The scraper who archived all of Cara now helps artists track their scraped work
zemotion · x · 2026-08-29
WIRED reports a dramatic turn: Heft, the scraper who posted a 12-TB archive of 12 million images from the artist platform Cara to Reddit, is now collaborating with founder Jingna Zhang on a new tool called Lantern.
- Cara, built for artists who refuse AI training on their work, has drawn 1.5 million users; it suffered three major scrapes starting in August, with the first costing the scraper under $10.
- Lantern lets artists fingerprint their images and periodically scans newly published public AI image datasets, notifying them when their work appears; it is open-source for anyone to inspect or contribute.
- Zhang calls it an imperfect workaround born of a regulatory vacuum, aimed at giving artists more control and awareness over how their work gets hoovered up.
Related event: Crawler Who Scraped Cara Joins Its Founder to Build Anti-Scraping Tool(2 posts)→
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