Fear of AI is driving artists to Cara, but is it enough to make them quit Instagram?
Reliant on Instagram for years, these Canadian artists are betting on a new social platform
It's something that Audra Auclair does all the time — a habit she shares with more than 500 million Instagram users. Every day, she opens the app and starts to scroll. But earlier this spring, Auclair began noticing something unusual on her feed: the artists she follows were posting the same news — something about an app they'd joined, a new social platform called Cara.
"I was like, I am on board immediately," says Auclair, who's a visual artist herself. Based on Vancouver Island, in the town of Ladysmith, B.C., Auclair has relied on social media to build her career, and she's been working full-time as an artist since 2015. From a small community on the West Coast, Auclair has been able to find international buyers for her fantasy-inspired paintings and prints, in addition to work from clients including Marvel. How has she been able to make a go of it? "It was pretty much 100 per cent Instagram," she says, explaining how she's established her name.
But these days, despite having a fanbase of 493,000 Instagram followers, Auclair wishes there were some other way to reach collectors of her fantasy-inspired paintings — and her pals and colleagues too. "I would love to get rid of Instagram," says Auclair. "So the sooner I can get on Cara, the better."
What is Cara?
Auclair is among the thousands of artists who downloaded Cara this spring. The free app was launched in January 2023, but has only recently exploded in popularity, and in early June, Cara made headlines when it cracked the Top 5 social networks in Apple's American App Store. According to reports, its user numbers ballooned from 40,000 to 650,000 in a week — approaching the 1 million mark days later.
Cara is billed as "a social media and portfolio platform for artists," and at first glance, it's something of a throwback. Users can publish images with captions — or text-only posts, if they're nostalgic for the Golden Age of Twitter. (Video is not yet supported.) It's possible to discover posts and people via hashtags, and content is surfaced chronologically, whether you're scrolling the app's "explore" page or your feed.
But Cara's rise isn't being attributed to nostalgia for the pre-enshittification era. Rather, many artists have flocked to the app as a way of protesting Meta — the parent company of Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp.
In May, Meta's chief product officer Chris Cox told Bloomberg's Tech Summit that the company is training its AI tools on user's public posts, and if you live in a country such as Canada, where national data privacy laws have yet to go into effect, there's no straightforward method for opting out. (Canadian users can access a form in Meta's privacy centre, where they can ask the company to "delete any personal information from third parties used for building and improving AI," but requests are not automatically fulfilled.)
"I think everybody got scared, very scared," says Natalia Acevedo, a Toronto-based illustrator who first heard about Cara in late May this year. Like many of the app's new users, she was wary of Instagram's AI plans. "I mean, they're taking part of our souls without our consent," she says, and the same sort of worries also drove Auclair to join Cara — even if there's no sure way to protect her art from AI's tentacles.
Auclair knows her artwork's already been scraped for AI models. Tools like this one, Have I Been Trained?, can search whether an artist has been included in a training dataset, and the last time she looked up her name, a bunch of her old paintings appeared in the results — images she thought she'd deleted years ago from sites such as DeviantArt and Redbubble. So why does she have confidence in Cara?
Cara takes a firm stance against generative AI
According to Auclair, she trusts the app because she believes in its founder, Jingna Zhang, a Seattle-based photographer and art director who's stood up to Big Tech multiple times in the name of artist's rights. In April, for example, Zhang was named as a lead plaintiff in a class action copyright lawsuit against Google. "Cara was created by a creator — who made the app for creators," says Auclair. And like its founder, Cara is publicly critical of AI.
"We do not agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form," reads a statement on the Cara website, and until "legislation is passed to clearly protect artists," posting AI art on the app is forbidden. Cara says that it "filters out generative AI images," and to prevent third parties from swiping user content for AI training, the app includes access to Glaze, a free tool that essentially tricks AI models into reading the data all wrong.
Can anyone outrun AI?
Brianna Tosswill, who works under the name Penrose Press, is a linocut printmaker living in Edmonton. Her work is as analog as it gets, she laughs, so the thought of AI cribbing her style doesn't faze her in the same way it might a digital artist. "I don't feel super threatened by it," says Tosswill. Still, she joined Cara this spring in solidarity with her fellow creatives. "If someone is going to try and steal my work, they're going to try and steal it regardless," says Tosswill.
Britt Wilson shares her view. "A lot of people are running to Cara to try and outrun AI," she says. "But the only way to do it would be to erase the internet of your entire existence. Yes, Meta might be using my stuff, and I'm mad about it, but someone else is too."
Wilson is a Toronto-based illustrator and ceramic artist, and she joined Cara in early June — adding it to the long list of social accounts and related digital marketing efforts that she's already managing to promote her art: TikTok, Bluesky, Threads, Patreon, a Substack newsletter and Instagram, where she has more than 20,000 followers. When she staked her claim on Cara, it was after hearing Meta's plans for AI.
"It was definitely a straw/camel's back situation," says Wilson, going on to paraphrase one of internet's favourite bon mots of the moment: "I want AI to do my taxes and my laundry so that I can do the fun stuff," she says. And on that front, she's already spending too much of her time completing tasks that don't involve art. That's what's really driving her to Cara, where she's currently testing the waters. If she's going to devote working hours to social media, there had better be a return on investment.
Wilson sells her art directly to buyers, most of whom live outside Canada, never mind Toronto. Since graduating from Sheridan College in the late 2000s, Wilson says that she's relied on various social platforms to network and make sales, and over time, Instagram became her favourite platform for sharing photos and videos. "Without my posting on social media to drive traffic to my shop, it's crickets over there," says Wilson. "I don't know how people would find me otherwise." But left to the mercy of Meta's various corporate strategies — the end of the chronological feed, the prioritization of Reels — she's watched her reach plummet, a situation that Acevedo and Auclair have also experienced.
"Having all of my eggs in one basket feels yucky," says Wilson with a laugh, which is one reason she's trying Cara. "The idea of having one company being responsible for all of my marketing seems a little off."
Can Cara replace Instagram?
But can Cara convince anyone other than artists to sign up? "One of the reasons that Instagram took off was that yes, it was a boon for artists, but it wasn't created specifically with artists in mind," says Wilson. "It appeals to a larger group of people" — folks who become fans, and eventually collectors.
Cara, however, was designed as more of a portfolio site — a community for artists and prospective clients. And that's the kind of activity Natalia Acevedo has been seeing on the app. "So far, I'm just networking with other illustrators. I mean, they can buy my art too, but I want to reach out to regular people, you know?"
If Cara continues to be the niche space it is right now, Acevedo will likely stay on Instagram, and Auclair feels the same way — as dismayed as she is with the app.
Why? "Mostly fear," says Auclair, laughing. "I'm trying to set myself up where if something goes wrong with it [Instagram], I'm not going to be totally destroyed, but I have too many attachments to 100 per cent leave." She earns some income through her Patreon page, for example — "but the way I get people to Patreon is through Instagram."
It's too big to fail, as Wilson sees it. Cara isn't the first great hope to emerge in the App Store. "People always end up going back to Instagram because it's got this huge, established audience," she says — 2 billion active monthly users worldwide.
"I have this hope every time," Wilson says, with a chuckle. "I have this hope that one of them will finally stick."
"It's been so long since there's been another hopeful app for artists — one that doesn't have to do with video, " says Auclair. "Honestly, I'm just latching on and hoping for the best."
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