A while ago I got an email from someone saying they found my work while looking through recent “vibe-coded and AI-built games”… And they wanted to feature my games on this AI website.
You can imagine the bout of panic. Vibe-coded?? How did they jump to that conclusion? Based on what? I make everything myself. No “artificial”, I’m just “intelligent”!!
Oh god, is this the beginning of being canceled yet again-again-again-again??
I never used any vibe coding or AI tools. I have no intention of changing that.
I used to be, and still am, a fan of classic pre-AI era AI… before gen-AI, and data scraping, and this modern rendition ruined it. I loved my AIML bot, that I customized myself, with data that I wrote myself. I love procedural generation, using code I write myself, based on rules I create myself… It’s sad to me how AI has become an umbrella term for all things wrong in tech when it has existed so long in games and computers.
All that said, I wrote the email off as phishing but generally this fear has been on my mind a lot… thinking about how anti-AI accusations, and all the social media outrage this entails, actually just seems to help normalize AI.
Thankfully a lot of my work predates modern “AI tools”. It is impossible to accuse, and invalidate, most of what I’m proud of… but I can’t imagine what absolute paranoia hell it must be for new digital artists starting out.
It would be easy to accuse anyone of “using AI”, and as a result of enough online relational aggression, blackballing them from their own communities or support.
It’s easy to do that to people anyone might be jealous of. It all just strikes me as another clout chasing strategy for social media.
My most recent observations… I think all this helps normalize AI (Yes, I will repeat that a lot).
We’re seeing the discussion change that you can’t really do anything “that cool” without using AI, so therefore AI must be involved.
I see so much over X (occasionally I peek in, because it’s a good litmus test for where tech bros are at) where a person will say “I was able to finally make something amazing as a solo-dev with AI!”
The gist of it is that a solo-dev doesn’t have the advantages of a team, and the only way to make something good is to use vibe coding. “You can’t possibly do it all yourself.” So we are seeing this idea creep in that good work is something only teams, or advantaged people can make. AI tools are empowering to disadvantaged individuals. (This being the ghist of arguments…)
I don’t agree. (In bold, so I’m harder to misinterpret.) I am a solo-dev. I pride myself in doing everything on my own, including making my own tools.
I also understand the cultural nitpicking that comes with calling myself a solo-dev because “people never truly make everything/something on their own. You didn’t build your own computer, make your own OS, or build your own engine… then you are not a solo-dev because that doesn’t exist…”
I know it’s frustrating, but I think the groundwork for normalizing AI has always been there, because there’s this sense of disempowering (discouraging, or denying) the capabilities of an individual.
I’m tired of it. The atmosphere is turning into something of a which hunt, where legitimate authors are accused of it, and it costs them.
For example see:
“Like many of you, I have questions about how this happened and what recourse the author has in the situation. Earlier this week, the author H.M. Smith was accused of using AI to write her new book, Daggermouth. In that case, Pangram returned the book as 60% AI. It is currently ranked at 73 on Amazon. Before that, Hachette canceled the book Shy Girl because Pangram returned it as 78% AI. What’s notable is that in each case, it was an individual from a media outlet feeding book files to Pangram without the authors’ permission. Welcome to the new world of “Gotcha!””
– “AI Accusations and Book Publishing”
As very recent examples.
I wrote this post in notepad. How easy would it be to pick at my writing? Do I, as a casual blogger, now need to rework my entire writing style to be as far away from AI as possible?
Do I not only need to be paranoid about checking how my words will be taken out of context by social justice bullies, alt-right bros, but also now anti-AI warriors? The inner voice in my head that argues as social-justice-bully-parttime-alt-right-bro is getting really loud. I can’t say anything without thinking about every possible angle someone would intentionally misunderstand me over, and post a screenshot of it (out of context, of course) for the dunks.
What does doing this to people accomplish exactly? Did it fix injustice? Do we know yet?
Canceling authors and artists over potential AI use, when there is no real solid proof from said artist or author, seems extra insidious to me because it was writing and art this stuff is trained off. So you steal it from everyone, and now anyone is afraid of making stuff because it will be accused of being AI?
I think we are seeing a type of ideology normalized in that people can’t possibly make anything original by themselves, and if they do then it must be AI. This applies very much to newer work.
Call me cynical, or paranoid, but this just reeks of a type of pro-AI propaganda, but with reverse psychology.
All that said, who really is disempowered or empowered by all this?
I’m a longstanding believer that, in order to really fight something, you need to understand how it works. This being important in our digital world. We can protect ourselves by making tools. The answer is individual empowerment. Anyone can do it! You don’t need to wait for others.
We can’t do that if we don’t actually educate ourselves on how these systems work.
There are a number of anti-AI tools, AI protection, and data poisoning projects that I’ve just kind of… hoarded links for. There’s so much!
The importance is to highlight that there’s constructive work being done to push back against abuse of tech.
https://jorgesanz.net/posts/2025-08-22-anti-ai-zip-bomb-with-caddy/
https://foxgloveapp.com/ similar to https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/userguide.html
https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/blog/2024/09/13/spigot/
https://git.gammaspectra.live/git/go-away
https://blog.castle.io/detect-and-crash-chromium-bots-with-one-weird-trick-bots-hate-it/
https://tzovar.as/algorithmic-sabotage-ii/
https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org
https://github.com/liclac/pngbomb
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/amp/
Also… Anti spyware tools for Windows (stuff that strips out all monitoring from Windows).
There are a lot of examples of open source tools for striping out bloat, spyware, or Microsoft from Windows, but this one is a good recent example. Pushback exists everywhere.
What I love about these projects is that they would not be possible without an understanding of how the technology works, and to have that understanding you need to allow yourself a level of tech literacy that social media discussions about this discourage.
Two other interesting projects are tools to bypass age verification…
https://github.com/helloyanis/age-verification-bypass
https://github.com/Vladimir-0001/Agechecker-Bypass
“It’s a proof of concept to show that age verification online is not a good idea. Whenever you send your ID online, it has the potential of getting leaked, and in the worst case scenarios, someone can act as yourself, or blackmail you into revealing where you have been online (with irrefutable proof since they have your ID). No matter what the privacy policy says, or how secure the site is, hackers can always find a way to get the data. See the amount of breached websites.“
It’s worth understanding that our digital world is fundamentally democratic by design. Anyone has the power to learn, break, hack, and create tools that break predatory technology or tech trends.
The only thing stopping anyone is knowledge that it’s possible.
“Rather than dwelling on the impending doom that we’ve gotten used to, what if we stop waiting for someone else to do something about it and start with what we can actually control? That’s why I wanted to explore dérive in the first place, but without an infrastructure, that wouldn’t be possible. The indie web and the web revival at large IS the infrastructure—it’s “an online world that’s way more diverse, much broader, more privacy-friendly, more welcoming to creativity, self-expression, and autonomous exploration.”
– Instead of Doomscrolling, How to Drift Through the Indie Web Instead of Doomscrolling
We have a word for it! The “Indie Web”. The original internet, where everyone exists on their own terms, and creates for themselves, away from social media or algorithms.
Resources like…
Resources List for the Personal Web:
https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/resources-list-for-the-personal-web/49
Are good primers into this, especially for people that don’t know they can even exist like this online.
Note that if you did this, it would be easier to protect yourself from your content being used to train AI models.
You can even build your own router, for example…
“Stop Internet Provider Spying : Build Your Own Raspberry Pi Router”
– https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/raspberry-pi-router-setup-guide-2025/
I know that I keep sharing it, but I think the story of this hacker turning their disposable vape into a web server is an amazing example of how tech garbage is reaching a point that it’s sophisticated enough to be… really valuable? …if you know what you are doing:
https://bogdanthegeek.github.io/blog/projects/vapeserver/
There’s all sorts of examples of people using tech trash, old phones, and turning them into things like routers https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/du9dr1/converting_a_smartphone_into_a_dedicated_mobile/
You can even find popular accounts dedicated to that on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXCaDNJjekD/D
I think there’s something hopeful to all that!
This post is really just a giant linkdump of resources I’ve been accumulating, while thinking about these issues of empowerment VS doom.
I do think there’s this aspect of mainstream social media where you can’t really trust the intentions behind anything you see. Hardcore anti-AI stances, and the resulting cancelation, helps normalize AI more than AI enthusiasts. I think that’s by design. Call me cynical (again), but I think social media is a very effective propaganda machine, and you need to question every popularized mentality that comes out of it. Especially if it is one that turns people against eachother.
? cool link alert ?
just f***ing send it
jfsendit.com
“Files go straight from your browser to theirs. No upload, no server, no account.”— Nathalie Lawhead (@alienmelon.bsky.social) June 24, 2026 at 7:30 AM
A while ago I posted a link to this online tool called “just f***ing send it”
“Files go straight from your browser to theirs. No upload, no server, no account.”
– https://jfsendit.com/
I thought it was a great “quick and dirty” alternative to having to share from Google Drive.
Aside from preliminarily digging into making sure it’s safe, and a little into how it’s built, I posted it without much more thought.
Unfortunately the link took off with something like 1.5k likes, which means it left my “happy bubble” and entered The Feed.
Things quickly escalated. The initial “wow this is cool” turned into people saying “What about THIS tool, what do you have against THIS tool” (and posting an alternative tool that does the exact same thing, but I would not know about)… I didn’t mind. I like tons of alternatives. I just think it’s silly to assume I might have something against it, if I didn’t mention it…
But then people started accusing the original link of being vibe coded because (from what I gather) an AI company talked about it, there was some light association with vibe coding, although I could not find the developer of the tool itself (the person that programmed it) being associated with either. My initial glance at the source indicated that it looked legit (at least predominantly human written), that’s why I posted it…
Things escalated to me “promoting AI”, and then a bunch of blocking happened.
There was something disappointing in regards to how quick people are to accuse something of being vibe coded with so little to go on. If a website that specializes in vibe coding posts my own work (even though I don’t touch that stuff), then does that mean I will be accused of being pro-AI? (See my opening story in this blog post).
It just seemed to make caring about if something is AI or not futile… because if you accidentally post something, or are somehow randomly pulled into association with it, then you are tainted forever.
The entire dynamic just distracts from the fact that there’s this real issue of technofascism and techfeudalism, but more time is spent nitpicking people online rather than holding corporations responsible for this.
Another example…
I gave a talk while back at a partly AI conference (it’s a big topic, and was a great conference that covered A LOT) where I strongly criticized “modern AI”, and the exploitation of tech.
When I shared a link to the transcript over social media, I was put on AI blocklists.
How will we actually make a difference if we don’t even participate in the discussion? We leave the technology to those who will exploit it.
Actually resisting this means creating alternatives, and tools, that empower us to protect ourselves. To do that, we can’t remove ourselves from the discussion. We actually have to be part of it, and drive it toward something better.
“Got a contract from flock to decommission a ton of these cameras in our area for them. They didn’t want them back at just wanted them destroyed with proof. Each one has like 2 pounds of copper and almost have a gram of gold in the contacts of each. The poles are aluminum too. We decommissioned 20 of them and it’s a good payday on top of what they paid us. A little annoying to take apart though so we just started smashing them by the 5th one. “
All that said, join the indie web! Make your own anti-AI trap because you understand the bots, data poison, crash the crawlers, hack some hardware! It’s more constructive than being part of the social media algorithm mob.
Please enjoy the outbound links. :)
