Cara Suffers 3rd Scraping Attack in 10 Days as 123,000 Images Hit Academic Torrents
Updated
Updated · Forbes · Aug 23
Cara Suffers 3rd Scraping Attack in 10 Days as 123,000 Images Hit Academic Torrents
2 articles · Updated · Forbes · Aug 23
Summary
Academic Torrents hosted a new Cara dataset on Aug. 22, marking the artist network’s third scraping attack in 10 days and exposing copyrighted images, metadata, text posts and user bios.
123,000 images were taken in the latest scrape, while founder Jingna Zhang said the repeated attacks now appear targeted at artists who oppose generative AI and rely on Cara’s consent-based rules.
Nearly 12 million Cara images were scraped in the first known attack and posted to Reddit, then a second dataset appeared on Hugging Face, where the platform said it hosted only URLs and metadata, not the artworks themselves.
1.5 million users have joined Cara since 2022 as a refuge from AI training practices, but Zhang said the scrapes are adding thousands of dollars in server costs and forcing a GoFundMe push for legal defense.