Dear CaptiveDreamer
Dear CaptiveDreamer,
I know you've been getting a ton of rude requests to take down the Cara archive (One of them was a horribly structured essay by me, sorry lol). It recently occurred to me that nobody has tried saying please or being polite.
I understand that you're reluctant to take this down. I get that, but to artists who want to keep drawing, painting, sculpting, ETC, without becoming part of the machine, it feels like the finale to your favorite show, book, or movie was leaked, or like your child getting kidnapped, which is, like, the same feeling.
If you really went onto Cara, you'd see that the platform is now in ruins. Most users are blacked out, on hiatus, or have deleted their accounts. Everyone on Cara is having emotional backlash of some sort, and it's hard to watch the community fall apart like glass.
To get to the point, it would help more people than it would hurt if you could please take down the Cara Archive. I hope that in the end, everyone, whether with or against AI, could come to an agreement on how to resolve the training of these models.
Hopefully your friend someday,
Spottedleaf73658
P.S. Everyone who's seeing this, please stop the trash-talking.
P.S.S. I'm serious, no more calling people retards because they don't agree with you (you know who you are).
P.S.S.S. I'm literally just a teenager, excuse my bad jokes.
P.S.S.S.S. I'll stop now.
but to artists who want to keep drawing, painting, sculpting, ETC, without becoming part of the machine
You want AI users to stay in their own lanes? Fine. They can leave the walled garden of Cara alone. They've shown that restraint for a very long time.
But when you Cara artists go back to X, see a gen AI thread, and continue mudslinging against AI, why aren't you staying in your lane, too? AI users can click your profiles and see your Cara links perfectly fine, you know? But what makes you think AI users will stay in their lanes after that? You can't seriously expect people to respect your boundaries when you can't recognize theirs.
You also continued to lose your minds after a "defused" AI scraping attempt. Many members of the community told Heft to get his head smashed in after he apologized and provided countermeasures for future scraping attempts. How do you think that looks to others? Do you really think those verbal threats to Heft wouldn't trigger a retaliatory response from another scraper? This isn't saying that retaliation is justified. It isn't. But neither was your community telling him to get offed especially when the scraping failed and no images got out.
Furthermore, the way you guys are still losing your minds despite taunting the AI community on Twitter about Cara's Glaze protecting your works really shows you have zero confidence in it, too.
We can't force everyone to stay in their own lane, just like you can't. There will always be people that will do things like this and that, but you talk about the things we've been saying to you, but what about what you're saying to us? If you go back and look at earlier discussions, there are people on your side resorting to things like giving false descriptions and name-calling, while dancing around the topic of what actually started all this. These attacks have almost always been started on your side. Heck, I've even seen people on the Gen AI side go as far as looking into the other person's social media accounts and attacking them for how they look. I'm not saying the people on the Cara side are innocent angels, because we've done things too, but I'm trying not to come off as hostile.
We didn't start losing our minds again until after there was a second scrape, which was when most of the threatening happened, if my time frames are correct. I'm pretty sure that people on Cara had believed that Heft had sent some kind of message to CaptiveDreamer about how he'd scraped Cara so that CaptiveDreamer would do it, even though that sounds really idiotic. If my time frame is wrong, then people were just being jerks, which is not okay, but not everyone on Cara threatened Heft.
We also genuinely thought that the glaze was working, which was why there weren't any scrapes before Heft's and CaptiveDreamer's. We were confident until we found out that we were being overconfident.
Also, I'm really sorry if I provided any misinformation in this. I'm usually not the most confident person in the world.
what about what you're saying to us?
And this is exactly the problem. You point fingers at AI users, they point them back at you. But what does this back and forth get you? And why does it matter who started it? Because when an AI user clicks on an anti's profile and sees a Cara link, suddenly the whole "We just want to be left alone" doesn't feel genuine at all. Especially if Cara users are willing to leave their safe space to mudsling at others. It doesn't matter which side started the mudslinging. But the fact is, Cara users still went out and did it themselves. This perpetuates the problem and it shows they do not care about the staying in lanes as much as they suggest.
If my time frame is wrong, then people were just being jerks
This was immediately after he apologized and started providing countermeasures. So yes, your side was being jerks. This is not to say Heft and Heft's group weren't. But two wrongs don't make a right and trying to justify either side's actions yields zero progress.
We also genuinely thought that the glaze was working, which was why there weren't any scrapes before Heft's and CaptiveDreamer's. We were confident until we found out that we were being overconfident.
If you want my honest opinion, Cara's Glaze advertising took you all for a spin. Same for Nightshade. The only reason why Glaze and Nightshade seemed to have worked isn't because that they do. It's because the artwork of the people it's meant to protect just never happened to be the targets of those wanting to use their works to train for AI, and that's not meant as an insult. It's meant as a reality check.