There was a time immediately after Elon Musk took over Twitter when it felt like app developers were launching new social media sites every week. It was exhausting. We all got very overwhelmed, and none of the latest sites stuck around with mass appeal. Do you even remember Artifact or Lemon8?
Thankfully, the bombardment of social media sites has slowed. And now, when a new platform rises, it’s almost, dare I say, interesting. That’s precisely how I feel about Cara, a new social media site available on mobile and desktop that describes itself as “a social media and portfolio platform for artists.”
It looks like a combination of all the other social media apps out there but focused on artists. You can do X-like microblogging and post your portfolio on a grid, like Instagram. Similar to LinkedIn, there’s a job tab for artists looking to get hired — or folks looking to hire artists. Like X, it appears that likes are public. And the Explore page looks a bit like a Tumblr dashboard. But unlike X and Meta-owned platforms, users can customize their home feed according to how many posts they’d like to see from the general public and their network, Fast Company reported.
The biggest catch? It’s a haven for creatives from AI, which has become a big problem for artists on Meta-owned platforms as Meta uses public posts to train its generative AI systems, which isn’t great for artists who fear their work is getting stolen or devalued by these systems.
Plenty of social media platforms feel like solutions that are looking for a problem, which can be annoying. On the other hand, Cara appears to be a solution to a particular problem: how generative AI affects artists and creators. The site’s website says it “filters out generative AI images” to make it easier for people to find creatives and artwork created by humans — and remove some of the ethical and moral issues tied to AI policies.
“Many platforms currently accept AI art when it’s not ethical, while others have promised ‘no AI forever’ policies without consideration for the scenario where adoption of such technologies may happen at the workplace in the coming years,” the site reads.
Cara’s stance on AI is that it doesn’t “agree with generative AI tools in their current unethical form” and will not host AI-generated work.
“The future of creative industries requires nuanced understanding and support to help artists and companies connect and work together. We want to bridge the gap and build a platform that we would enjoy using as creatives ourselves,” the site adds.
According to Tech Crunch, Cara is still in beta, but that hasn’t stopped it from climbing to the top of the App Store charts and encouraging 650,000 people to download it.
