New obscure sorrow unlocked: where you write a book so popular someone copies it all and ends up with a better looking more popular knock off.

I'm playing through the couch co-op game Split Fiction, and this is basically the premise (with more fun gameplay).

I made up a few words like this myself, all of which rhyme with either orange, purple, or silver.

https://rhymes.pressbin.com

But John Koenig's work is really well done and packaged in such a consumable way. I'm sorry to hear he's the victim of copyright infringement.

I ran into something like this a few months ago. There was this new indie game, Idols of Ash, that had just released and was blowing up on streaming. I googled it and found what looked like a legit site, idolsofash.fun. It had detailed strategy guides, screenshots, and even an embedded copy of the game. But the embed was buggy, so I searched for the game's itch.io page and left a comment.

Turns out the "fansite" was unaffiliated, and after playing the real game, it became clear the whole site was AI slop. It got gameplay mechanics subtly wrong, the screenshots didn't always relate to the captions, and the embed was a shoddy decompilation pulled from the game's files (easy since it was built with the Godot engine, and presumably where the site's knowledge of the game came from). It's apparently something afflicting a lot of indie devs -- somebody uses Claude or similar to rip your game and spin up a detailed site where you can play it for free. Not sure what the angle is, though, since the site says it's unofficial in the footer, links to the official Itch storefront, and doesn't insert ads or malware. Could just be an overzealous fan, but the whole thing struck me as very strange.

I'm interested to see if this is the whole story[0], but on the surface it sure is infuriating.

[0] this article and a bsky post by the author of the article are the only sources I can find other than the website itself - which is definitely as chock full of AI as indicated

> Nearly every day, I get emailed a newly-launched, obviously-vibecoded website filled with AI-generated content that was designed to siphon attention away from human creators: bloggers, authors, journalists, artists, musicians, and anyone else who slowly, painstakingly makes things for a living. I’m not even sure anymore that the emails I’m receiving are sent by a human.

We did it guys! This and the recent NYT article about the deepfake expert who can no longer trust his eyes when analyzing deepfakes, makes me hopeful that Silicon Valley will finally realize its dream of destroying human society.

What's funny is that if you go to the linked site that's meant to be a showcase of the design agency's design skills, you'll see that it's ... pretty shit.

Ugly. Random. Thoughtless.

Thanks to free speech, telling people to go fuck themselves is protected expression in the US. I took the liberty.

AI slop is a thief. But we knew this already.

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