Cara: Art & Social app downloads 2024

Downloads of the social and photo app Cara skyrocketed. Launched on October 23, 2023, Cara is a social and photo app for artists, photographers, and illustrators to share their creativity online. In the first days of June 2024, the Cara app recorded approximately 314,000 downloads across the Apple App Store and Google Play Store. Cara provides an ethical space for art consumption and has chosen not to host AI-generated work. The platform, which bootstraps thanks to the efforts of artist and activist Jingna Zhang, has grown rapidly into an alternative to conventionally popular social media.

Artists vs AI

Artists, creators, and illustrators have been vocal about their work being used to train AI image generators. The use of human-created art hosted on social media to train AI remains controversial. Image-based social media such as Instagram provide artists with an outlet to find clients and promote their work, but Meta's decision to use the content hosted on its platform to train artificial intelligence models has attracted bitter criticism from the art world. Online audiences seem to agree at least in part with the copyright criticism raised: according to a survey conducted among U.S. consumers, 43 percent of respondents reported thinking companies should ban AI-generated copies of human art while 70 percent reported that artists should be compensated when AI copies their works. While AI-generated imaging programs are subjected to fleeting popularity and might have a meteoric rise, they can also generate considerable revenues. Lensa-AI, which launched in 2021, experienced in-app revenues of 30.86 million U.S. dollars in December 2022, after becoming part of a major TikTok trend video style. The app, which generated avatars and artistic renderings of user-uploaded pictures, grossed barely 500,000 U.S. dollars in June 2024.

AI reignites debate on age-old question: what is art?

At least according to respondents in the United States, AI-generated imagery is not art. Over 60 percent of U.S. consumers felt this way, according to a survey conducted in June 2023, while around 40 percent thought that AI-generated images and videos should be considered art, even if they were not created by humans. Despite the public opinion on the matter, generative AI programs have enjoyed an unprecedented commercial success in the online ecosystem. Image-generator Midjourney, which launched in July 2022 as an exclusive experience offered on social media Discord, was the most popular generative AI powered image tools marketed globally in 2023.