Social media applications come and go depending on a variety of things from trends to bad decision-making on the part of the company. However, when a social media company becomes popular, it usually takes a lot for them to be replaced or disowned by the masses. It takes even more for a new social media app to become mainstream.
There is a new social media platform on the scene attempting to make it big with its unique style and ideas. Cara has taken the world by storm in the last few months. Its main focus is banning AI and showing the world how unethical AI artwork is.
The statistics surrounding Cara’s growth are deeply connected to decisions made by Instagram. Instagram’s demographics do not mix well with AI, so when Meta announced their scraping plans, people turned tail and headed for Cara.
Keep reading to find out more about how the statistics for feelings surrounding AI, Instagram, and Cara are all connected.
Check out this article on How many gamers are there in the world.
Quick Statistics
- Cara’s downloads worldwide increased from 49,410 in May 2024 to 314,040 in June 2024
- Cara pays $0 towards traffic and engagement on their platform
- Over half of social media users report posting art of some kind online
- 46% of Instagram users prefer creative content like art
- 53% of 18 to 34-year-olds do not think AI-generated images should be considered art
- 54% of people can tell the difference between AI-generated images and human-created work
- 74% of artists believe AI-generated art to be unethical
What Is Cara App?
Cara is an up-and-coming social media and art-sharing platform. Unlike many other social media, Cara is focused only on the sharing and celebration of ‘real art’ made by human beings. Its goal is to be the perfect place for an artist to create an online portfolio without the stress of work being stolen.
Although, many people begin to wonder why an application like this needs to exist. The answer to that is generative AI. Cara is a direct response to how many social media have handled the rise of generative AI, with most companies opting to embrace it rather than turn away.
Founded by Jingna Zhang, Cara was created by someone who has also experienced her share of intellectual theft. Zhang’s first fight for her artistic rights came in 2022 when she filed a lawsuit against a painter who won a large sum of money for copying one of her photographs.
In 2023, she then joined her fellow creatives in an ongoing action lawsuit against Stable Diffusion and other AI image generation tools. She joined yet another class action in 2024 against Google for similar accusations.
The stance Cara takes on AI imagery is that it is unethical theft, stealing work that other artists have dedicated their time to through methods like ‘scraping’. While many other platforms currently support different methods to help AI learn, Cara completely forbids it.
Not only does the application forbid it, but it has also taken measures against AI through art glazing. Art glazing scrambles the AI scrapers’ read on the art, effectively poisoning any AI that might attempt to learn from art posted on the application. Aside from that, AI generations are also not allowed to be published on the platform for any reason.
Cara App Growth
Cara has taken a harsh stance against AI and the platform has grown significantly because of it. People agree with Cara’s stance on AI image generation, but the platform did not start significantly growing until recently despite its founding in January 2023.
The incline in visitors to the platform started in February 2024, rapidly increasing by hundreds of thousands of people as the months went on. As the name, Cara, began to spread around, more and more people became interested in what it had to offer.
This trend wasn’t just seen across one type of device. It was seen across all devices. It originally seemed that the traffic would continue to steadily increase for quite some time as of April 2024, growing naturally as word spread about the platform. The rising rate of Cara did not stay steady for as long as they predicted, however, thanks to some unpredictable factors coming into play.
Aside from just visitors, Cara, the app itself, saw a dramatic increase in application downloads starting in May 2024 before completely exploding in June 2024, seeing nearly 300,000 new users. The steady incline previously seen trending for the Cara app had far surpassed expectations, but the question is why?
The answer is simple: Meta made a bold announcement that left a lot of artists fleeing to new platforms. At the end of May, Meta aka the company that owns platforms like Facebook and Instagram, announced that they would be using posts on their platforms to train AI starting June 26, 2024. The correlation is shocking to witness.
Cara App Growing Pains
Cara has had its fair share of growing pains since its founding, but especially in the last few months. The platform is run entirely by volunteers, a small group of them at that, and they pay for the platform to keep running out of their own pockets.
When the application suddenly blew up, the cost was detrimental, leading to an uncertain future for Cara. Jingna Zhang, the founder of Cara, has refused to be bought out or funded by large corporations to maintain the platform’s integrity.
She does not want Cara to become like other platforms that are run for money and greed. Zhang wants it to stay as an application for the people, by the people.
Because of this, Cara runs mainly on donations now as well as money from the volunteers’ pockets. This is completely contrasting to Cara’s current competition, Meta, and their platform Instagram.
Instagram is a multibillion-dollar company, earning more and more money each year, with an annual revenue of $51.4 billion in 2022. The company is focused on profit and has no problem staying up and running thanks to its never-ending stream of revenue. It is a large privilege that Cara does not have. This privilege extends to their incoming site traffic.
While the chart may make it seem like they don’t pay for any traffic, remember that the chart is in billions. Instagram pays anywhere from 10.8 million to 2.7 million dollars every month for traffic to their site, earning them more and more money with every visit.
Cara on the other hand has zero paid traffic. It looks like they pay nothing and that is because they don’t. With a small platform like this, they can’t afford to pay millions of dollars to increase their revenue like Instagram can. This reveals the true nature of the platform and its focus on the art itself rather than the value it makes.
Meta And The Arts
Meta has always been a haven for artists and creatives of all types. People felt safe sharing their work on the platform for all to see, gaining followers and customers thanks to Meta’s algorithm.
According to Americans for the Arts, a poll shows that over half of social media users report that they post art of some kind online. The table below breaks down the percentages of what kind of art these users share.
| Type of Art | Percentage |
| Photographs | 43% |
| Writing/Poetry | 21% |
| Arts Events | 15% |
| Reviews | 13% |
| Videos | 29% |
| Original Artwork | 16% |
| Articles About Art | 14% |
While this table represents social media in general, Meta platforms dominate the social media world right now, making them the most popular place to post this type of content.
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger, all of which are on the upper half of this list, totaling a little over eight million users between them. WeChat, TikTok, and YouTube are currently the only platforms competing even a little with Meta.
The numbers don’t change much from year to year. In 2023, Facebook took the lead as the most used social media platform in the world and Instagram was only a few places behind it, directly behind YouTube and WhatsApp.
Since last year, Instagram has become a little more popular than WhatsApp, but since they’re both owned by Meta, it doesn’t much matter.
For Instagram, creative content is the second most preferred type, with 46% of users preferring this type. This includes artwork and discussions around art. According to Peppercontent, Facebook is similar with ‘user-generated content’ being the most popular type of content on the platform, followed by humor.
Both Meta platforms are filled with people looking for art, artists, and any type of creativity they can find. So when Meta hurt artists using the platform by taking the side of AI, it makes sense that a lot of these people began to flee to other social media sites like Cara.
Why Is AI Such A Big Deal?
Now that Meta’s hand in Cara’s growth has been established, let’s discuss why AI image generation and AI are an issue in general. When most people think of AI, they think of helpful little robots like voice assistance.
Little do they know how much else AI has a hand in. The most detrimental in many people’s eyes is AI image generation.
AI art has been around for a long time, but it only began to blow up at the end of 2022, as seen in the chart. However, AI art has only gotten bigger since.
AI image generation as of August 2023 had resulted in over 15 billion images being created. That number is beyond human imagination and comprehension. While there are dozens of AI image generators out there, the main one taking the world by storm is Stable Diffusion.
Stable Diffusion is the same company that the founder of Cara, Jingna Zhang, is currently in a class action lawsuit against for intellectual property theft. Stable Diffusion alone has generated over 12.5 billion of the total AI images or over 80% of them.
Let’s put into perspective just how many images 15 billion is with this graph. The amount of content created by artificial intelligence is over 30 times the amount of all Shutterstock Library images.
It competes with all of the images ever uploaded to Instagram in history. Keep in mind, that AI image generation did not become extremely popular until the end of 2022 while Instagram has been in existence since 2010.
If that still does not put into perspective just how many pictures AI has generated in the last few years, check out this chart. In human history, it took 149 years to create 15 billion photographs.
That same amount of content was created by AI within just a year and a half. Humans simply cannot compete with AI in content creation, leading many to believe that AI will eventually replace the need for humans to create art.
Now, some people are on the side of AI image generation. They don’t see the harm in it. Some see it as something to use for fun and others still see it as a tool to help progress human creation rather than replace it. If that is your standpoint, then what is the harm of AI?
The harm caused by AI goes beyond replacing human artists and intellectual property theft. If those do not seem like an issue, many argue that the cost to the environment is.
A study done in 2019 showed that training an AI model is detrimental to the environment in its CO2 emissions, far surpassing other benchmarks.
For reference, this study was done in 2019, once again before AI started taking the world by storm. If this study was redone today, the effects would likely be even worse with how popular AI usage is growing.
More and more companies want to have their own AI, leading to more AI training being done and more deadly levels of CO2 being emitted.
AI Art Opinions Versus Instagram Demographics
The opinions surrounding AI art and the demographics of Instagram line up quite well, further helping to explain why users left the platform in favor of an anti-AI app like Cara.
Instagram users are primarily made up of 18 to 34-year-olds who make up 62.3% of the platform’s age demographic. According to Statista, the percentage of adults in the same age range who think anything created by artificial intelligence should not be considered art is 53%. Meaning, that the majority of Instagram’s primary age demographic opposes AI art.
The gender split on Instagram is almost perfect even with 50.6% of users being male and 49.4% being female. According to Statista, 55% of men do not believe AI-generated images should be considered art. 67% of women on the other hand, who are slightly in the minority of users on Instagram, do not believe AI art should be considered art.
Once again, this leads to the fact that the majority of Instagram’s primary demographic, men, do not support AI art. The majority of both genders are on the same page when it comes to AI image generation.
AI Art Opinions In General
People’s opinions on AI-generated images and AI art vary more than the last few studies would suggest. While in general people are against AI-generated images being considered art, a lot of average people do enjoy AI images.
| Who… | Percentage of People |
| Have Seen AI-Generated Art | 27% |
| Enjoyed AI-Generated Art | 56% |
| Think AI-Generated Art Is The Same Or Better Than Human Art | 65% |
This table represents an average group of people’s opinions on AI-generated images. The majority of people think AI is enjoyable and on par with human artwork, if not better. The number that stands out is that only 27% of people have seen AI artwork before.
According to a recent Yale study, only 54% of people can tell the difference between AI-generated images and those done by humans. This leads one to question if more people have seen AI artwork without ever realizing it.
In general, the public opinion of AI, not just AI art, can be rather interesting. Most people do not fully understand how many things artificial intelligence is involved in. However, when the second-highest opinion on AI is that they are killer robots, public opinion seems to be leaning against AI once again.
| Artists Who… | Percentage |
| Think AI Art Is Unethical | 74% |
| Think AI Art Will Negatively Impact Their Ability To Generate Income | 55% |
| Want To Be Asked Permission Before Their Work Is Used To Train AI | 73% |
Now that we have the general public’s thoughts on AI and AI-generated imagery, we can see artists’ opinions are quite a bit different from the average. The majority of artists are against AI art, believing it to be unethical and fearful that it will destroy their livelihoods.
When Instagram turned to helping AI, it made more sense to see why so many artists fled to Cara. Artists want to have ownership over their creations and to protect their work. When the majority despise AI, it’s clear why they would turn to a platform that would protect them from it.
With a graph like this, the answer to most artists’ problems with AI seems simple: talk to the artists. They simply want to give consent to have their work taken and then be given fair compensation and credit for their energy.
Artists want to be acknowledged when they are the reason that AI image generation thrives the way that it does. If steps were taken to ensure the things artists want, maybe then applications like Cara would not need to exist.
60.3% of artists believe that companies like Instagram are responsible for ensuring that their artwork is protected from theft, including from entities like AI. When artists want companies to keep them safe, it makes sense that users leave when they feel they are no longer secure.
Artists no longer felt safe having their work on Instagram when the company decided to begin its AI-scraping program in June. Moving to Cara, a company that would ensure the artwork was protected, was the best bet for them as a result.