Artist Platform Cara Hit by Third Data Scrape in 10 Days

A social network built specifically to shield artists from AI training datasets has become the target of repeated data scraping attacks, underscoring the intensifying conflict over consent and copyright in the age of generative AI.

Cara, which hosts 1.5 million users who explicitly opt out of AI training, experienced its third security breach in ten days when scrapers published copyrighted images and user metadata to Academic Torrents on August 22, according to founder Jingna Zhang. The platform had already been scraped twice before, with datasets appearing on Reddit and Hugging Face.

"This is now a targeted attack meant to cause artists pain," Zhang wrote on X. "Scrapers know we're a volunteer project with no financial means to respond. So they say it's legal, believing themselves to be untouchable."

A refuge under siege

Zhang, a fashion photographer whose work has appeared in Vogue and Time, launched Cara as a public benefit corporation in late 2022. The platform offers functionality similar to Instagram but with explicit terms of service prohibiting AI scraping and technical features designed to protect artist rights.

The service emerged in response to the first wave of generative image models like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which trained on massive archives of copyrighted images scraped from the internet without artist permission. For working artists who need to share their portfolios publicly to attract clients, Cara represented a middle ground—a place to maintain visibility without implicitly consenting to AI training.

The initial scraper, posting under the handle "MandarinDrawnPoppy994" to the subreddit r/DefendingAIArt, archived nearly 12 million images from Cara. "Scraping is necessary to develop good models," the poster wrote. "It's like building a highway – some houses must be demolished, but in the end everyone benefits."

Zhang says she convinced the original scraper to remove the dataset, and that individual has since offered to help create an open-source tool for detecting when artwork appears in new training datasets.

Platform responses vary

When the second scrape appeared on Hugging Face, the platform's Trust and Safety team declined to remove it, stating that because no copies of artworks were hosted on their servers—only URLs pointing to Cara—there was nothing to disable through their takedown process. Hugging Face did not respond to requests for comment, according to the report.

The third attack on August 22 captured 123,000 images plus a separate dataset containing users' text posts, bios, and profile information, now hosted on Academic Torrents.

Why it matters

The Cara attacks reveal a fundamental tension in AI development: whether the imperative to advance technology justifies overriding individual consent. While some AI advocates frame data scraping as a necessary cost of progress, artists argue their livelihoods depend on controlling how their work is used—especially when that use involves training systems designed to replace them. The financial strain on Cara, which faces thousands of dollars in unexpected server costs from handling scraper traffic, also highlights how volunteer-run ethical alternatives struggle against well-resourced actors who view consent as negotiable.

Zhang characterized the attacks as motivated by animus against the anti-AI stance itself. "They're like, 'you say you want to protect artists, you say you're opting out. So we're going to violate your consent, violate your saying no,'" she said. "At this point this is nothing but malicious, targeted harassment meant to inflict harm."

The platform is exploring a GoFundMe campaign to cover legal and infrastructure costs.

These details were first reported by Rob Salkowitz in Forbes.