Fuck AI

Recently I've been embedding metadata into pictures I upload which include the cost to license out the image for AI training: 1 million dollars. Then, if an AI company scrapes my picture, I can take that company to court and have a concrete dollar amount for how much that company owes me for damages.

I hope shitty things like this motivate people to organize into alternative networks, like local meshnets and more in-person community interactions. The internet may be hopelessly broken at this point.

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.

Mildly hot take:

It really points to these people just having really bad moral compasses.

In other words, these people are actually just bad people, as weird as that is to realize.

Like if you don't understand that what you're doing is wrong, that does not entirely excuse you from moral judgement of the rest of society; if you fundamentally disagree with the premise of something being good or bad with another person, it does follow that they're a bad person. Which then does mean that people doing shit like this are objectively bad people, doing objectively bad things.

Which brings back to question of how bad something needs to be for it to constitute being "evil". I'm not religious, but there's a certain level of how something bad impacts others, intent, and context, that I believe most people would classify as evil. Not demons and hell and that nonsense, but effectively something worth crusading against and being extremely hostile towards. Something that threatens life and peace, and of a certain scale, I would call "evil".

So these bad people doing stuff like this, with the intent of stealing on a massive scale, directly against the autonomy and will of artists... Not exactly evil, at first.. but if it results in actual harm, and if that harm is intended... that, I would define as an act of evil.

So yeah, just a topic or perspective I think worth discussing. We all know something's really wrong right now in society, and I think there's a level of even language and ethics that hasn't caught up or isn't in full view. I also realize the dangers of proposing this and it being a slippery slope to what it may even advocate. That being said, again, I think it's a perspective worth entertaining at least from a philosophical perspective and discussion.

Cara uses third-party content moderation services from Hive (an AI company) to prevent AI-generated art from being uploaded onto the site.

Hahahahaha so this friendly™ Chinese platform basically feeds every uploaded image into an AI to determine if it's AI.

Just self host your own personal blog/art or use a proper website and not that shitshow.

Well I was gonna go tell them to off themselves in a plethora of colorful ways on reddit, but it seems their account was banned lol.

This asshole is testing some deep waters when it comes to contributory liability of copyright infringement in the US: https://www.cooley.com/news/insight/2026/2026-03-26-supreme-court-confirms-limits-on-contributory-liability-for-copyright-infringement

An app like Cara, that positions itself as an Anti-AI art platform, would obviously be targeted by anyone who's offended simply by its existence.

Not only its a honey-pot of art, it's also a challenge for any self proclaimed ai "prompt kiddie" to hurt the other side.

They need to apply better protections to at least make mass scraping by bots a bit more difficult and expensive.

It's amazing how disrespectful these idiots can be. They'll destroy and steal people's work, feed it to Big Corpo™ Slopinator 4.7, get shit-tier content in return, just because they chugged the kool-aid that this tech with billions of dubious investments is the future of everything.

You can tell just by their tone that they know what they're doing is immoral and wrong, but they still do it. Hard to not become a misanthrope living in this society.

" I may soon have a way to remove nightshade" lol good luck with that

This isn't just about scraping the images, it's about sending the message

Yeah good luck asshole.

PSA to anyone who uploads art online, anywhere. Poison it first. Use the latest version. I'm sorry but you are in an arms race now. Dickhead over here is full of shit, but even if they're not, Nightshade is updated fast.

But, isn’t this just a demonstration that Cara isn’t doing what it’s built for? If one person, who is honest about what they did, is able to scrape all the art for $10, wouldn’t the major AI companies also be able to scrape it?

And not only would they not be honest about it, it seemed like this went completely unnoticed by Cara.

"defending AI art".... jesus, that's sad.

I love making art and I'm gonna stay focused on that instead of getting mad because wow some people are just worthless

"We are the Swarm. We consume all."

I wanted to verify this. It was real but has been since removed and judging from the missing comments by the moderators nonetheless, so that's a W. Then I looked through this community and here are some neat experiences I had:

• One post's subject was a goober on social media saying "cannibalism is more justified than ai art". I looked through all the comments - none of them even entertained the possibility of this being a joke.

• In fact it is very often that they just post some stupid anti-ai screenshot where the original post had like two impressions and title it the ai equivalent of 'they are coming for our guns!'

• I sorted by Top/Year. First post was a random drawing someone made with their hand and said "i'm not good at prompting so I drew this with my hand". My flabers have been gasted.

• It's pretty weird because it's like looking in a mirror in a way: their arguments are exactly the same as I thought they were* - and the way they are posting about us is sadly pretty similar to the way we are posting about them. This post included.

*And yeah, I think those arguments are terrible, but for some reason they don't and that weirds me out how when presented with the same arguments people can just go in completely different directions.

So this was my shallow dive into a community that shall not be named on a platform that shall not be named. Thanks for coming to my TEDTalk.

Going out of their way to disseminate creators' art in the specific way they have asked not to, then to go and gloat about it is peak disrespectful jerk behaviour, and seems commonplace among the pro-AI crowd.

To give an analogy, if someone cooked a noodle dish, shared it with the public and asked people to use a fork or chopsticks, it would be one thing for you to take some home and eat it with your hands on your own. Weird but whatever. But to go and post online about them eating with their hands or another way aside, mocking the wishes of the creator for any reason other than disability accommodation, that's not illegal but it is hella disrespectful and hurtful.