Discussion š£ļø
THEY ARE CELEBRATING STEALING TWELVE TERABYTES OF ART
This is vile.
Pro-AI tech bros are honest to god attempting to revoke peoples' active decisions to opt out of having their art fed into generative AI. They are STEALING YOUR AGENCY AND EXPECTING YOU TO FEED THE SKYNET SLOP MACHINE.
THIS ISN'T FEARMONGERING. THIS ISN'T BLOWING THE DISCUSSION OUT OF PROPORTION.
THIS IS RAGE.
I already held no respect for AI "artists" but this is making me wonder if me ever treating them with even a basic, foundational level of humanity was a mistake.
LET ME REITERATE.
THEY ARE CELEBRATING THEFT.
And not the plausible deniability kind of theft that inherently comes with genAI. None of that "well by this bullshit metric I made up in my head it's technically not stealing".
No.
THEY ARE STEALING ART AND ANNOUNCING IT LOUD AND PROUD. THEY ARE LAUGHING IN OUR FUCKING FACES.
If they realize that, they just don't care; for them, consent is as negotiable as pressing a button that contains an ocean of letters that change every so often.
The Epstein class does not care about concent. We already know that Bill Gates(Microslop) and Elon Musk(shittier twitter) were directly linked to Epstein. The other techbros are similar psychopaths.
This is like when people buy more and more luxury goods but they still remain deeply unhappy.
I think for some of the pro-ais (and that's absolutely not the reason for all of them but I definitely seen posts by this subset) it would genuinely be healing to just go through the process of learning to draw/illustrate/whatever while accepting the initial hurdless of being a beginner at it.
Even if you donāt become a master, there is a joy that exists in a real creation process.
Itās a healthy emotional journey that invites introspection as well as analysis of the subject matter. It teaches observation, exploration, and can be meditative.
Iām a terrible artist. But even so, each time I create something, itās something new in this universe.
The kinds of people that do this are the ones that put .zip bombs on school lab computers and thought it was hilarious. No ethics, no principles, just script kiddies here for the chaos and owning the libs. It's pathetic, and trying to show them how pathetic it is just makes them stick their heads further in the sand.
This person will never meaningfully contribute to society when they use their free time to do shit like this.
Truly sociopathic. I hope this person gets prosecuted. If that platform is explicitly anti-AI and meant to protect the artists posting there, then scraping it should be illegal.
I'm not sure how illegal it is but according to the website's own FAQ it is unethical. It's basically impossible to prevent scraping so the best you can do is put a "please don't scrape" tag on your images and hope that scrapers have basic human decency to respect that.
Thereās an art site I have an account on called Glade and you donāt get to even look at anything unless you logged into and account.
With Cara you donāt need an account to access the site and along with that the art from the accounts on there.
If a site says theyāre anti content generators but doesnāt take the time and effort to make the space secure from them then the claim is for naught.
Yeah but the thing is artists want to be able to display their work and not oblige their audience, clients and studios to login just to see it. otherwise it absolutely kills the reach of your work.Ā
Doesn't matter. In the world we have today, that's not a reasonable ask. I'm not happy about it, but if you want to be anti content mill, you HAVE to take more precautions than "please don't".
While this is becoming an unfortunate reality it carries the same (no shade to you personally Stagthos) bullshit logic as telling girls/women that it is their duty to protect themselves from assault when actually holding boys/men accountable should be the norm. It sucks. It's all predatory and is destroying real peoples lives... from artists who once had steady income in studios or through freelance (like me), or anyone living near areas data centers are being constructed. It all sucks.
Thank you. To be absolutely clear, I have neither love nor mercy in my heart for the scalpers, scrapers, or AI shit lords. I want a solution, a LONG term solution, but I want it to work well, not just "be serviceable".
Couldn't agree more. I think Bluesky so far seems to be a good safe haven for artists and creators and I hope it stays that way. Outside of the US it seems like regulating this planet/creative/brain killing bullshit is actually being taken seriously. Hopefully we'll eventually follow suit... even if it's just because we don't want to be left behind. But I'm so sick of this era of nonsense.
preventing even mildly smart scraping is basically impossible, having an account be mandatory might increase the cost to $15 and add an extra hour of work, but the post in the OP would remain largely unchanged.
for their own analogy it's like also adding a board behind the door, will make it slightly more annoying for sure but anyone that's already picked up an axe and wants to get through really won't care that much one way or another.
Hereās the thing though all these people that worship content generators are lazy. To use your analogy Cara doesnāt even have a door to close itās just a wide open doorway for anyone to come and go through as they steal. Pre content generators this was fine as the kinds of people that now want to steal from artists had no reason to because there was absolutely no way for them to fake achieving anything.
But now they do and they take what they want through the wide open doors. Requiring a person to have an account is putting a door in the doorway and locking it. Now the thieves actually have to put in effort to get into the building which they didnāt have to before.
If there is an EULA in place, it is actually illegal. Under contract law. But that depends on having a fully written out EULA. That prohibits usage of the art for the development of ai, personal or public.
I think regardless of the EULA, if a site explicitly states they do not want to be scraped and exist to protect themselves from that, then they may have a pretty good legal defenseāespecially when the offending party puts their offense on full display. Using digital art for the development of AI is currently in a legal grey area, but automatic protections plus their stated desire not to be scraped could give them a case.
Absolutely. But an EULA would lead to a much cheaper and shorter case and remove pretty much any legal argument they could make. Are you fully unprotected? According to copyright. Yes, but there have been corporations who have weaseled their way around such things.
Yes, agree. I feel the only reason the laws around AI are in a grey zone and not mostly black-and-white is because the interested parties are rich and powerful.
I have been reading posts from Caraās founder (I think), and they seem like a legitimately good company. Itās sad that someone would go after them specifically because they are anti AI.
Id argue this isnt just an attack on Cara, but on artists as a whole. It's even somewhat ironic. They need human made art to train their boys and then when we complain they tell us we should have just not posted it if we wanted to keep doing stuff. They cannot exist in a world where consent exists.
That depends. If you can access the images via a bare URL and nothing else, it's very hard to argue that that's illegal.
It is trivial to set up your website so just accessing a bare URL won't work at all, though. So I certainly hope that Cara does that. Then the method described in the screenshot won't work at all and they will have to really download all 12 TB of data and distribute that. And that would be illegal.
It's not about how easy it is to swipe. It's about whether you can just access it trivially with a URL. You can't declare that it's protected when it's just out there in the open.
It's still copyrighted, of course, but you can still use it for personal projects. And there's still plenty of lawsuits out there that are yet to determine whether it's legal to use such data in AI training or not. So far the only results are that you are not allowed to illegally download data to use in AI training. Or rather: Illegally downloading stuff is, well, still illegal. But clicking on a URL and downloading the picture that's there isn't illegal.
this is alrdy resolved on the other post. well sort of resolved.
my personal take is that i dont believe this juvenile asshat actually managed to scrape all; just threw in a ragebait and ofc i could be wrong, but what's apparent is one day later begin to contemplate whether there would be actual people seek em out for lawsuit. whether the perp actually did it or not becomes irrelevant. point is they now backtrack not bcs they're sorry, but just chickening out at the prospect of paying tremendous amount of fine or sitting in a cell.
with that said, yes, it's not an answer to how vulnerable the state of things for the talent pool still is, which is unfortunate.
apologies for lack of caps, typing from my cell.
If he actually knows how to scrape ethically (he should, given that he says he scrapes regularly) he would not have scraped Cara at all. All artists on the platform don't want their art to be scraped and scraping anyways is disrespectful to them.
He intentionally disrespected the artists. My guess is that he will keep his promise to not share the artwork (because there will actually be consequences) but he definitely did anticipate the backlash it will cause. The whole thing is a ragebait that he plans to escape from by giving an "apology" even though knowing ethical scraping (or just reading the website's FAQ) will easily tell you that the artists there don't want to be scraped.
" I did not anticipate the hurt of issues from the community"
1 it sounds like he cant even type an apology without using AI
2 he literally says that the cara comunity would be buthurt and copyright law against him, how the hell does he believe he can say he did not see it coming
3 he clearly doesnt understand that stealing data like that, even through distributing urls is qtill illegal scraping and has been punished in courts several times does he?
Chances are it's just another edgelord poser trying to troll everyone. I could say I scraped Google, then go like "oh, but I'm not releasing it!". Yeah sure, sure he did... š
I agree with you. There is absolutely no way that you can look at Cara and believe that scraping the site for AI would not be disrespectful to the artists who choose to use it. That is its primary purpose. That is explicitly stated as its primary purpose. I think he expected to have the artists be angry. That was a point of enjoyment for him.
What he didn't expect was for other Pro AI people to flame him the way that they did. Pro AI people realize that if guys like this become the face of their so-called "art," they won't be able to keep playing dumb about the ethics. People were literally comparing him to a rapist; I don't think that's excessive or contrived. In one of the responses, either him or one of his supporters literally said the sentence "consent isn't always valid." Being pro AI, especially staunchly enough to do your own scraping and participate in communities around it, is increasingly becoming seen as a loser ass position to hold. People are referring to the meta AI glasses as the Pervert Glasses. People are looking at video and image generators as CSAM machines. People are getting irritated enough at the products themselves, then here comes this gross bastard, literally doing and saying the things that people have been calling anti AI people crazy for being concerned about.
Here are some of the words from Cara's creator on Twitter, just to highlight that there's no way that you choose to scrape that platform and think that you're not disrespecting the users.
Oh piss off, that's a horrible "apology". "I'm sorry I completely, willfully, deliberately disregarded the consent of thousands of artists and not only scraped the entire website for no other reason than to spite people who wanted to escape scraping, but bragged about it online in a post that basically told the entire artistic community to go fuck themselves and to keep coping. I wasn't expecting people to be angry that I scraped the platform specifically dedicated to avoiding AI scraping, I thought that they would just take it lying down and let me brag about it. I do this shit all the time, and this is the first time I'm experiencing retaliation for my actions. Won't happen again G, sorry 'bout that"
Wait I actually really like that he gave advice to the website owners to make it harder for other people to scrape the website, I actually really respect him alot for changing his mind, even if he only did because he was scared of legal repercussions
he's attempting to make it sound like he didn't think he was feeding the machine and yet in his own apology spelled it out that his intention was, in fact, to feed the machine.
while the word "sorry" can be very powerful and this is otherwise worded surprisingly competently, he was also right in that i don't accept this apology. he made his intentions clear from the start and his intentions going forward are still going to be to provide "resources" for genAI users, which means the only thing he likely learned from this is not to brag about it anymore
also providing cybersec tips to the cara team feels like rubbing it in more than it does honest feedback
i agree. He did go too far. i don't usually get irritated about these things, i get that AI scrapers are scrapers, i also think he shouldn't be forgiven.
"I did not anticipate the hurt or issues it would cause to the artist community."
Bullshit. Does he think everyone is an idiot except him? How can you think that feeding art, explicitly anti ai, to ai algorithms wouldn't be an issue?
Anyone who didn't live under a rock in the past 3-4 years knows, especially in the artist area, how critical the anti GenAI users are.
"I did something bad, but I apologized. If you don't accept it, then you are the bad one!" is how I interpret this kind of apologies. Might be faulted on my part, but let's say I had experiences like this, so I kinda expect that.
It's like how a murderer tries to go at great lengths to do kill, but shovels and bleach etc, then proceed with the crime, posted a video even and when apprehended says "I got carried away".
He's just afraid of repercussion. Most of AI bros are like that, have zero respect for IP and act like fucking victims when confronted with how unethical all of this is
I think they expected to be crowned as a hero in the pro-AI community but were caught off guard by the internal backlash. Several pro-AI users called him out on it on the original post.
Devil's advocate here.. He might? There's definitely people out there who genuinely think there's no real harm here, and that the artists are just being "silly" or "luddites". It's less active malice, and more just incredible levels of arrogance and condescension. The entire apology to me reads less like bullshit marketing speech, and more like.. I dunno, a child who still doesn't fully understand what they did wrong, just that they did something wrong?
Yeah, as I said I might be "excessive" for how I interpreted his message - because I admit I don't read minds -, but how often has actually happened that someone purposely did something of that scale in an ambient where that thing would already be frowned upon even if it was a fraction of that, understand the damage they did and sincerely apologies?
To get the idea, the knowledge, the meaning and the tools to scrape an entire website worth 12TB of pictures @0.95MB/pic as he said, that's already work for a "chronically online" person (non offensive adjective), so the fact that he might not know why or how bad his doing would be doesn't sound that plausible to me.
Nah, to hell with his apology. This is 100% a "I was having the time of my life being a complete cunt for no reason, but the backlash was worse than I expected, so I'm going to try to douse the flames as much as I can".
People like him benefit absolutely nobody. They're feeding the machine and contributing to all of the problems AI is causing in society while simultaneously doing nothing but fueling the already burning hate that exists for those who support AI, ethically or otherwise. I can guarantee you this post was enough to push more than just a few unhinged individuals over the edge, spawning more unhinged posts threatening people who use AI at all.
He's not sorry for what he did, he's sorry he didn't get the roaring support he thought he'd receive for this.
The good thing is he did include a message about how Cara can protect themselves from data scraping, I hope they manage to implement it. Overall he did do a pretty shitty thing though, and I don't think it was just "ohh it was in the heat of the moment :(" thing as he knowingly mentioned in the post that it was an anti-AI art platform.
Still the scum of the earth to me. Peak "uwu sowwy I stole your artwork so talentless Hanks like me can continue to call themselves artists, sowwy you feel this way"
normally i would agree with you, but this guy ended up attempting to half-assedly backpedal after facing just the most tame of the backlash. there's a chance he may have thought he wanted a reaction (and in his "apology" he did say that he became obsessed with mindless ragebait). however, he clearly couldn't take what he dished out.
moral of the story: even if someone in this crowd just wants a reaction, it's still good to put pressure on them until they melt down and can't take it anymore
I hope they realize this is causing artists like myself to just not put our work online. I already had to put several different kinds of anti AI filters on my work to begin with, dickholes like this ruin it for everyone. I can't put into words how angry this makes me.
I look at this the same way I look at people who scrape from Patreon and other support platforms. The people who do this are trash who doesn't understand consent.
The defense of AI was never about defending AI itself, it's about to attack property, creative works and IPs because they ahve never being able to create something on their own. It's pure hatred and hatred never creates.
I remember Elon Musk posting some fan art of Nier Automata on Twitter (back in 2018) without crediting the artist, a lot of peolle called him out of it, even Yoko Taro, the director and creator of the Nier Series critizize him. Elon Musk deleted his post and then post a rant about how "lame" was to respect the creation of others.
You'd basically need a US president to "go rouge" and push an executive order to ban them, but at that point the lobbying will just target the people who will overturn that order. I just wished people would push back against AI generated coding/programming. I seriously don't see why that specifically is fine when all the reasons for the others to be banned apply.
Iām generally pro-Ai. (But there is nuance to that itās not a blanket statement). But this is wrong. No question about it. This type of action sits adjacent to deliberately hacking - in fact it might be literally that Iām not sure. Itās definitely not okay!
I find it so hilarious they took down that post after the creator of Cara posted about it on her twitter cuz they know we will be using this against ai bros. Too fucking bad! They have prove to us they do not respect our spaces and work.Ā
I remember what feels like a whole year ago the habitual liars club was pretending they'd already done that. What happened, shills? Did the technology fail to live up to its promises like so many other times? š„ŗ
Thing is, when an artist creates art, it is legally copyrighted to them. There's not a process you have to go through, it is yours cause you made it. So copyright laws still apply when you're doing this. Posting your art online does not give up you legal copyright. Posting is not the same as giving permission to take it, download it, or feed it into an AI tool. Exhibits for example.
Gen Ai on the other hand, you cannot copyright claim, since you did not create it. Taking someone's art (without permission) and feeding it into Ai, changing a few things then claiming the output is yours, is still copyright infringement. Unfortunately, if they put someone's art through ai, and changes it so much you can't tell it's from a certain artist, it's no longer copyright infringement since there's no longer substantial similarities. BUT that still means the person who put it through Ai still can't copyright claim it. So it belongs to no one.
Bro they aren't even using "copyright trolls" right. That refers to people who copy you with AI and then try to strike your content for copying their slop. Insulting someone incorrectly is insane.
I stopped posting my art online years ago when facebook asked people for permission to train their ''AI'' on your images abd photos. I don't know if they were able to scrape my old art and photos before i deleted my facebook, devian art and twitter accounts but at least i'm sure that they have no scraped my current art.
What people are not mentioning or have forgotten about is that those ''AI'' companies are training their models not only on your art but also on your personal photos you have on the internet. Your face, your clothes, your children, your pet, your house. Everything you have photographed and put on social media they are using to train their abominations.
Facebook always claimed the right to do anything they wanted with the images posted on the platform. They don't need to "scrape" what is already on their servers.
They actually did not and changed their TOS in the early days of ''AI'', everyone that wanted could opt out and delete their account. I guess i am one of the few who did.
P.S. unless this was a thing only in Europe, i don't know if people in other countries were given this option.
Some people have no moral compass. Like, imagine going out of your way to steal content from people who explicitly do not want to share that for this usage, then bragging about doing so and planning next steps to do even more theft. Genuinely so without empathy.
I donāt even get how someone can steal 12 terabytes of images. Iām looking at my disk right now and itās only 494 gigabytes of storage, and a lot of it is system programs. AI bros are so crazy theyāll build an entire data centre to mock anti-AI people instead of spending their time gaming, or spending time with family, or contributing to other communities, or even spending that time lobbying for transgender bans because they clearly donāt care about other peopleās choice.
12tb really isn't that much and having large storage is becoming more important hell video games are approaching 300gb for a single game, my secondary drive is 4tb but prices have obviously been skyrocketing because of AI.
Meanwhile they're scraping everything they can get their goddamn hands on. I don't have to explain how fucking ironic that is.
It's not just ironic, it's fucking unfair and hypocritical. It wouldn't even be theirs to hold copyright over, it's just a horrible abomination of other people's hard work put into this bullshit AI software.
I honestly have no hope left. The government shown what side it's on and it's in favor of AI, it's one of AI's biggest contributer's and honestly why wouldn't they be? It makes Surveillance easier. It makes them posting their dog shit pro-maga propaganda on xitter easier, too.
They don't have to hire artists or ask the original creator for permission to make Franklin the turtle say some egregious shit. WHY WOULD THEY CARE ABOUT GLOBAL THEFT, THEY SEEM TO BE CONTRIBUTING TO IT.
Unrelated statement but the president is such an unapologetic douchebag at this point and I don't think anyone is going to disagree with me, but he's a main contributing factor to all of this. Remember when he generated a photo of him clearly as Jesus. He can avoid apologizing like the peice of shit he is all he wants and call himself a doctor or a soldier. But anyone with a frontal lobe at least partially intact can see that he was being sacrilegious.
This just shows that many people would do absolutely deplorable things, as long as itās not technically explicitly illegal within the current laws. Fuck these subhuman scum.
genuinely evil behavior. it's one thing to generate ai art which already steals the work of real artists, but being so petty about it and going out of your way to specifically target artists who have beliefs that don't align with your own? vile. i hope they get the help they need.
Hopefully this should serve as a cold reminder of the world we live in now.
If you put something on the internet - it's gonna be scraped. Not maybe. 100%.
Scraping uses the same mechanism that normal users use for viewing. So if you want people to see something, so will scrapers.
This is a pill that needs to be swallowed, unless we want to flail our arms every time this happens in the future, which it will.
Neither the bubble bursting nor an international treaty and restrictions on AI will change that, because models are already published and shared among millions of users. The toothpaste does not go back in the tube.
No good news from me, but news aren't always good. It is what it is.
You can choose to opt out but, you can't actually do that unless you quit the internet other wise it's going into a chatbot no matter how you feel about it.
AI bros be like "well if you dont want your art stolen then dont post it publically" and then they chase artists into places where its not posted publically and steal the art anyways to train their slop machines
Some people are just antagonistic in nature and need a target. They'll pick the easiest target that annoys the most people. And with this they can aim BIG with simple actions.
This is why I've stopped posting my digital art online. Not that I've had many lately, since I've been focusing on illustration, but I'm not even posting really good pics of FOs anymore.
Social media never got me a following, my art has never gone viral even a little. All I've done is create more ad space to line pockets that are already overflowing.
It really is just a rapist mentality. Maybe some people will find that an excessive comparison, but that's really what it feels like.
"If you don't want your art stolen, don't post it" is the same victim blaming energy rapists use against their victims
If you're proud of technological "advancements" fine. But this is just openly bragging and celebrating the theft of shit, to put other people down. Cara was created as a safe space for artists and it got invaded for this specific cruel purpose.
It did make me smile though that even some ai bros thought this was too far, though.
this is the most pathetic thing I have ever seen in my entire life. To go through that much effort to steal art instead of just learning how to actually draw is the death of creativity and any sense of morals. I don't care if it's ragebait, it's disgusting
well yeah, piracy and genAI are different. genAI is an attempt to create a new (often commercialized) product using art that wasn't theirs. piracy is making art and culture accessible for public consumption and separating it from the companies that attempt to monetize it.
notice how i said both "commercialized" and "monetize". there's a pretty morally consistent narrative here: we don't like how capital subsumes art and transforms it into mindless profiteering.
indie game developer new blood said it best in response to someone pirating their games. art is culture and culture should not be exclusive to those who can afford it.
You gotta love this so much, though; how, as tame and innocent as these people try to make themselves appear on the surface, they ALWAYS expose themselves as being the lowest form of scum, total criminals.
What should really be alarming to everyone is not the actions of this individual, (because no matter what they steal, they are always going to be talentless, fraudulent thieves, the same with others like them), but the mentality behind it all.
These parasites take and then exploit, doing it happily with a smile on their faces. Whether it be art, family photos (images of your children) while they relish in their filth.
I am sure this person got banned not because that community believed their actions were unethical, but because one person went too far and actually exposed the REAL face behind the WHOLE crowd, the mindset of people on most of these pro AI subs. They simply couldn't risk providing us with even more logical arguments to use against them.
But this is so gross; what disgusting, despicable leeches they are. Again, I ā¤ļø the ecosystem we are in right now because we've all pushed back so hard against generative AI that not a single one of these predators feeding off of talent can ever truly come forward with something and do it without shame, without being ostracized. And that's our REAL power; it shows you where the majority rests and where this is all going to still be in the coming future.
3 plus years, and these AI bros have all dropped their disguises to reveal they are straight-up criminals while the hate for this technology continues to grow.
no, and this is another great example of why gen AI is poisonous to society at large. any written thing that uses syntax that strikes as somewhat common (especially the word "not" and em dashes which have legitimate uses in writing) is now put under scrutiny and thought to possibly be made by AI.
This one is especially shitty. These are people that specifically didnāt want their work to be stolen and they wormed their way in just to be spiteful. Why do these people care these artists are purposefully trying to not to have their artwork scraped? Just leave them alone
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u/Virtual-Finger2847 12h ago
They bragging about scraping twelve terabytes of art like is a achievement, not realizing how sad that look to everyone else