The man who scraped Cara's art now helps artists fight AI

A Reddit user scraped 12 million images from Cara, an art platform built for creators who don't want their work used to train AI, and posted the entire archive as "a fun project," WIRED reported. Weeks later, he's helping Cara's founder build a tool to stop people from doing exactly what he did.

Cara has drawn about 1.5 million artists since photographer Jingna Zhang and a small volunteer crew launched it in early 2023. The app filters out AI-generated images and offers Glaze, a tool that masks an image's style to disrupt AI mimicry. None of that stops scraping itself, which Zhang says is close to impossible to prevent.

Starting August 13, Cara was hit three times in under two weeks. A user going by MandarinDawnPoppy994 posted a 12-terabyte archive covering nearly the platform's entire public library on r/DefendingAIArt, saying it cost him under $10. A second user, CaptiveDreamer, pulled 8.5 million links plus usernames and tags to Hugging Face; the platform agreed to remove the personal metadata but kept the links up, since "no copies of the artworks are hosted here." A third scraper took 123,000 images and user bios containing personal information and posted them to Academic Torrents on August 22.

• Aug 13: 12M images, 12TB archive, posted to r/DefendingAIArt, cost under $10
• Mid-August: 8.5M links plus metadata uploaded to Hugging Face by a second scraper
• Aug 22: 123,000 images plus personal user data posted to Academic Torrents
• Cara's GoFundMe: $120,000 goal for legal fees, over $100,000 raised
• Lantern: open-source tool, one-way image fingerprint, scans new AI datasets for matches, alerts artists

Zhang, who is separately part of class actions against Stability AI, Midjourney, and Google over AI training data, has raised more than $100,000 of a $120,000 GoFundMe goal for legal fees. "I just feel it's targeted and very hurtful," she told WIRED, adding that "laws are not caught up on" protections against this kind of harvesting. Some Cara users have already deleted their portfolios and left. Zhang doesn't discourage it, but pushes back on the idea that leaving makes anyone safer: "Bigger platforms get scraped more, so that makes me feel worse."

The MandarinDawnPoppy994 post came from someone who goes by Heft, a student with a software background who spoke to WIRED over Discord using a pseudonym after receiving doxing and death threats. Heft says the scrape started as a technical project with no plan to publish it, and that he got "carried away by trolling in the comments" once he posted it as an attempted ragebait. He didn't expect the reaction: people "sharing how they were having panic attacks over the scrape, how they deleted their entire portfolios from the internet."

Heft joined Cara's Discord as a troubleshooter, showing the team how their proposed fixes could still be broken, something Zhang says he can do "in like a few minutes, literally." The two are now building Lantern, an open-source tool that lets artists create a "one-way fingerprint" of their work without storing the images themselves. Lantern scans new public AI datasets, and if a match turns up, the artist gets a notification and a link so they can request removal or file a takedown.

Cara's fight sits alongside a wider pattern of creators pushing back against AI's data appetite, from UK actors demanding legal ownership of their own voices to reporting on how Amazon has scanned and destroyed rare books to train its own models. Zhang doesn't expect the pattern to fade. "Getting attacked by AI is just going to become so, so commonplace," she said.

This piece is informational, not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset.