AI Backlash: Kara and the ‘Not AI’ Rage Against the Machine

A growing number of creators and online platforms are openly rejecting artificial intelligence (AI), labeling their websites as free of generative AI content and attempting to outsource AI developers' work to model training.

Seattle-based social network and artist portfolio platform Cara has captured this anti-AI zeitgeist, while Philadelphia-based Not By AI has launched a campaign to help artists and creators verify their human-created work.

Started in October 2023 by artist and photographer Jingna Zhang, Kara aims to be an alternative to websites like DeviantArt and ArtStation, allowing images created by generative AI.

“I've waited for ArtStation and waited for them to improve their position,” Zhang said in a blog post. “I don't know if people don't care because they think there's nowhere to go. So if that's the case, I thought I'd build it.”

As Zhang explained, she wanted to build a platform that would facilitate discussion and learning and, crucially, avoid scraping content by default. Her service will not accept AI art until laws are passed to protect artists and AI datasets are ethically sourced.

According to Kara's FAQ, the site automatically adds “NoAI” tags to images uploaded to the platform, which is intended to teach content scraping from generative AI companies not to collect images on Kara. But the site admits there are limits to what it can do.

“No image publicly displayed on the Internet can be completely protected from unethical exploitation if companies and bad actors are determined to do so,” Cara explained. “So while we're committed to removing the burden from artists to keep their creations from being added to AI datasets as much as possible, we're facing the same restrictions that all other sites are currently going through and we can't guarantee that the labels will be the only ones that fully protect creators.”

In addition to AI-generated images, Cara's policy prohibits the posting of NFTs generated using AI.

“As a platform, we do not want to foster a get-rich-quick scheme or a culture of obscurity, and it is outside of our terms and conditions to use Cara to promote such activities,” Cara said. “Furthermore, many NFT projects use artwork created by AI image generation, which is considered a violation of our rules and is not allowed in portfolios.”

For AI imagery, Cara turned to an unnamed third party, saying they “don't have the manpower to manually review each image upload” and that the service doesn't include AI model training.

Cara has separately partnered with SAND Lab, the developer of the Glaze project, which is building disruptive technology for AI model training on artists' images.

Glaze said it uses machine learning algorithms to make subtle changes to digital images. While these changes are invisible to the human eye, the image has changed enough behind the scenes to prevent AI model trainers from exploiting them.

Cara and his anti-AI stance caused an influx of users, which led to some growing pains. When Zhang announced on June 2 that Kara had hit 300,000 users, the site was suffering from downtime due to its load.

“We're about 900,000 users now, but it's been stressful,” Zhang told Wired yesterday. “I saw a bill from a service provider, and it was almost $100,000 for six days.”

Meanwhile, Not By AI is a subscription-based badge for artists, bloggers, and content creators that can be added to their website to declare that 90% of their content is human-generated.

The regulation does not cover all AI — generating, editing or interpreting content are acceptable uses, the project explains.

“This means that if you use AI for brainstorming or concepting, generate 9% of your content, and employ AI to find typos in all of your content, you're still abiding by the 90% no AI rule,” the team said.

Subscriptions range from a $5.00 per month “starter” tier to a $12.00 “enterprise” tier, depending on user needs, as well as a flat $99.00 badge-only option.

“Adding our Not AI badge to your content is an efficient way to showcase your human-generated content,” the team said. “However, recognizing that our badges can be misused, we strongly encourage you to create a project page that describes a human-centered approach to content if we use our badges commercially.”

Not by AI and Kara did not respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

Artists and writers face an uphill battle to prevent their work from being collected by AI web scrapers claiming fair use. Last year, a Japanese court ruled that using data sets to train AI models does not violate local copyright laws.

While the AI ​​model developer complied with requests to remove the content, some, like digital artist Greg Rutkowski's work, were re-uploaded by users after it was removed from Stable Diffusion in July.

Artists have turned to the legal system with varying degrees of success. In October, a federal judge ruled that AI-image generator Midjourney and digital art platform DeviantArt did not provide enough evidence to support their claims of copyright infringement.

“Plaintiffs have failed to allege certain persuasive facts that DeviantArt played any positive role in creating training images by scraping and using Anderson's and other registered works,” the judge wrote. “The complaint, instead, acknowledges that the scraping and creation of training images was done by LAION in the direction of Stability and that Stability used the training images to train for Stable Diffusion.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.