Image-Sharing Platform Cara Faces Repeated Scraping, Founder Calls for Regulatory Action Against AI Training Data Theft
Jingna Zhang, founder of the image-sharing platform Cara, has issued an urgent appeal to creators and policymakers following two instances of her platform being scraped for AI training data within a week. Cara was established in 2023 to provide artists with a safe space, free from AI scraping, and its popularity surged after Meta announced plans to train its AI models on Instagram and Facebook posts. Despite moderation tools designed to filter out AI-generated images, 12 million images were scraped from Cara by an individual who boasted about the 'fun project' on Reddit. A second scraping incident saw Cara's data uploaded to Hugging Face, an AI developer platform. Hugging Face stated that because the dataset contained only links to image files, not the images themselves, it did not breach their terms of service and could not be removed. Zhang expressed deep frustration, highlighting that laws and governments are not adequately protecting artists from non-consensual scraping, which has resulted in significa... 
