Last week, PetaPixel reported that Cara, an anti-AI photo app, had all of its content scraped into a dataset despite the platform explicitly not consenting to the practice. It turns out the story has a happy ending.

After a Redditor boasted about scraping 12 million images from Cara, a practice used to build generative AI image models, a visual artist who goes by Nijhia reached out to him and began talking. Over the course of hours, the scraper had a change of heart and eventually agreed to delete all of the data.

Writing in The NewBohemian, Nijhia reveals the hacker spent two weeks scraping all the content from Cara, but he claims that it was never his intention to make the dataset available to other parties.

Nijhia berated the scraper for hours, calling him out for his behavior. This clearly had an effect, as he became increasingly open to the idea of deleting the Cara data.

The scraper wound up sharing his screen and apparently showed Nijhia as he deleted the dataset.

“This was literally a battle of attrition for me all day long,” Nijhia says in a YouTube video she made about her interaction with him. “But if that meant the people of Cara did not have to deal with having their work scraped, then fine.”

Jingna Zhang, the photographer who set up Cara, says that she also spoke to the scraper and believes that he understands what he did was wrong and is very remorseful. Not only that, but he apparently gave tips on how to strengthen Cara’s protections from AI crawlers.

“We will never know another person’s heart or if what they say is the truth, but I believe action speaks louder than words. And at the very, very least, his effort to right some of the wrongs were real actions I could verify,” Zhang says in a post on Cara.

“In my conversation with him, he genuinely seemed to be learning how data scraping may feel violating and hurtful to people. I hope he will direct his energy in the future to consider working on things that can help protect artists and victims of harm.”

AI scraping continues to be an issue for the photography and artist community; a survey earlier this year found that 58% of photographers had lost work to generative AI.

Image creditsHeader photo licensed via Depositphotos.