My work was stolen by AI bros :( (Patreon)

EDIT: A good overview from the creator of Cara herself: https://cara.app/post/bb1dc657-591e-47dd-bc94-d9e99a09f377 This is so much worse than what I thought too, it has cost Cara 1000s in server fees because some self important little freaks spent $10 scraping the site for their own amusement, just sick. I'll leave my original post here, but I'm only minorly affected by this, ultimately. Larger damage is being done to Cara and websites that are being scraped and charged server fees because of it. The people who do this are a plague.

Hiya everyone, I've got some frustrating but probably not surprising news. Long rambly post ahead.The short of it:

As the title says, my work was scraped from the artist/portfolio site I use as a map gallery known as Cara. For those that don't know Cara is a by-artists for-artists website that is specifically for those of us that do not like, nor want, anything to do with generative AI/slop.

Here is my gallery as an example: https://cara.app/stainedkarbon600 of my works were stolen from my gallery and stuffed into multiple datasets that are then used and sold to various buyers to train their slop machine on.

I work so hard to make these maps for everyone to enjoy and use in your adventures. I put my heart and soul into making them, and while I feel like I'm not always successful in making a map, a piece of art, that I'm super happy with, I do my best to put a piece of myself into it in hopes that someone will see it as more than just a functional image. When I put a map out I hope that it'll find a special place in someone's adventure and help inject just a little bit of my heart into it to add to their own. Extremely cheesy I know, shut up its just a map, get over yourself etc etc lol I am who I am though. Everyday I have this worry in the back of my head that one day someone will just start churning out AI slop maps in my style and destroy my livelihood cause they'll just be able to bastardize my work, turn it against me and flood me out. Why pay a slow, neurotic artist money when you can get unlimited 'good enough' slop maps for free? I'm scared, and I'm tired. I just want to make art for this lovely community and if I'm lucky, pay my bills while doing it, cause I don't have any other worthwhile skills to fall back on, this is it. I'm an artist to the core, its art or die for me lol This just fucking sucks, for all of us across many areas. It is so easy to feel disheartened when something like this happens, especially when it slaps you in the face rather than quietly in a corner somewhere. I recently did a free trial and a lot of lovely people showed up to sample my offerings, I really hope you're enjoying what you've found here, and thank you deeply if you've decided to stick around for a little bit after the trial <3 All the support really helps me to carry on doing this.

More details, general ramble:EDIT: A good overview from the creator of Cara herself: https://cara.app/post/bb1dc657-591e-47dd-bc94-d9e99a09f377 This is so much worse than what I thought too, it has cost Cara 1000s in server fees because some self important little freaks spent $10 scraping the site for their own amusement, just sick.Recently some AI bro with a questionable understanding of 'consent' (surprise surprise) decided it would be a 'fun project' to scrape Cara and steal millions upon millions of works by artists who just want a safe space to post our work and interact with other creatives.

I'm not gonna go into detail about it, but if you are curious just google 'Cara artist scrape dataset' or something like that and it'll show up.The whole genAI conversation is a much larger one which I've had a million times and don't want to get into much more. I know everyone is going to have differing opinions and nuances, but I at least hope that we can agree on the fact that stealing work and then turning it on the people they stole it from is wrong. Now obviously no place on the internet is safe from scraping these days, mass data theft of information is too valuable to those that stand to profit from it, and the tools to do it are too easily accessible. I am also under no illusions that my work is already out there on questionable sites and in datasets long ago.That being said the part that saddens me is the willful cruelty of these people to not only steal everything, but to also do it 'just because they can' and 'because artists deserve it', and whatever other excuses they shit out to justify their actions.

I could go on forever about this so I'll wrap it up by saying; Fuck AI bros, fuck AI. Take pride in being human.