As we speak, how many people have Cara accounts?
Now we have almost 900,000 users. But it was stressful. Yesterday or the day before – I’m losing track of time – I saw a bill from a service provider that was almost $100,000 for six days. So we’re trying to figure out our financial situation. It’s a continuous process.
Do they work with you to lower your bill?
I hope so. We are talking, other service providers have also talked to us. We are considering our options.
This wasn’t supposed to be your full-time gig. Is there a moment when it becomes too much and you have to look for partners? Are you considering a subscription model or external investors?
Before all this happened, the next thing on our to-do list was to launch a subscription service for our users to see what the response would be and whether it would be self-sustaining. We don’t have time now – we have to pay the bills Now. That’s why I’m considering all options.
Are you worried about people outside your circle getting involved and speaking out?
The crucial thing is that I have control over how I build Cara. I love being independent and I want to do it alone as long as possible, but in the worst case scenario, we collect money. I considered friends and family [funding] this year, with people I can completely trust.
Where would you like to see Cara in five years?
I want to see what the community needs and build accordingly. I have some idea of how generative AI will impact jobs and how it could lower wages even for people who still have jobs, but who can say what will be most helpful in five years? I’m sorry if this sounds like a no-brainer, but I think you have to adapt as best you can and build what makes the most sense at the time.
How many people are currently working on Cara?
Four or five of us for the last year. In the meantime, we have plenty of aid. I don’t know if they’ll stay here, but right now we have almost 10 people on our engineering team helping us get through this crisis. We originally had three employees who helped me on a day-to-day basis, and now we have between 10 and 20 people who try to, for example, manage our Discord, which last time I checked had between 8,000 and 10,000 people. They are trying to manage content moderation. We have tens of thousands of messages on Instagram. Everyone just wants to aid and the people are really nice.
Backing up a bit, could you walk me through the process of joining class action lawsuits against generative AI companies?
I don’t like getting into it, but if no one has brought up something I want to see, I will. It doesn’t matter that it makes me unpopular. It was a little hard for me to watch when people were still in the stage of denying the generative usefulness of AI at work. It will never replace artists, look how bad the hands are.
I will say that the hands are really bad.
My exposure to technology and artistic production is different because I work as a photographer and I am in training. Companies were sending me demos talking about natural language processing used to generate content five or six years ago. I stayed away from the AI discussion for a while because I was fighting my own copyright lawsuit at the time and there was a lot of harassment.