Cara (app)

Cara

Type of site	Art portfolio Social networking service
Available in	English
Founder(s)	Zhang Jingna
URL	cara.app
Registration	Optional
Launched	December 15, 2022 (2022-12-15)
Current status	Active

Cara is an image sharing platform founded by Zhang Jingna that opened for public testing on January 2, 2023. It was created as a portfolio sharing and a social networking site for artists and creatives. It is available both as an app and as a website, and is run by Zhang and a group of volunteers. Cara states that it is "creators-first" and, upon its founding, was intended to protect human artists from the rapidly-proliferating AI-generated art on other larger social media platforms, such as Instagram or Facebook, as a part of Meta Platforms. After Meta announced its decision to train its AI on all user-created content starting June 26, 2024, Cara quickly rose in popularity, growing from around 40,000 users to 650,000 in a single week, as artists migrated to avoid having their art trained on without proper procedures for compensation. Zhang has also stated that she has purposely avoided venture funding for Cara, as she does not want outside influence from investors to interfere with the interests of the platform and the artists on it.

Cara has filters in place to prevent AI-generated art from being uploaded onto the site, stating in its about page that Cara will not "host AI-generated portfolios unless the rampant ethical and data privacy issues around datasets are resolved via regulation." Cara at one point also featured Glaze technology developed by SAND Lab at the University of Chicago that "poisons" the image if it is used in training sets for AI models. Artists were free to "glaze" their art before uploading it; however, the feature has since been paused after it was taken down for "security and access issues."

The growth of Cara was also driven by "general dissatisfaction with existing platforms and their lack of engagement," which has been an issue even before social media platforms such as Meta announced their plans to train user data for AI. However, some have also expressed concerns that Cara may be too "artist-centric," and that one of its weak points is a lack of a non-artist audience to gain exposure to artists. Others have pointed out that companies such as Google and OpenAI started out with good intentions just as Cara did, but later reneged on their mottos and mission statements in the name of profit.

Zhang is among a group of many creators, including George R. R. Martin and The New York Times, who have filed lawsuits against large tech companies like Google over freely scraping the internet for content to use in their AI training data, much of which is copyrighted. Cara was created as a shield for artists to guard against AI-scraping.