you spelled "AI" as "IA" :D)

@redstrate Thank you! Fixed, and yes, this is a typo I do often: in French "Intelligence Artificielle" acronym is IA, the perfect inversion. So my brain is used to see it and skip it. 😆

@davidrevoy Great post, but I have the issue that you suggested mastodon.art; the problem of that instance is that they defederate with too many instances for small reasons, and when the instances' admins and mods questions to reason they failed to provide evidences, and tend to assume bad faiths, even my second account's instance (tech.lgbt) got in the crossfire tho. Their moderation stances would not help any artist there, I am still baffled many people still recommend that instance

@natsume_shokogami It's indeed hard to recommend an instance for artist, and I understand if you had a bad experience that this line I suggest is problematic. I'll try to get more information about it and revise my copy if I get evidences the network lack of transparency about that.

@davidrevoy

These are some useful tools that Digital Artist had better to learn:

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html?ref=journal.hexmos.com

@freezr Prove me that it works 🙂 Because in its current shape, Glaze/Nightshade is only pure marketing to me and a commercial product.

@davidrevoy It will be the same as the other one that emerged when the bird site shitstorm began. What was it again? Artfol, I believe?

@tiopalada 🤣 🤣 🤣 yes.

@davidrevoy
Or people could check out @pixelfed
It’s a federated version of instagram built like mastodon. It even has a dedicated portfolio mode.

Much better than jumping on another corporate platform.

@BroBot90001 Psss Pssss, read the end of the article.

@davidrevoy

Nope, I can't prove anything and since are both made by a University I took for granted those two software were opensource, but they aren't.

I can just assume researchers risk their reputation making false claims, I believe that is feasible messed up a model, as much as those models must have backup so it should be easy for them to recover a sane model anytime.

@freezr The researcher haven't made false claims. They say in the paper it's ineffective. You can check it (on the conclusion).

Edit, it's not on the conclusion, I was wrong. I checked this long time ago. It's a bit all over the paragraphs. I'll try to find it back. the paper:

https://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/publications/pdf/nightshade-oakland24.pdf

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org Using AI to detect AI images or training AI to know human made images, thus still using uploaded content to train said AI? ​​

@amoonrabbit Oh yes, the irony is big here. 🙃

@davidrevoy

> "What we have here is a structure built on exactly the same rules at its core that guarantee a future enshitification: proprietary, closed and centralized. "

... aurait sans doute suffit, mais tout le reste du billet réussit à être intéressant quand même. Bien joué !

@Hibourdon J'avoue, ça résume bien le tout. 😆 Merci.

@davidrevoy Désoler l'image ma fait penser a la corne de Kaamelott , mais ceci est tout aussi bien.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik9zRX1idPM

@iok 🤣 🤣 🤣

@davidrevoy nice write up 👍

How exactly do they aim to be 'Ai free'? Is it possible to automatically detect ai generated images?

@moonshinebrigade You can check what they write on their About page, the "our stance on AI" https://cara.app/about

So, it's not a firm anti-AI gen art, but more like a 'we wait the law, and we ask to label them if the law is ok".

They probably use a built-in AI tool to detect AI art like the one you can play on https://thehive.ai/demos (AI detection tab, the second icon from the top).

@moonshinebrigade I was wondering about this aspect as well. They might argue that the exact tech behind this is being kept a secret to protect them from countermeasures. But my best guess is that it's "just another AI"... while there are definitely "real" AI detection mechanisms out there, they need a lot of hardware which probably won't scale well with the growth of the platform.

@danielsteinborn using AI to keep out AI.. sounds problematic. As you say, what resources would this take, while allowing a multitude of images to be posted..
From what i understand, deep fakes are incredibly hard to detect..
Or do they rely on their userbase, to report suspicious images.. #hivemind

Has anybody tried to upload an ai generated image? #curious

@davidrevoy Interesting read! This is actually my first time hearing of Cara.

I have a question about your point on Cara being a "Human made image stock": while this is definitely a good criticism of platforms like Cara, would it not also be easy for an AI company to create a Mastodon instance and scrape art via federation with other instances? Like if Facebook and Threads were to do this, for instance?

@constancies Thank you.
Yes, I think making a bot and scraping the Fediverse (only by following art hashtags and collecting downloaded post) would be easy. But the user/bot would have to scrap only a relatively little batch; something that looks like a human reading a TL, or searching a topic. Because in case of an higher volume, the IP of the bot and its impact on the bandwith of small server would be noticed and probably blocklisted after a long period.

@davidrevoy Eww… Instagram has probably the worst UI in history of art sites, IMO.

@tennoseremel Oh yes, totally true 👍

@davidrevoy the div.grid {margin-right: -1rem;} css rule makes the post frustratingly slightly wider than my screen making scrolling (touchpad) a bit awkward could you fix that?

@zlago Thank you for the feedback! I haven't seen it. Very precious, I'll fix it tomorrow. 👍

@davidrevoy
"NO AI": a new commercial hype

Exactly.

@davidrevoy come all to my restaurant. I promise no platypuses.

@glauber 🤣

@davidrevoy
*finishes reading*
Wait, you can move posts between activityPub instances now?

In a hack-y way, or in a 1st-party way?

@HikaTamika You are right, I put that in the list as an advice to Cara dev/admins in case they were watching or reading, but then after I tell that my profile offer me "all of this" and this part (porting all the posts to the new account) isn't working. At least as far as I know: all accounts I saw who transferred their account to a new instance took their followers, re-followed the account they did; but started over with a account blank of post.

I'll put a note/erratum, thank you. (edit:done)

@davidrevoy I wonder how different things would be if mastodon.art did not kill so many artists experience with fediverse.

A friendly art focused server running pixelfed that allowed image migration and albums would probably have put us in a completely different place right now.

There are just too many of these art sites that come and go. With a pixelfed setup, artists can host their own site, like they used to host galleries before, and just have people follow from anywhere on fediverse. Or just use it as a gallery.

But it is seen as "too techy". Like back when they made their own site in HTML, it wasnt?

@lettosprey @davidrevoy Agree about .art. I ditched it for my primary masto account and moved to .social after they removed images I posted in a completely uninformed hissy fit, then tried to tell me what it was and was not when I asked about it. On the whole .art is a bit too militant for my liking.

@iamgerardthomas @lettosprey Thank you for the feedback. I update the link to point to their About page were the policy is written clearly. I also added a [2] footnote about receiving comments telling me this choice was controversial and guided readers to the official list of instance.

@davidrevoy good overview and analysis! I feel like Cara is not the place for me, I'm just going to be disappointed when I can't make any headway there because I don't draw in the standard digital concept artist style, and also because it's only other artists there

(I also have a feeling it's yet another one of those apps that only really "works" properly on iOS, and I am an Android user 😝)

@elainemwill Oh yes I totally understand about the style. It's very "Artstation standards" in a way (and sometime unfortunately to a point that many popular artworks looks in fact like AI gen Art, because AI gen art took all from this norm).

About the App; they don't have a iOs/Android app: they just have a tutorial on how to use the webbrowser on phone to create a shortcut icon to the website. This is nice, because you can use the browser of your choice (and then, anti tracking ext)

@davidrevoy
No RSS feeds. It's a shame 😞

@davidrevoy I need to read the article when I can load the page (in a forest atm). It's weird how just now cara is talked about again, I heard of it a long while ago and been eyeing it for a while before setting up a gallery. Though my understanding: it's replacement for artstation, mainly a place for industry artists. And it's run by decent people with very good intentions, but that isn't to say they can't fuck up.

@Neotheta Yep, exactly. 👍

@davidrevoy I've created an account as well and, of course, I've read their FAQ about NSFW content (I've had quite a painful experience about this on Mastodon), and as usual, the problem is the same : they don't define what they mean by "NSFW". Is it explicit porn, depicting genitals, or does it mean that even the slightest appearance of an innocent nipple would qualify as NSFW? This ambiguity doesn't help me to trust them, so far…

@davidrevoy I'm pretty sure that in some cultures, letting a toe being seen qualifies as nudity. A concept that may lead to self-censorship and loss of freedom of expression deserves a precise and honnest definition. Cara, being all about art, and lots of art pieces quie commonly depicting nudity without being porn, should have made a little effort to be clearer on that subject.

@davidrevoy I've sent them a question by e-mail about this, I just hope they'll give me an honest reply… and I really hope it won't be something like "we don't want any bellaminette on Cara"! ;)

@davidrevoy Of course, if one searches some sort of universal defintion, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_safe_for_work
The problem is that words like "nudity" don't mean the same thing in all cultures, times, and contexts.
For instance, total nudity of a mythological character in a renaissance painting might be alright while only showing off a nipple in a today illustration could be considered as porn by some people. That's all quite puzzling…

@BrunoBellamy Oh yes, I should update the article and add the 'no NSFW' in the negative points, because it affects many artists I know.
True, they have hard time to define things. Their terms also ask to refer to their "Code of Conduct" but I wasn't able to find the document. It was vague and broad conduct terms plugged in their ToS maybe.

@davidrevoy A pretty nice article for sure. The FOMO stuff does ring home at least a bit for me.

I mean not for me personally. I don't have to live off the blog I am writing for hobbyist purposes on a niche thing (relatively speaking) I like. More precisely I don't make any money off it, it rather costs me. Though I would not have it another way.

I don't have the pressure to produce something if I don't feel like it. Like right now where the blog basically was not updated with something since the end of March. Other things take priority like finishing my degree. Though there is some stuff I would like to tackle once its over. back to topic lol.

I can see where all this new social media can cause lots of FOMO in especially self-employed people who have to market themselves. Its the hot new thing that might be a chance for you to grow (it likely is not) so one is inclined to jump on the bandwagon.

From my own experience: Social Media is like the most necessary evil in doing anything you want people to see. I am not good at it I don't like doing "advertising" posts where I put my links out there. I do though like getting to talk to people about stuff I like, which these advertising posts facilitate for me (well sometimes)

I did talk to some artists I dearly like who of course have to advertise themselves a lot since they are small. They are lovely couple of novelist and artist. She does concentrate on art and he does writing and social media stuff. He outright told me does not have the capacity for another social as I was trying to nudge them to join fedi. And I can see all that management being an absolute drain on artists who have to do all that alone. So you want to maximize your efforts.

PS: I really like the clean design of the (new?) website. It looks so nice and is easy to read. The comments being implemented via fedi is something I will have to look into for my blog as well (but later)

@davidrevoy
For the sake of “protection” from AI, they ruin the user experience for ordinary users.
I don't know English and I use a translator. In general, the translation of the page, and specifically user posts, is simply terrible, since the translator translates words and not entire sentences. Another disadvantage for users who do not know English.

@DearFox Outch! 😵 I checked the html: this is horrible! No wonder it breaks accessibility.
Thank you for the info. I'll plug this on the negative points.

@davidrevoy@framapiaf.org @DearFox@meow.social ...why did they do this???? It's extra work and it only makes things worse and it's empty comments too so it's totally useless. Wow

@ChaosKitsune @DearFox Yes, no wonder where their huge bandwidth budget goes: delivering billions of <!-- --> daily... So much wasted electricity. 😤

@davidrevoy They seem to have replied to some of your concerns.

---

We heard your concerns about the rumors, here are our answers:

• Does Cara make me sign away my copyright?

No. Our Terms of Service grants us permission to host your images, resize, crop, & display them on Cara. Cara doesn’t own nor sell your work.

• Does Cara train an AI, or give Hive AI user data for training?

The answers are: no and no.

Cara does not train any AI models on its user data. Our terms with Hive ensures they do not train on our users’ data either. We use Hive to detect AI images and keep them off Cara. That’s it.

• Was Cara founded by an AI supporter?

No, our founder @zemotion has always advocated for artists’ copyright, does not support unethical GenAI practices, and is a lead plaintiff in 2 class action lawsuits against AI companies such as Google, Stability AI, and Midjourney.

She has fought for artists’ rights in court to raise awareness that artists do not give up their copyright when sharing their work online, and she is committed to continue fighting for and advocating for artists rights to be respected both through her own work and with Cara.

To our community who took the time to stand up for us from these claims, thank you. 🙏

https://cara.app/post/a11308b5-c435-4c47-9aab-ecf067fc527e

@Deus Hey, I'm glad they published answers to these questions, but don't put words in my mouth: none of these three points are concerns I had in the first place in my blog post.

Also, I would prefer to get these claims baked by evidences and transparency rather than just believe what their PR service reply (eg. by publishing publicly their terms with Hive).

About property/copyright: check the ToS, point 4. https://cara.app/terms

(1/2)

@Deus "The Cara Site and all works of art (“Art”) and/or other user generated content (including without limitation commentary, images, third-party links, and similar content and/or works) (collectively the “Art And Other User Generated Content”), text, data, and other materials contained in the Cara Site are copyrighted unless otherwise noted and are the property of Cara and/or the individual artist who created any individual piece of Art And Other User Generated Content (the “Artist”). " (2/3)

@Deus So they co-own your artworks's copyright when you post. Yes, you still own it, but so do they.

And with that, they can sell it.

That's why I said on my blog post they can sell the network and give the copyright they have to another party who buys the network later. This one can publish book with it, or make a video game, or if they change ToS train AI on it. It's their property.

(3/3)

@davidrevoy Let's appreciate the fact that they have done a good job. And since the Fediverse yaps on about 'protecting' the interests of artists against generative AI, they (at the moment) are also doing a good job on that front too. The Fediverse has also failed in to woo artists and build a community of artists (the level we see in Cara). Need to relook at why that is the case?

@Deus Mmm.. That's mainly because the Fediverse is not an entity. It has no direction, no leader, no budget, no voice. It is a network that emanate from what the users do with it. If artist wanted to make something with it, it would be different. But it looks like most of them don't want to be pro active, they just want yet another company who pampers them and tell them "we are the good guy" but has same systemic issues as other platforms...

@davidrevoy Finally not in a forest & remembered to read this! Very good article, dropped some similar critizism on the vid Bobby Chiu had on youtube to hype (now it probably looks that I copycatted you hahah xD)

I still joined it as I planned months ago already, for connecting with artists & being inspired, it's an artstation replacement to me, not gonna bet for it to last very long in nice condition tho.

@Neotheta Thanks! Yes, totally agree.

@davidrevoy @freezr did you find it?

@semiconductor42 @freezr Hey, I didn't, and was really confused I couldn't find the paragraph anymore. So, I skip for later and forgot to have another look. Thank you for the reminder.

I checked, and my fault: Nightshade looks like being effective. 🤔

My source of confusion and origin of my critic about the paper was because mixing it for a previous engine made by the same team a year ago, Glaze: https://shawnshan.com/files/publication/glaze.pdf

But Nightshade is a different beast. So, good, and mea culpa. 😅

@davidrevoy @constancies would you not just start your own instance - other instances would send you stuff like any other instance and you just extract what you want from there?

@aturff @constancies Yes, the Fediverse had a case recently of exactly that. But it was quickly spotted as a bad actor by other instances and block-listed in less than a couple of days from almost all the landscape afair.
The main challenge of an instance like that would be to just look like a regular instance and have similar activities. Anything a bit different quickly become visible on the log of many servers.