I’ve beat this drum before, but this has the same gotcha as permissively licensed code.
You put it out there, and people WILL do things with your code you don’t like. And you cant really stop it if they are motivated.
In absence of legal protection (which scrapers dont seem to care about these days), you pick exposure, or control, on a spectrum. You cant have your cake and eat it.
I find it extremely sad in the Cara situation, because this person is basically getting trolled, and by their own words they are already close to burning out.
The people scraping Cara are not AI companies looking for cheap training data. They are just twitter trolls toying with someone. They are not gonna spend the money and expertise required to use that art to train an AI, at best they’ll make a shitty LoRa which nobody will use because it will have no value. They are not doing it for any nefarious reason other than : 1. it’s cheap, 2. it works (the admin responds with intensity), 3. it is not illegal.
So the Cara admin is gonna compound their own burnout by piloting a crowdfunding campaign that will end up in heartbreak because no honest lawyer will take a case like that. And this will do nothing to advance Cara’s original mission which is to be a social space free from AI slop.
I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Cara ends up closing shop, all because the owner wasn’t clear-headed enough to disengage from internet trolls.
Because of the context. At no point were AI labs mentioned in the story, it is all about these assholes from “pro-ai” spaces who scrape the platform and then brag about it and publicly taunt the Cara admin. You can go see them in their stupid little subreddits and such, they are not shy about it.
Now for the other side of the question : why on earth would an AI company, who is already getting sued left and right for infringement, get into a public spat with the admin of a marginal community ? And for a dozen million images of mixed styles and media, that would barely move the needle of an image gen model. It doesn’t add up.
Well, the ones advertising it are not AI companies.
And I think they’re more interested in bulk data than spending their expensive manpower on cracking some niche site. But I suppose we dont know for sure; they could have been partially scraped, silently.
Also, a slop free space is a much more viable goal, IMO. I kinda forgot thats the other half of the premise.
But I think the community needs to loosen up on the “defeating scrapers” thing though, as that is certainly pressuring the admin. They can make scraping inconvenient enough to act as a deterrent, but beyond that is a recipe for stress.
It’s a shame cause the idea of a cozy, human-centered place on the modern internet is a sweet proposition in itself. Not everything needs to be a war, and you always have the option of letting go of things you can’t control.
I’ve beat this drum before, but this has the same gotcha as permissively licensed code.
You put it out there, and people WILL do things with your code you don’t like. And you cant really stop it if they are motivated.
In absence of legal protection (which scrapers dont seem to care about these days), you pick exposure, or control, on a spectrum. You cant have your cake and eat it.
I find it extremely sad in the Cara situation, because this person is basically getting trolled, and by their own words they are already close to burning out.
The people scraping Cara are not AI companies looking for cheap training data. They are just twitter trolls toying with someone. They are not gonna spend the money and expertise required to use that art to train an AI, at best they’ll make a shitty LoRa which nobody will use because it will have no value. They are not doing it for any nefarious reason other than : 1. it’s cheap, 2. it works (the admin responds with intensity), 3. it is not illegal.
So the Cara admin is gonna compound their own burnout by piloting a crowdfunding campaign that will end up in heartbreak because no honest lawyer will take a case like that. And this will do nothing to advance Cara’s original mission which is to be a social space free from AI slop.
I wouldn’t be the least surprised if Cara ends up closing shop, all because the owner wasn’t clear-headed enough to disengage from internet trolls.
How are you so certain about this?
Because of the context. At no point were AI labs mentioned in the story, it is all about these assholes from “pro-ai” spaces who scrape the platform and then brag about it and publicly taunt the Cara admin. You can go see them in their stupid little subreddits and such, they are not shy about it.
Now for the other side of the question : why on earth would an AI company, who is already getting sued left and right for infringement, get into a public spat with the admin of a marginal community ? And for a dozen million images of mixed styles and media, that would barely move the needle of an image gen model. It doesn’t add up.
Well, the ones advertising it are not AI companies.
And I think they’re more interested in bulk data than spending their expensive manpower on cracking some niche site. But I suppose we dont know for sure; they could have been partially scraped, silently.
This is a good take.
Also, a slop free space is a much more viable goal, IMO. I kinda forgot thats the other half of the premise.
But I think the community needs to loosen up on the “defeating scrapers” thing though, as that is certainly pressuring the admin. They can make scraping inconvenient enough to act as a deterrent, but beyond that is a recipe for stress.
It’s a shame cause the idea of a cozy, human-centered place on the modern internet is a sweet proposition in itself. Not everything needs to be a war, and you always have the option of letting go of things you can’t control.