He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them
wired ·
Cara, an art portfolio platform designed for creators opposed to AI training on their work, was hit by three major data scrapes in August 2026, alarming its 1.5 million artists and spiking server costs. The first scrape, by a Reddit user who posted a 12-terabyte archive of 12 million images, sparked widespread debate and copycat attacks, including a second scrape of 8.5 million links uploaded to Hugging Face and a third of 123,000 images with personal data. Founder Jingna Zhang, frustrated by legal limits and user departures, launched a GoFundMe for legal defenses, raising over $100,000. Unexpectedly, the initial scraper, who goes by Heft, apologized and began collaborating with Zhang on an open-source tool called Lantern. Lantern fingerprints artists' images and scans public AI datasets to notify artists when their work appears, allowing them to seek removal. Zhang hopes the incident will draw policymakers' attention, as she believes such attacks will become increasingly common.
wired