Zhang Jingna

Zhang Jingna (born 1988) is a Beijing-born, Singapore-raised photographer — and former national air-rifle shooter — whose painterly fashion and fine-art photography has appeared in Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s Bazaar. Working under the handle Zemotion, she became one of the most influential Asian photographers of her generation before becoming the AI resistance’s most effective builder.

Building Cara

In early 2023 Zhang founded Cara, a portfolio and social platform where generative AI images are banned and posts are tagged “NoAI” to deter scrapers. When Meta began training AI on Instagram content, the exodus was dramatic: Cara grew from about 40,000 to 650,000 users in a single week in June 2024, topping App Store charts and approaching a million users soon after. Zhang told TechCrunch the anger came from Meta putting AI “so much in their face” while adding friction to opting out.

Winning in court

Zhang also fights on the legal front. In 2024 she won a landmark appeal in Luxembourg against painter Jeff Dieschburg, who had copied one of her Harper’s Bazaar Vietnam photographs; she summarized the ruling: “Using a different medium was irrelevant. My work being ‘available online’ was irrelevant. Consent was necessary.” She is a plaintiff in the artists’ suit against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway, and joined a 2024 suit alleging Google trained its Imagen model on copyrighted work.

Unusually among AI critics, Zhang pairs protest with product: rather than only demanding platforms change, she built the alternative artists moved to.