Episode 296 - Jingna Zhang DESCRIPT
[00:00:10] Richard: Hello and welcome to Sustain, the podcast where we talk about sustaining open source for the long haul. Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going? Does my voice sound like a midnight radio show host, as my co-host has just said? These are the questions going through our minds today as we start this podcast.
[00:00:27] Jingna Zhang: Very excited to be here today. Excited to be here and joined by my fellow host, Errol. Errol, how are you doing? 
[00:00:34] Eriol Fox: Doing good. I had a busy day with, like, seven hours of meetings today. It's a lot 
[00:00:38] Richard: That is horrible. Yeah, I'm really sorry. I hope they were all meetings with puppies, 'cause that sounds amazing. That sounds really cool.
[00:00:46] I have not had seven hours of meetings. I have had seven hours of sleep. The meetings will come later. This is the first of them, but it's the best. So very excited to be here today, and we're excited to also be here with someone else to talk to. It'd be a very [00:01:00] boring podcast if it was just me and Errol talking to ourselves.
[00:01:03] Our guest today is Jingna Zhang. Jingna is joining us from Seattle. Jingna, how are you doing? 
[00:01:09] Jingna Zhang: Hello. I am good. As good as can be when things are not good. 
[00:01:16] Richard: Which I feel like has been the state for a while. Jingna is amazing. If you haven't heard of Jingna Zhang, she is a photographer who has done a ton of really cool work.
[00:01:26] If you go to her website, you see amazing non-AI created photographs of models doing cool things, models hanging around. Michelle Yeoh looking really good on a cover. She's done a ton of work in this space. I first heard of Jingna around 14 years ago when she emailed me saying, "Can you help me build a website that can be useful for photographs?"
[00:01:50] And I'm like, "No. No, I'm, I'm a, I'm an academic. Thank you. Good luck. I don't even know if that's possible." And I'm glad she ignored me and went on and made it anyway. [00:02:00] A few years later, I heard of her again when there was a court case in, I believe, Luxembourg, and we'll probably get to this, this is all just context, where someone won an award for taking one of her photographs, putting it through a really crappy machine learning filter, and then basically saying- Oh
[00:02:18] "This is mine." Not e- not even. Okay, let's actually start there. What happened in Luxembourg and why? 
[00:02:23] Jingna Zhang: That one had nothing to do with AI, actually. It happened before the current gen AI boom. It... This guy just took one of my pictures and flipped it, and basically copied it for a painting, and then submitted it for an art biennale, to which he won some kind of award.
[00:02:42] I think the Princess of Luxembourg was there at award ceremony. The ministers were there. It w- was all a very big deal. Two people independently emailed me asking me if I gave permission or license, because I was not credited, and I was kind of trying to investigate. And so I told them, "Can you check with the [00:03:00] organizers?
[00:03:00] Like, how did this work? Do they know?" And simple, before I got to do anything personally, I received an email from this guy who, who won the prize, and he CC'd the organizers, and he basically tried to explain to me how copyright works and how he's entitled to use my work because painters need inspiration from around the world, so it's out there, he needs to take it.
[00:03:27] Th- that's not the exact words, but the spirit of that was quite arrogant, and I was just kind of floored. So I thought, well, if the organizer's like, "You know, they're not gonna do anything," and he's clearly not about to apologize, there's no one I can go. So then I posted about this on social media because I don't usually like to get into drama farming, if, if you wanna put it that way, and this is something that's very good for drama farming, and I was aware of that.
[00:03:55] So I try to avoid this usually, and that's why I was doing investigations separately. [00:04:00] But Since I know where to go, right? So, so I post it online. And I have not really posted about my work being stolen for many, many, many, many years because it does really just happen a lot, and if it's something that's really bad, you try to engage a lawyer, and you try to get it fixed behind the scenes.
[00:04:16] That, and that's what you do professionally, right? 
[00:04:19] Eriol Fox: I thought, okay, I don't 
[00:04:21] Jingna Zhang: really want to do this, but at the same time, you do see the story of other people struggling with this online, and I have come to a point of my career where I feel like, you know, younger photographers might look up to me, younger creators, and see me as someone who is well-established, right?
[00:04:38] You know, I have shot for different editions of Vogue or Harper's Bazaar, and like you say, Michelle Yeoh. But I thought, well, if someone who is seen as legitimate calls it out, right, it feels different than, oh, this is- there's an artist I don't know online who points that out. So I thought it could be educational and, and helpful for smaller artists to just have something to point towards and a professional saying, "Hey, this is wrong."
[00:04:58] So I posted this. [00:05:00] It goes really viral. It makes the national news in Luxembourg. It was reported in the region around Europe, and I find out through the news after a couple days that he engaged and retained the most famous lawyer in Luxembourg, and that I started receiving DMs from people telling me to be very, very careful because this, this lawyer is, he's very aggressive and I should be afraid.
[00:05:24] Like, out of good intentions, they're telling me, like, I should be concerned. So I had to go out there and look for a lawyer for myself. And before something bad has happened, what can I do? Obviously, then a copyright lawyer is going to just send a cease and desist and do the copyright stuff. So in the narrative of the public, it sort of was a, oh, Chinese woman sues Luxembourg student or something.
[00:05:45] You know, it is playing into all the stereotypes that could get people riled up, but the fact was, like, I was kind of just being reactive to the whole thing and just doing what I could to, to protect myself. You know, first was just around copyright, and then second was, like, oh, I [00:06:00] needed to get a lawyer to protect myself, like, legally.
[00:06:02] So it had nothing to do with AI, but I think the public news conflated it with, a bit with AI because I actually lost the first instance due to, quote-unquote, "unknown reasons." And then we appealed, and I won the appeal, but that process took two years, over two years. So that is when generative AI has come around, and I was talking about AI issues a little bit and around copyright, and then I think when this appeal was resolved, I had joined class action lawsuit for artists, again, AI companies for the Laion-5B dataset, and I think people just started conflating any kind of copying with AI a little bit.
[00:06:44] It just, there's just so much news and hallucinated news, you know? 
[00:06:49] Richard: So that's really intense. I'm always surprised when anything comes out of Luxembourg because it's really, really small, but it also had global ramifications, which is great. But it really sets up the context really well for what you did [00:07:00] next.
[00:07:00] So you're the founder of Cara. Can you tell us what 
[00:07:02] Jingna Zhang: Cara is? So Cara is a, sort of a artist portfolio and social platform that I started very much similar to the idea that I approached you with back in, I don't know, 2014 or '15, or I think it was the year I did it, but 2014, yeah, maybe. And I... But, you know, this time the only difference is around the end of 2022 was when these well-known art platforms started kind of leaning into generative AI publicly.
[00:07:44] And around the time, I don't know who comes up with the standards, but I am not familiar with that. But like the no AI, like Meta had came out, right? And people honor it is one question, but it costs nothing to put it into your header, So these websites were [00:08:00] saying that they're not going to use it by default, so they would be happy, basically they would be happy to let AI crawlers scrape their sites and their user data for training AI models, which to me was a very strange action because There is zero incentive for them to do so, their platforms are built for artists. their incentive should be to protect artists, to be with artists, to protect their users. And why would you give something away that is not even yours to give away in the first place, And I kept sort of waiting for them to change their stance, you know, 'cause, 'cause I had done this before, right?
[00:08:41] Making a platform. I know it's hard, I know it takes a lot, and I also know established platforms from a common sense point of view, wouldn't wanna throw that away for no reason, right? Just all they have built up, like the goodwill and, and all these things. So people were putting up that like, no AI logo at, as boycott on these platforms, you [00:09:00] know, it's all over their front page, for example, Art Station did not change their stance, and I just thought that was so strange.
[00:09:06] And a few platforms popped up around that time. They were like, "Oh, we're gonna host a website that had like no AI forever," I thought, okay, that's very cool, Great marketing . But, where are the platforms that have a little bit more sensibilities and actually think about things a bit realistically?
[00:09:25] Because if you actually look into the art industry, the independent industry, also the AI industry, you know that technologically it might be impossible to sustain. But also from a realistic point of view, the industry will likely lean into generative AI, which we hear, through the pipeline.
[00:09:46] So how can you enforce that? Like, are you gonna ban every professional artist who is, working for a company because they need to make a living from your platform, And I think there is space for there to be like a forever no AI platform, [00:10:00] but to commit that early without knowing what artists might need in the future, what the future looks like, I think that does not show foresight , so I made Cara on just a very simple premise, which is, number one, we're not gonna give your stuff away 'cause, we think that's basic decency, and we're not gonna train on your stuff without your consent 'cause that's also basic decency, which, today is very rare apparently, because on Meta you can't even opt out, right, unless you're in the EU.
[00:10:24] and that's just those two things. That's it. And I'm like, we're gonna figure out gen AI in the beginning, and we'll build some fail safes to, track this. But how it looks in the future, we I hate the word adapt, right? 'Cause I feel like that's, that's been co-opted to be used for all kinds of bad things.
[00:10:38] but you sort of have to just look at a world and see what the next best thing you can do, right, to support people rather than just make commitment to something that realistically feels hard to sustain, you know, in the interest of greater good. So that is Kara, just culturally on social platform and trying to be creative first.
[00:10:56] Eriol Fox: It's really fantastic to hear the story of [00:11:00] how Kara came about and the, extractive colonialist, genderness of how you started is not lost on me.
[00:11:08] Like, as soon as you said, like, this Luxembourg painter dude was, like, stole your stuff, I was like, "That's colonialism. That's extractive of all the women that, you know, the men that won Nobel prizes for whatever a woman did for them, and they stole it." So I just wanna let you know that I see you and I hear you, and that is not good.
[00:11:26] C- can I add 
[00:11:27] Jingna Zhang: one thing? Please 
[00:11:28] Eriol Fox: do. 
[00:11:29] Jingna Zhang: in my defense, it helps with UI/UX design, right? But the, there was a Reddit thread discussing the wrong and right, and I don't have Twitter blue, so I guess Kara can let me in. Instead of saying he arrogantly explained to me, I said, "He mansplained shit to me," and people were very triggered by this word, which I thought was appropriate by the dictionary definition.
[00:11:46] But people were very, very triggered, so there were people on Reddit like, "Yeah, you know, she deserves to be raped. She deserves to get stolen. She deserves nothing." you know, all this stuff. And then somebody was like, "Oh, a case of a woman trying to take money from a man."
[00:11:58] Richard: And I, "Just go be a sugar [00:12:00] baby, then." And I'm just like, " But he took my work to make money off it. I was already making money off my 
[00:12:08] Jingna Zhang: work." And it, it was, it was very, very interesting. 
[00:12:12] Eriol Fox: As soon as I hear your story, it immediately, made sense to me as another femme person in the creative industry.
[00:12:18] So I see you. I hear you. I am livid on your behalf and wish you nothing but, the most relaxing and joyous future for your wonderful art. Oh. I think the interesting thing, the thing that I wanna ask I'm gonna date myself a little bit here. I grew up on the age of the internet, where I was uploading art to, like, Side7 as, and DeviantArt back in the early days and, Ohikaki boards where you would draw, like, pixel art, where you could watch somebody re- like the... It would play back your drawing on those, like, BBS boards- Yeah ... and things like that. So I grew up on that side of the internet [00:13:00] where part of creating work and being on the internet, was about being in community, was about sharing the thing that you love to create with people that also love to create.
[00:13:14] And sometimes you would do things like be inspired by another person's piece of art. And then as I kind of grew in my own artistic practice and my design practice, I started reading like information and writing from Lawrence Lessig about transformative works and how, that works and things like that, and it's a very complicated feeling.
[00:13:36] the question that I wanna ask you is, given that one of the most powerful parts of creative work and how creatives stay employed, inspired, paid, is by building community, and to have this attempted to be taken away by like capitalistic means, how would you describe a perfect like [00:14:00] or an idealistic collaborative community space in the day of scraping and AI? 
[00:14:06] Jingna Zhang: to speak to your question which I think has an interesting relation to open source is Open source can exist in, today's day and age, right? a lot of things we use, like React, that's paid by a multi-billion dollar company, right?
[00:14:20] their employees can do that. Artists don't really have this very accessible, very systematic, and very large scale sort of, organizations or companies where they're just like, "We're setting aside a few, million dollars," or multiple million dollars to just fund a group of artists to create public domain art to make the world enjoy, I don't know if that would be an ideal world, But that could be something that will be very lovely, Right now we have residencies. you have grants that people can apply to. But I don't think it's not really in the same spirit as open source, right? This is like, okay, there are two seats in [00:15:00] this, very hypercompetitive and, no artist have a job and everyone is really, poorly paid situation.
[00:15:06] So like, if the system fundamentally changes, I think that could be supportive of the arts, the arts industry and also just creators to create more and share more and give more back to the world. Without that, it's a little bit of a situation of everyone for themselves, I don't mean it in a critical way.
[00:15:26] It's just like that's what's to survive. One thing that I do observe what's going on with, all of these, campaigns around like human artistry or speaking up for, to protect artists or the bills that are getting passed, a lot that you will see revolves around music or around actors and, of course, you know, their work deserves to be protected, right?
[00:15:46] But you don't see people who are not part of guilds or associational organizations, their voices being heard in this conversation. What about the people like you or me who grew up on the internet? We are not part of Hollywood. we don't pay a due. [00:16:00] Like, of course, it's good that their union and guilds are fighting for them, but this thing is not isolated to only Hollywood and DC, it's cross-border. It, affects everybody globally, and, I don't know, make my things very, like- That's brought my brain to a weird space, which is I think like the UN needs to step in, right? There needs to be something like a copyright treaty, by default people's things or works or creations, I don't want my family photos that, my family members posted to be scraped by default either.
[00:16:26] Like, it shouldn't just be for copyrighted work, creative work, I don't really have a, proposal or a solution a- around the creative part. I think the most urgent part is just how anything we post online is now being extracted, like you say, to build potentially replacement machines or worse, AIs that might kill us in the future, depending on who you ask.
[00:16:49] So it's just kind of horrible. 
[00:16:50] Eriol Fox: And kind of sometimes feel like not just kind of like the death of creativity, but more of the death of creativity in the [00:17:00] sense of like It feels like it's harder to authentically share something with people on the internet- Definitely ... than it, than it used to. the element of trust and how things will be used, in what ways.
[00:17:14] It does feel like a more precarious era that we've entered in, basic trust and decency with, like, the elements that we create. But as you say, a lot of us want to share our work for the betterment and the enjoyment of as many people as possible. How do we even begin to teach those principles?
[00:17:37] Do you think that, like, things like Lantern, I'd love to know and hear a little bit more about, like, what Lantern is, doing here. I hear a lot in the tech industry, like, a carrot stick approaches. It's like, how can we not have to use the carrot or the stick, but, like- Yeah
[00:17:54] build the good systems, as you say. So I'd love to hear a bit more about Lantern and [00:18:00] maybe, like, how we can begin to, like, build a better internet. 
[00:18:03] Jingna Zhang: the key driver for a lot of things is... Well, it's two things, right? It's incentive and education. one thing I've learned from Makara, just to answer the question about better internet, So I would love for Makara to be a corner for a better internet, to start a culture of that. I think we see that. and we actively, design things in a way that hopefully encourages better interaction. We have, like, longer comments. We want people to engage with each other. we write educational posts telling people, like, well, because we're technically still, still in beta, you know, like, this is, like, longest ever MVP.
[00:18:41] don't have a recommendation system. you have to go out there, look for people to follow. Like, remember how the old internet used to work, But many people just coming onto Makara today, they are saying this is their first social platform, or this is their first anything platform. They've never used a forum.
[00:18:55] and I like to think of myself as a pretty introspective person. Like, I, I like [00:19:00] to think a lot about how can I improve my way of thinking, improve my understanding of the world. It makes you a better designer, and that applies to how you see the world. and there were things that still surprised me.
[00:19:10] For example, when- We did not have any items, fed onto your home feed. We would receive bug reports from people and they would say like, " "I think my car is broken. there's nothing on my home feed." And we're like, "Well, how many people do you follow?" Like, you know, like, "Who do you follow?
[00:19:24] Or, or check out." And they're like, "Uh, I don't follow anyone." and it occurred to me that there would be people who actually do use platforms and have never used a b- follow button in their lives. it is one thing to imagine, okay, a recommendation feed is, is showing you things that's enraging or teaches you bad things or makes your attention span short.
[00:19:46] It's another thing to be like, there are people now growing up or being introduced to the internet that have never curated anything of their own, that have, never really seen a world where people might seem sincere or want to share for the sake of sharing. They might have only been exposed [00:20:00] to, quote-unquote content creators that are there to get our attention, to sell you something, to make you upset or all this stuff.
[00:20:05] and that comes to the education part, which is we need ways to teach people th- that there is a different world, there is a different way of thinking. but, when there is a distance and gap between these kind of understandings, that that's where, people are fighting online, anytime there's a discourse, you know, the, your, the camps are just like, "Well, why can't you do this thing?" Or, "Why do you do that thing?" Similar with, a lot of I like to call them, like, AI tourists, like the people who came after 2020. sorry if that's mean, but, between them and versus people who have been into AI for a long time versus artists, right?
[00:20:37] we all come from slightly different mis- different understandings and expectations of the world, For artists, like, what we do is our identity. This is our art. This is, my heart and soul. I want the world to enjoy it. Of course I do. but I don't want you to use it to weaponize it against me.
[00:20:52] You know? don't want you to use it to make something else. that's... More than the financial loss, which is very important 'cause that's how people make a living, by sharing their work online and then [00:21:00] getting hired. But it feels like a personal attack, when people disregard what you think. And then on the software side, you have people coming through just, using open source and stack for... Like, our stack is, you know, pretty much everything is open source, too, right? that's the modern stack. we're used to that, and I think there is a group who take it for granted, and they don't, they don't really look into seeing, what was the origin of open source?
[00:21:22] How did that come about? What is it about? Like, they don't care that this was about, universities or academics just working on software together to benefit each other. and that's why it's free and open source, is it wasn't even originally meant for enterprise to profit off you, which it has gone a bit more into that.
[00:21:37] Which if you wanna give it away for free for people to benefit, cool. You have a license, and you can say you wanna do that. so you just have these very many different points of views. and I think education could, put everyone a little bit more on the same page so they can make the- their own informed decision when they want to disagree, rather than an uninformed position when they disagree, which is where we are right now.
[00:21:57] 
[00:21:59] Eriol Fox: I came across [00:22:00] this quote recently that I sent to one of my lovely developer friends who's looking at leaving, coding as a, a space.
[00:22:07] Shout out- Mm ... to my wonderful friend, Bruno. And this quote was one of the big factors among many as to why AI has such a foothold in coding spaces, is because a majority of the people don't consider programming to be art. Mm. And I feel like this, thing that you're talking about around, like, how We're not investing in how people relate to what is- Yeah
[00:22:34] created by other people in the world is to this point of this is what we need to invest in. Like- 
[00:22:39] photography is art. Yeah. Design can be art. 
[00:22:43] Coding can be absolutely be art. Yeah. And I think a lot of developers- Um- ... are completely divorced from this now. 
[00:22:51] Jingna Zhang: I definitely think good programming's art.
[00:22:53] I like to say to my team, like, good engineering manager, like, that's an art, how you work with people. like, there are many things that can be art, I [00:23:00] mean, this is why in art world you have all these arguments about what is art, what makes it art too, and I never really like to participate because I think, sometimes the, elitist or purist spirit removes what I think of as art, because I do photography, before AI, like, we are like the stepchild, right, in a family. Like, that is the thing that's not seen as art too, you know? So, so I'm very used to that. And, I do understand why some engineers don't think of coding as art because, there is a lot of, like, very routine things.
[00:23:27] how many, like, you know, 5,000 ways can you do, like, a sign-up form, I get it, But obviously there are also very interesting, very exciting problems you can do, and I think a lot of mathematicians are experiencing that now I feel for them, but it is also what artists have been saying for the last four years where they were happily following along being like, "Oh, AI, it's, great."
[00:23:46] You know, like, artists were very excited about AI. professional artists were the first people I heard about gen AI from. is just very different from when you now realize how far you can go, yeah, I am curious what people will do as more and more people [00:24:00] leave the professions they, they have been in, Whether it's, art or engineering or mathematics. what sucks the most is that the people I feel like are wanting to lead these kind of things, a lot of times are people that do see the craft as art. and that's why it's disheartening because it feels like you are fighting against a tsunami, that there's almost nothing you can do as an individual. and I think that is very lonely and very, very hard. 
[00:24:28] Richard: we have a few minutes left. I really want you to talk about Lantern a tiny bit- Okay ... and what Lantern does. 
[00:24:32] Jingna Zhang: Yeah. So Cara was attacked, uh, in a series of scraping attacks, kind of this targeted scraping attack in August.
[00:24:39] And the first scraper actually ended up apologizing. I spoke to him. We actually talked about open source, and I pointed out Hey, you know, I understand why people who become interested in gen AI stuff due to open source, but you kind of forgot the fundamental part of open source, which is like there is a license and you are supposed to [00:25:00] respect it."
[00:25:00] And likewise, artists do have a license, and it starts off with being all rights reserved, So that's when we talked about these a little bit and we were talking about how he can, make up to us and make up to me, and I thought, let's build something that can help people, and ideally even beyond the users of Cara.
[00:25:17] so we came up with the idea of doing Lantern, which is basically, similar to Have I Been Trained, which was used to check against the LAION-5B dataset. but I think that they've shut it down now. Maybe they ran out of funding. But that was only against one dataset, and we thought if we could hash a bunch of different datasets selectively, it could help, number one, to inform people if they want to take DMCA ta- takedowns, if they want to press legal actions, like that would be a very useful tool, right?
[00:25:45] Because the average non-technical person is not gonna figure out how to search through these things. number two, it could work very well for education because when the news of us being scraped first came out, we were getting accused of being incompetent because I am a non-technical founder, and I'm like I don't even [00:26:00] know what to say to that.
[00:26:01] I'm a non-technical photographer. I am shooting for Vogue. What- whatever, right? Like, there, there are ways to accomplish things. I have good technical teams, so I trust them, you know? It's, very strange, so these kind of comments would get propagated and people keep repeating like, "Oh, it's because she's non-technical, so it got scraped."
[00:26:17] And I was like, scraping happen to literally any website. it doesn't really matter, right? It, it can be seen, it can be scraped, even if you had a paywall, it could be brute forced. Look at AI agents today, nothing is, safe. And, people have a hard time believing me on that because I am non-technical.
[00:26:34] so that, fine. And we thought with Lantern they could check for themselves what data set they are in, so, proof is better than words, But number one, could be a service. Number two, I think just education to, catch people up to, I suppose, the loopholes of technology. I think that's really, really important right now.
[00:26:53] that would be helpful. So, that's what we want to do. But, you know, it's work in progress, just started. we are looking for servers, [00:27:00] okay? and support if anybody wants to sponsor us. we had a little bit of a disagreement on, what kind of license to use. you know, I would've been fine with MIT license.
[00:27:10] he was, you know, yeah, I mean, we were using a Mozilla license. but then, like, when I was sleeping on it one day, I was just thinking like, you know what? I kinda wanna have an AI carve-out and, have, the scraper. He was saying like, "Well, that makes it, like, not open source." And I was just thinking like, well, it depends on who you ask, This is kind of a point of contention, and I'm very curious what have you guys been seeing? Or have you had these kind of discussions with 
[00:27:36] Richard: others? One of the reasons we're able to be a podcast is all is because there's tension in the community around what open source is and how you keep it going.
[00:27:43] That's true. So 
[00:27:44] Jingna Zhang: there's 
[00:27:44] Richard: no answers. I'm really, I hate to break it to you. even the gold standard, which is the OSI's license, is debatable f- just for open source. I'm not even talking about the, open definition of AI, right? Yeah. That's a whole different contention. Yeah. So there are no answers here.
[00:27:59] A lot of it [00:28:00] is battle by fire, and I know that some people may disagree with me, including Duane O'Brien, who is the current executive director of the OSI, who's coming on this podcast in a couple of weeks. Hi, Duane. Just talking to you in the future. Hi, Duane. But yeah, it is, difficult to figure out what that is.
[00:28:15] And unfortunately, I think that conversation could really go on for a very long time. But I see Earl, your hand is raised. Earl? 
[00:28:22] Eriol Fox: Don't silence me, Richard. Yeah, this is a huge thing, right? there's licenses that cover code a lot of the time. We have Creative Commons in some way, but it doesn't always apply to every kind of creative work or many creative works.
[00:28:38] in the design space, especially like designers contributing to open source, we have a very similar problem. does the MIT license, the, you know ... I can't think of another license now. GNU? Um, um- 
[00:28:53] Jingna Zhang: Yeah, Mozilla, I guess, is the one we're doing ... 
[00:28:54] Eriol Fox: Mozilla, yeah. There's so many. I, you know. does it apply to the, quote-unquote, "pixels" or the [00:29:00] user research documents or the exploration into how things mean and why they mean that way and when you interact with them?
[00:29:08] we can't encapsulate that, in the current licenses, and we basically are not protected in any way under, like, licenses right now. But some people are, like, having conversations about, what could a license that is inclusive of design at the very least, look like in open source? But I think the issue that you're, pressing on, the bruise that you're pressing on in the, tech community here is what proximity to code- is prioritized.
[00:29:39] And design has a closer proximity to code than photography, than illustration, than painting, than artwork, unless it's artwork created in code. And therefore, the proximity to code, I've realized in my years of open source, is how we increase value. and it's a sad state of [00:30:00] affairs, but with perseverance on these projects that we work on, we will continue to work on this.
[00:30:04] But it is a difficult space to debate in. 
[00:30:08] Richard: But I'm glad that we have these debates. Thank you, Jigna, so much for coming on. This has been really great. This is definitely one of the podcasts where I wish it could go on for another five hours, but that would be very difficult for our, listeners, who I'm sure are now pulling into their workplace and being like, "I need to get out of the car now and, uh, actually go to work."
[00:30:26] But who actually drives to work anymore? Thank you so much for coming on. This is really great. People can follow up on Cara, that's C-A-R-A, by going to cara.app online, or Lantern by going to lantern, L-A-N-T-E-R-N, lanternite.org. And of course, these links will be found in the show notes. you can also find Jigna's website as well on the show notes on the site at podcast.sustainableoss.org.
[00:30:56] Spotlight's the part of the podcast at the very end where we highlight other people's projects or [00:31:00] things that we think need a bit of light put on them.
[00:31:02] Super, super fun. Shout-out to Eric Berry for starting this in the first place. my spotlight today, I've realized I've never spotlighted this, which is bizarre to me, is the Biodiversity Heritage Library. It is a massive institution that is separate from the Internet Archive, where all of the documents related to species, or biodiversity are tried to be stored in one place that's accessible.
[00:31:26] I use this every single day of my life all the time. it's one of my favorite resources. And if you wanna find amazing art, all of the documents that are on the BHL are available to be used, and they're all from, you know, most of them are from the 1800s, or 1700s. And there's just beautiful paintings, there's beautiful drawings that are completely open source in the best sense.
[00:31:46] Go use them. Go copy them. My current background on my laptop is the imprint of butterflies, not the sketch of the butterflies, but the other side of the page, where the paint has leaked over. So there's just a ghost of [00:32:00] butterflies past. and it's just really beautiful. BHL is amazing. Shout-out to BHL.
[00:32:04] Errol, what's your spotlight today? 
[00:32:06] Eriol Fox: I cycled through like three different spotlights that I wanted to, spotlight, but I settled on one because of what Jingna mentioned about the homepages of, Cara, where people were expecting feeds without following people. So my spotlight is a report and project from bitsoffreedom.nl.
[00:32:27] It's an exploratory study of addicting design by Caroline Sinders and Dr. Ramy Gad Elrab. And it's a report and research about the patterns that modern technology or contemporary technology use in order to keep us addicted to systems, and an e- exploration into, the legal aspects of that. And so it's a really, really good read, really amazing work done by, Bits of Freedom and Convocation Research & Design there.
[00:32:59] Richard: Shout out to [00:33:00] episode 107 with Caroline Sinders. That was a while ago. Very excited to hear that she's still doing stuff in this space. Jingna, what is your spotlight today? 
[00:33:07] Jingna Zhang: I was gonna mention The Met, Open Access, from The Met Museum in New York. they have a great library of their own collection, great photography. I go on there when I need textures sometimes. And like I said, you need big organizations with, deep pockets to be putting up open source artwork out there for the world to use.
[00:33:26] And it's just great to browse too, you know, just high-quality photography if you can't go to The Met. So I like it for that too. But, if you need free art, cool-looking art, go look at The Met Open Access and Respect people's ownership of their work. 
[00:33:41] Richard: Woke. Jingna, thank you so much for coming on.
[00:33:44] It's been really great to have you. Listeners, thank you for listening. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. If you have, there are a few things you can do. One, you can go to podcast.sustainoss.org to look at the show notes and to follow up with all these things. Two, you can tell all your friends about it.
[00:33:57] Literally, they don't know yet because you haven't told them, and [00:34:00] you haven't told them enough. So tell a friend. Tell your mom. That'd be great. If you wanna tell us about what you feel about the podcast, you can email podcast@sustainoss.org. Please send us along all of your love mail. That would be really, really great.
[00:34:12] The more we get, the better we feel. You can also make our wallets feel a bit better, which is important, because we pay for things like editing. So go to Open Collective, and go to Sustain OSS, and please donate there. That would be super, super great. And of course, you can like us on all the places where podcasts are vended.
[00:34:28] You can also talk about us on social media, which would be really, really cool. and please follow up, learn about Cara, learn about Lanternite. Go look at Jingna's Photographs. cause they are super, super good.
[00:34:39] And I just really can't thank you enough, Jingna, for coming on today. Best of luck with everything, and take care. 
[00:34:47] Jingna Zhang: Thank you very much.