Cara app and AI image machine learning

Are you worried about your Instagram images being used by AI?

Hey there gorgeous,

So you may have seen a flurry of Instagram Stories posts this week about the new Cara app for artists.

Cara is a social media app that is designed to be a portfolio platform for visual artists, and as such there are plenty of people likening it to Instagram of old. There’s no video, no advertising, and your following feed is chronological! Also, AI generated art is actually forbidden.

Another reason artists are getting so excited is because Cara claims that not only can you share your work in an AI-free environment, but that the platform is actively working to prevent imagery from being replicated (or AI scraped for machine learning) through the use of a tool called Glaze.

Developed by the SAND Lab at the University of Chicago, Glaze is meant to “protect human artists by disrupting style mimicry in the training of generative AI models.”

Which means what exactly? And should you jump over and create an account as well?

Well the technicalities of how the ‘anti AI’ system operates are… pretty technical :) If it actually does work, great!

But the thing that is worth mentioning is that if you have images pretty much anywhere else online, you won’t be protected by it. If you still post on IG, machine learning is still going to be doing it’s thing on your images and words.… so from my perspective that makes this a fairly redundant feature. You would need to jump to Cara wholly and solely to make this feature be a selling point. For many of us Instagram’s still where our communities are, and our buyers, which means that’s where we need to be.

Reasons to jump on Cara if you’re considering it -

*there are no loud videos

*the following feed is chronological and easy to find

*there are no ads

*it is free to use (for now, although I have heard they have asked for donations to help keep it running… it is in Beta so the financial model they will set on to survive will need to be resolved at some point )

* getting in early will enable you to grab your handle without worrying about someone else taking off with it.

Reasons to not join Cara-

*it’s another app to add to the ‘daily to-do’ list and honestly, do we all really need another one?

*it is in its infancy so it is currently a very small (US centric) pool of people to network with and build community with

*while there has been a massive influx of people to the platform this last week, it still seems to be mostly artists… which means the people who buy from artists (apart from other artists) aren’t there yet

*also because it’s in its infancy, you will probably find it quite glitchy initially, particularly as it is overwhelmed by the massive influx of new users currently flooding in…

Should you join Cara ?

Only you can decide whether or not it will be worth your time to join up and engage.

If you do decide to join, I have an account over there @quietcreativeacademy (please note there is no s at the end of ‘Creative’ due to character limit when signing up) Come and say hi. Ostensibly I have set this account up to play around in, and am not sure how much I will post there. I want to get a feeling for the space, to see how things pan out, and to grab my handle :)

I will not however, be leaving Instagram.

Talking about IG and Meta and their AI learning models…

In addition to a flurry of posts about Cara, you may have recently seen a flurry of Stories posts on Instagram this week where content creators are effectively telling Instagram / Meta that they do not consent to having their images used for machine learning, and that copyright for all images past, present and future remains with the creator. In fact over 175K people have posted this request to their Stories!

This is what it looks like (no, I didn’t post it)

Here’s the rub though.

It’s just a Story post and it’s not legally binding. The digital equivalent of not worth the paper it’s written on if you will.

Up until quite recently there was the option to opt out directly using a link on a Facebook page, but that now no longer exists.

(I do want to stress however, that even though there was this option for a short while, it was still at their discretion whether or not Meta did let you opt out. So my personal feeling is it was just a bit of a red herring anyway.)

So, whichever way you look at it, it’s pretty much impossible to opt out.

Which leaves us where?

Shaking our fists at Meta impotently maybe?

Well not quite. While we as individuals may have little agency over the way our data is used, there are legal cases being launched in the EU at the moment against Meta AI machine learning which may result in some form of protection, or at least in the whole process being made more transparent. And I would hope similar actions will be taken elsewhere as well.

Where this all ends up going and how long it takes is anyone’s guess. So at the moment it is really a case of wait and see.

Which is all to say, if you want to continue to use Instagram, we’re not currently able to stop them from using our images and words to train their AI. It’s not just Instagram though. AI is infiltrating everything and is being trained on basically all of our interactions online. The only way we can truly opt out is by opting out of having an online presence. Which is much much easier said than done.

If you are in the early stages of your business, and if your products are very much visual in nature, marketing it and them online is hands down the best way to become known and build your business to become profitable and self sustaining.

The social proof of having thousands of Instagram followers will open many doors for you. I cannot stress this enough.

A large Instagram following will have magazines knocking on your door to interview you, shops making contact to sell your work, galleries taking you on and clients trusting that what you say you will deliver, you will.

Meta training it’s AI on you is, unfortunately at this stage, the cost to do so.

X Ilona

PS If you missed last weeks Letters, a little heads up that my 1:1 Coaching spots for next quarter are now open. If you are in the early stages of your Instagram journey the 4 week or 3 month options would probably be best. If you have worked with me before and are after some refinement in your IG strategy the 60 min session would have you covered.

Oh and I have a new Instagram handle. Come say hi! Xx