He scraped 12M artworks from Cara for AI—now he's building tools to protect artists
nordicinst · x · 2026-08-28
WIRED reports that Cara, the image platform for creators who refuse AI training use, has attracted 1.5 million artists and offers protections like Glaze. But blocking scraping itself is nearly impossible: starting August 13, Cara suffered three major scrapes that spiked server costs and alarmed its community.
The first incident came when a Reddit user posted a 12TB archive of 12 million works—essentially Cara's entire public library—to r/DefendingAIArt, saying it cost him under $10. Founder Jingna Zhang learned of it via user tags; the scraper was gloating and recruiting others to use the dataset.
Now that same scraper is collaborating on tools to safeguard creators, a shift from adversarial scraping to collaborative protection, with Europe leading the charge.
Related event: Crawler Who Scraped Cara Joins Its Founder to Build Anti-Scraping Tool(2 posts)→
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