GoKawiilCara photo-sharing app hit by mass AI scraping, prompts scraper-turned-collaborator tool
Cara, an artist portfolio platform built to shield creators from AI training scrapes, suffered three large-scale data harvests starting August 13, including a 12-terabyte dump of roughly 12 million images posted publicly on Reddit. The person behind the scrape admitted doing it for under $10 and bragged about the effort, sparking backlash among Cara's 1.5 million users who had joined specifically to avoid this kind of exploitation. Founder Jingna Zhang says the incident exposed how legally murky and technically feasible such scraping remains despite platform defenses like Glaze.
GoKawiil's interpretation of the reporting above, not reported fact.
The episode shows that even platforms explicitly built around consent and anti-scraping tools can't fully stop determined actors, since current law hasn't caught up with automated harvesting at scale. It also highlights a strange dynamic where someone responsible for scraping artists' work is now reportedly working with the community on tools to help protect it, raising questions about accountability versus practical fixes. For artists already suing AI companies over unauthorized training data, this reinforces the sense that no space online is fully safe from exploitation.
- Cara, built to protect artists from AI scraping, was hit by three major scrapes starting August 13.
- A 12TB, 12-million-image dataset was leaked publicly on Reddit by a scraper who called it 'a fun project.'
- The incident underscores gaps in legal protections against AI data harvesting even on consent-focused platforms.
Wacom Intuos Pro Drawing Tablet — Cara's 1.5 million artists are making original work by hand, and a pen tablet like the Wacom Intuos Pro is the classic tool for that job. Its pressure-sensitive pen and customizable shortcut keys make illustration, painting, and photo retouching feel natural in apps like Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint. A solid pick if the story has you wanting to create art rather than scrape it.
See Wacom Intuos Pro Drawing Tablet on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.Source: wired.com — Miles Klee, 2026-08-28
Published there as: “He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them”
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