The man who scraped Cara's archive is now co-building a tool to protect artists
Cara, run by photographer Jingna Zhang and home to about 1.5 million artists, was hit by three major scrapes from 13 August; the first scraper announced he had pulled an archive of 12 million works for under 10 dollars. WIRED reports the same person regretted it and accepted working with Zhang on an open-source tool to protect artists. The game archive The Cutting Room Floor went offline after a denial-of-service attack it ties to a user who evaded its language-model block.
Artificial Intelligence··Morning
Cara faced three major scraping waves
Cara, run since 2023 by photographer Jingna Zhang and a crew of volunteers and now home to about 1.5 million artists, was hit by three major scrapes starting on 13 August. The first scraper announced on a Reddit forum that he had pulled a 12-terabyte archive of 12 million works, close to the site's entire public library, for under 10 dollars, and later deleted the post. WIRED reports that the same person came to regret it and agreed to work with Zhang on a new open-source tool to protect artists.[1]
The second and third scrapes carried links and images
The second scrape took about 8.5 million links plus metadata such as usernames, titles and tags and uploaded them to Hugging Face. When takedown requests arrived, Hugging Face said it would notify the user to remove the personal metadata but would not do the same for the links, because it hosts no copies of the artworks. In the third, on 22 August, 123,000 images along with text posts and user bios containing personal information were shared on a torrent site. Zhang opened a fundraiser for legal costs with a 120,000 dollar goal and had passed 100,000 dollars as of Thursday.[1]
The game archive closed after an attack
The Cutting Room Floor, a game archive founded in 2002, went offline after a denial-of-service attack. The site had been serving its own MS Paint images to requests coming from language models, and it holds responsible a user it had banned for reaching the site through Claude. By the site's account, the banned user wrote on X that he would complain to the hosting provider and look into the domain and its operators, then evaded the ban and filed abuse reports. Co-founder Xkeeper said he had made no direct accusation and had only noted that the post came immediately before the attack. That is the site's own reading, and it carries no independent confirmation.[2]
