Do you like art? I hope you like art, for your own sake, as it makes life slightly better. In fact, if you play tabletop role-playing games or write on the side, you may rely heavily on artists to create visuals for your ideas. Artists have a dedicated foothold in a wide range of creative communities at all levels, and that foothold has been in danger since the advent of generative AI images.
Generative AI offers an extremely tempting offer: whatever you can write, it can draw in any style and to whatever extent you may desire. While this art is still not nearly as refined as that made by a trained artist, it’s usually good enough for concept art and basic ideas can be communicated. Hundreds of small-time creatives have flocked to generative art to be used as their experimenting grounds for visual representations of their ideas for free or cheap. Wanna get character art for your Dragonborn Paladin? Spend a couple of minutes typing prompts and you’ll get a glossy new portrait of your character with some bonus fingers included for free.
To make matters worse, most if not all platforms for posting art have made deals with artificial intelligence companies like Chat GPT to enable data scraping. Data scraping is, put plainly, feeding thousands of images and their associated tags to an AI to train it to imitate them. Every time an artist posts their art, the AI is fed that art and trained in how to imitate it to replace the artists. Instagram and Facebook have become hostile environments for artists.
With the need for a safe haven, Cara enters the scene. Cara is a new platform created around January of 2023 in response to Meta announcing it will use images on its platforms to train its AI. Site creator Zhang Jingna created the site in protest to Meta’s scraping with plans for the site to initially grow slowly around how early artist testers use it.
It features a dual viewing experience, with a portfolio view showing completed works and high-achievement pieces, as well as a timeline view for artists' works in progress and smaller pieces being worked on. Most importantly, the platform offers built-in protection from AI through heavy content moderation via Hive and ‘poisoning’ the art with Glaze (no literally, their entire job is making art yucky for AI to scrape).
Platform features and generative AI-related services aside, why should YOU as a reader care at all about this little App? Well, my beloved nincompoop, it’s because nerd and geek culture lives and breathes art. Every small piece of merch, fan art, Original Character, t-shirt design, poster, and yes even fursona, owes its existence to an artist. Cara is setting an example, and if successful - a standard, in protecting users and small businesses from encroaching generative AI. If Cara is to keep going, it’s going to need a little help.
Cara experienced some explosive growth recently, leading to the expenses of running the site increasing 50-fold within a week. Zhang has made an incredibly encouraging announcement in response to this while also admitting to two things completely out of her control: Non-Artist Users and Donations. While Zhang openly states that the goal is not to run the site off of donations, the development team still needs time to implement changes allowing for the site to run without donations. There is no better cushion than a Scrooge McDuck mound of money to support this team as they work. Non-artist users are a more interesting issue.
I imagine this was how Zhang felt upon receiving overwhelming support
Cara is designed for artists but isn’t necessarily exclusive to them. Currently, the biggest criticism is that the platform will become a kind of Ouroboros of artists posting and consuming each other's content with little to no output going to the general populace. This is where Nerd and Geek culture comes to the rescue. Go find a new favorite sci-fi, fantasy, or steampunk artist, and let's keep this platform going! If you find an artist you like, share it down below and get some more eyes on their work.
