He Scraped All of Their Art for AI. Now He’s Collaborating on a Tool to Help Them

Cara, the artist-focused platform run by photographer Jingna Zhang and hosting roughly 1.5 million creators, experienced three major data scrapes in August 2023—a 12-TB download of 12 million images, an 8.5-million-link dump to Hugging Face, and a 123 000-image leak on Academic Torrents. The scraper, identified as MandarinDawnPoppy994, later partnered with Zhang to develop an open-source protection tool, and Zhang has raised over $100 000 toward a $120 000 legal fund for cyber and copyright defenses.