We’re having this conversation right now, how many people have Cara accounts?
We now have almost 900,000 users. But it has been stressful. Yesterday or the day before yesterday (I’m losing track of time now) I saw a bill from a service provider and it was almost $100,000 for six days. So we are trying to determine our financial situation. It is a continuous process.
Are they working with you to reduce the bill?
I certainly hope so. We have received several calls and we are working things out. Other service providers have also talked to us, so we have options, but I’m hopeful we can work it out with these guys and maintain a long-term relationship.
This wasn’t meant to be your full-time job. Does there come a point where this becomes too big and you have to look for partners? And are you considering a subscription model or outside investors?
Before all this happened, next on our to-do list was to start a subscription service for our users, to see what the response would be and if it would be self-sustaining. Now we don’t have time, we have to pay the bills. now. So I’m looking at all options.
Are you worried about people outside your circle getting involved and having a say?
The important thing is that I stay in control of how I’m building Cara. I love being independent and want to do it alone as long as possible, but worst case scenario we raise money. I considered a round (of funding) from friends and family for the end of this year, with people I can absolutely trust.
Where would you like to see Cara in five years?
I want to see what the community needs and build around that. I have an idea of how generative AI will affect jobs and how it could reduce wages even for people who are still employed, but who’s to say what will be most useful in five years? I’m sorry if that seems like a non-answer, 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 working at Cara right now?
Four or five of us over the last year. Temporarily we have a lot of help. I don’t know if they will stay, but right now we have about 10 on the engineering team working with us during this crisis. We originally had three employees helping me day to day, and now we have 10 to 20 people trying to do things like manage our Discord, which last time I checked had between 8,000 and 10,000 people. They are trying to manage content moderation. On Instagram we have tens of thousands of messages. Everyone just wants to help and people are being very kind.
Backing up a bit, could you explain to me how to join class action lawsuits against generative AI companies?
I don’t really like being involved in things, but if no one has addressed something I’d like to see, I will. It doesn’t matter if it makes me unpopular. It was a bit difficult for me to see when people were still in the denial stage that generative AI was usable for work. This will never replace artists, look how bad their hands are..
I will say that the hands are indeed bad.
My exposure to technology and artistic production is different since I work as a photographer and am in the production process. I had companies sending me demos about using natural language processing to generate things five or six years ago. I stayed out of the AI discourse for a while because at the time I was running my own copyright lawsuit and there was a lot of harassment.
