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.