A scraper republished Cara's whole 12-million-image library for less than $10

Cara's team learned about the dump from its own users, who tagged the account because the scraper was, as Jingna Zhang described it to WIRED, gloating on Reddit and looking for other people to join him in doing something with the dataset ^[8]. Detection ran through a subreddit. Nothing in a stream of requests for public pages announces that the client on the other end is assembling a training set, which is why the alarm came from outside the system rather than inside it.

The two features Cara advertises sit at either end of that request without touching it. The AI filter governs what gets into the library, and Glaze works on the pixels themselves, masking style so a model that trains on the file has a harder time mimicking it ^[4]. Neither is in the path when a client asks for a public page and keeps what the server sends, and WIRED reports that preventing scrapes is nearly impossible ^[5].

The arithmetic on the transfer is worth doing on paper. Twelve million works inside 12 terabytes averages about a megabyte an image ^[1], and the under-$10 figure the scraper claimed comes to roughly 83 cents per terabyte on his side of the wire ^[2]. The second dataset covered about 71 percent of the library by count ^[3]. The third covered about 1 percent ^[4], and the small one is the one that carried user bios.

Then there is what artists did, which is the number a product team should actually look at. Some deleted their portfolios and abandoned the site, and Zhang says that if it makes them feel better, she supports it ^[16]. These are people who left platforms like Instagram, where content is explicitly available to Meta as training data ^[18], for an app whose product was a promise about consent. When the promise failed, they removed the asset. The deletions, not any session-depth chart, are what recorded that shift.

Every remedy in the story arrives after the copy exists. Zhang's legal GoFundMe was past 83 percent of its $120,000 goal by Thursday ^[15][5], she is a plaintiff in two artist class actions, one against Stability AI, Midjourney and others and one against Google ^[10], and the man who took the whole library now regrets it and is collaborating with her on an open-source protection tool ^[11]. Meanwhile the laws have not caught up, which is how a scraper gets to call this technically legal ^[9].

The promises on a marketing page tend to sort by where each one is actually enforced. Intake you control outright. Serve time you control at a price, which is exactly what Zhang is naming when she says the team has done the right things within limits without making the app horrible to use, and that temporary login gates are not really a solution to an internet-wide problem ^[17]. Everything downstream of a successful request is a request you are making of strangers. Zhang's own line is that Cara has almost certainly been scraped before and cannot guarantee complete security ^[19], and that is a far better sentence to have published in advance than to be explaining afterwards.