Artists have finally had enough with Meta’s predatory AI policies, but Meta’s loss is Cara’s gain. An artist-run, anti-AI social platform, Cara has grown from 40,000 to 650,000 users within the last week, catapulting it to the top of the App Store charts.
Instagram is a necessity for many artists, who use the platform to promote their work and solicit paying clients. But Meta is using public posts to train its generative AI systems, and only European users can opt out, since they’re protected by GDPR laws. Generative AI has become so front-and-center on Meta’s apps that artists reached their breaking point
What’s keeping this from repeating the same scenario?
Nothing but by now we got used to switching service whenever it gets bad
Then maybe it’s time to switch to a FLOSS federated alternative, like Pixelfed? That way nobody can implement bad changes like this without the community fixing or forking the code.
Yup I’m already there but it’s hard to get any traction, im posting stuff into the void, its gonna take a while to get the typical Meta users over there :/
I understand but then again it goes in a circle - more content ➡️more users➡️more content
Unfortunately that isn’t really the reality. Apps like Vero have plenty of creators, but no regular users. And since there’s no regular users, it never grows beyond a network of creators trying to make it big.
Critical mass is almost impossible to overcome for a new platform. Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter all still have exponentially more users than any of their supposed alternatives, and no matter how they treat their users the vast majority of them have no problems staying.
Doesn’t the data disappear once the host decides to cease providing the service? From this perspective I don’t see how a small team or an individual could keep the data for longer compared to a large firm.
I mean avoiding AI images is baked into their mission statement. I guess they could go full asshole and renig on this, but unlike Meta who can piss off a lot of people without affecting their bottom line. If Cara renigs on their whole point of being, a huge chunk of their user base is going to run off. It would likely be suicidal and only good for a quick cash grab exit strategy. I mean, I fully believe almost anything tech should sadly be expected to crumble to enshitification on increasingly shorter arcs. If you are looking for long term quality online services that don’t decay, you are in for lots of dissapointment.