What’s Happening: As tensions continue to brew over AI’s existential threat to artists and Meta using public posts to train AI systems, artists are leaving the platform en masse in favor of Cara, a free photo-sharing app with ample protections against AI scraping.

The Download: Artists have long relied on Instagram to share their portfolios and reach new clients, but many now say they’re leaving to prevent Meta, the app’s parent company, from using their art to train AI models. Tensions around text-to-image AI systems like DALL-E and Midjourney have been brewing within the creative community since the programs were introduced in 2022, but they reached a fever pitch last month when Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, stated that publicly available images and text shared on Facebook and Instagram posts would be fair game for its AI training data. To make matters worse, it’s impossible to opt out unless users are based in the European Union, which has far-reaching privacy laws in place to protect personal data. Even then, users have described the opt-out process as “highly awkward” and not fully guaranteed to work.

In response, thousands of artists have ditched Meta apps in favor of Cara, a new photo-sharing platform whose functionality resembles Instagram but is specifically designed to protect users from AI scraping. Cara forbids AI-generated images and doesn’t train AI models on its content or allow third parties to do so, thanks to “NoAI” tags implemented in the app’s metadata. That likely won’t be enough to deter dedicated scrapers, so Cara recently introduced a tool called Cara Glaze that makes it more difficult for AI models to understand and mimic an artist’s style. More protections will likely be needed as scraping technology becomes more sophisticated, but so far it seems sufficient. In the past couple weeks alone, Cara’s user base has skyrocketed from 40,000 to 650,000.

The trust in Cara’s protections is also thanks to the track record of its founder, the photographer Jingna Zhang, who was part of a group of artists that sued Google for using their work to train its AI image generator without consent. She has a lot of work on her hands—Cara’s servers have crashed multiple times as hundreds of thousands of artists have flocked to the platform. Because the app is crowdsourced, her team is asking for donations to keep it afloat.

In Their Own Words: “These companies have turned on their customers,” Jon Lam, a video game artist, told the Washington Post. “We were sold a false promise, which was that social media was built to stay connected with your friends and family and help you share what you’re up to. A decade later, it’s just this platform for them to harvest data to train on.”

Surface Says: Whether Cara can maintain its meteoric rise remains to be seen, but there’s clearly demand for a social network minus the algorithms—one that doesn’t take advantage of personal data, make it impossible for artists to thrive, and inundate users with insane AI slop.

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The Jar of Love Fund began as a microgrant initiative in 2020 by ArtNoir, the international collective dedicated to pursuing cultural equity in arts and culture. Now in its fourth year, the program counts Sotheby’s and the Black British Artists Grant Program as collaborators in its mission to bring funding to artists, curators, and cultural producers of color. The 2024 Jar of Love Grant will bring $5,000 in funding to recipients in New York and London. Applications for New York City are open until July 6, and London applications will open at the end of July.

In the 1930s, Aino Aalto—the Finnish design pioneer who often collaborated with her husband, Alvar—met the Japanese ambassador to Finland and his wife, who gifted her silk fabric with a cherry blossom motif. Delighted by the gesture, Aalto created the Kirsikankukka textile pattern that evokes springtime sakuras as an homage to the art of Japanese textiles. The pattern was out of production until 2018, when Artek unearthed original fabric swatches at the Alvar Aalto Museum and enlisted a family-owned printing house in Kyoto to produce the fabrics. The pattern remains a fixture in Artek’s upholstery catalog. Now, to celebrate the 130th anniversary of Aino’s birth, the brand has teamed up with Danish studio Tekla to reintroduce Kirsikankukka. This time, it graces high-quality percale cotton bedding in white, blue, and pink, with a children’s option—Tekla’s debut in the category—inspired by a baby bed of Aalto’s design.

As the first entirely new hotel to be built on New Orleans’ St. Charles Avenue in more than 30 years, the 40-room Hotel Henrietta recently opened to great expectations. The property, designed by local firm Farouki Farouki, sure doesn’t disappoint. At reception, Pierre Frey wall coverings create a cozy atmosphere around a scene-stealing marble bar and rich emerald green and brass accents. An art program, consisting of vintage and locally commissioned works, gives the property a homey feel that’s further complemented by rooms featuring kitchenettes, ample space suitable for hosting, and even laundry access. At the end of the night, guests can retreat to the comforts of their Parachute linens and the hotel’s Le Labo amenities.

When: Until June 29

Where: Carvalho Park, Brooklyn

What: The Paris-based artist combines painting, sculpture, performance, and elements of the built environment in his second solo show at Carvalho Park. Osorio, who studied design and architecture in France, brings mirage-like pigment paintings to “canvases” of polycarbonate and prods viewers to consider the show’s themes of clarity, obscurity, and illusion.

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The Robern brand was born in 1968 and has since become an American tradition. To answer customers’ increasingly upscale tastes, Rosa and Bernie Meyers reinvented the standard medicine cabinets and vanities of the day—from cold, steel, utilitarian—into coveted décor.

Surface Says: There’s long been a dearth of aesthetically inclined vanities and medicine cabinets, but Robern’s are fit to complement thoughtfully furnished interiors elsewhere in the home. With options for dwellings from pieds-à-terre to rural farmhouses, there’s something for everyone in the fabricator’s curated lineup.

A Peacock graphic inducts the killer doll Chucky into the queer pantheon.

A pineapple-sized hailstone is spotted in Texas, and it may break a state record.

Trend watchers have pounced on goth gardening, perhaps owing to Wednesday.

Gen Z plumbers and construction worker influencers are making bank on TikTok.