Artist Jingna Zhang built Cara, a platform explicitly intended to protect artists from having their art stolen by AI...and yet these people just won't leave them well enough alone.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2026
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Actually. I have a hot take.
Forgive me... But the solution is not to replicate Instagram. Which is what Cara does.
Nor DeviantArt, either.
That's never going to work, for precisely the above reason, and many others.
This is something that's bothered me immensely about photography (which I'm getting back into as a hobby). Because, for all the "taking a stand" the community does, what do they do en masse?
Subscribe to Adobe
Live on Instagram
Worship corporate influencers.
Upload stuff to clouds that will explicitly be used to train.
Just to start.
It infuriates me.
I'm all for the anti-slop stands, but the bulk of the community has precisely zero leg to stand on, if they're just going to fork over cash hand-and-fist to feed the beasts, and spend all their time on those platforms.
So what do we do?
Make prints. Display them! It can be in museums, festivals, meet ups, in your place, on the street, literally anywhere you want. Even if its on digital screens; as long as its in person, and the digital copy is squirreled away.
And that's if you feel strongly about the training thing. Personally, I'm more inclined to just post stuff under a permissive license places like Wikipedia could use (albeit not on Instagram).
To be clear, I don't mean to lump everyone into that. There's tons of photographers outside that bubble.
...But there are a ton in it, and they happen to be the loudest complainers.
Not putting the work online slashes accessibility and discoverability though
Yep.
Pick one:
Permissive, open visibility.
More intimate viewing, restricted usability.
Can’t have one’s cake and eat it.
People thought they could, posting on Instagram or whatever, but that was a lie from day one.
Sure we can. You don't need to either use Instagram or never use the net. That's precisely what Cara is for. Promote open source tooling and use friendly communities that don't promise to scrape your life's work.
Now how we deal with mass scrapers downloading images; that's a legal issue. One that even physical venues isn't immune to (it just adds a lot of friction).
I think there's a difference between "this person took a few images and edited them" and "I scraped an entire website to use for training AI slop".
That's the point!
The friction is the key.
If you post images on the internet, how accessible they are directly correlates to how "downloadable" they are. Trying to imitate social media while fighting all scraping is a infinite, costly battle; that's a service trying to make posts viral and inaccessible. That takes Facebook money to sustain.
And it's not necessarily some script kiddie troll that's boasting about it on Reddit who will eventually get in.
...But add fundamental friction? That raises the bar.
I think the fallacy is artists believe they need an gigantic amalgamation of online people exposed to their art, a large fraciton of the internet. That's not true. And its a deception, anyway. Smaller niches or smaller communities are fine, and they won't be such high profile targets.