What is the buzz about Cara?

 

A little while ago I noticed a fair few YouTubers, posting about being time to leave Instagram and most are heading for Cara. I totally understood why they wanted to leave, it wasn’t just the threats of AI  “scraping” up their creations, it also had it origins in changes to the algorithm and move to the more tik tok-ish aspects like short distracting video and capturing attention so the viewer stays on the platform but moves on to the next distraction, then the next. As their attention span gets less they move on down the rabbit hole. Good for Instagram to sell the eyeball time but terrible for a creative trying to find traction, if you don’t make it in the first few minutes and/or the first few viewers, your work will disappear from even your friends, fans or collectors. Ok, good hashtags might let a few interested folk find you, but don’t hold your breath.

The result, you just hear crickets perhaps only a few of your closest friends or colleagues ever get to see your posts now. Worse the posts that you like, the ones that show great accomplishment in your art or photography don’t rate, Whereas an embarrassing photo or unfortunate typos might get shared around. Fun and incentives to post has ebbed away.

The perception that Meta was going to start training their AI systems on user data (hate to tell you but I suspect they already do) set off the alarms in many of the Instagram community. Particularly the original creatives, a sub population I aspire to belong to. Like me I think they are looking for something like Instagram was in the days before it was taken over by Meta.

So what is Cara? Its another platform to post your images (artwork & photos) promoting itself as “by artist for artist”. At the moment is a privately run service that doesn’t incorporate any artificial intelligence images and includes access to Glaze. Which claims to poison the use for neural network training on unauthorized “scraped” images by incorporating hidden codes within the digital version of the image that scramble how the image is represented. I’m still to be convinced this is a good long term solution.

So it is time to have a look, a slow and pondering wander around. I’m sure its going to have a few growing pains.