Back in 2023, John Earnest created a fun drawing application called WigglyPaint. The thing that makes WigglyPaint unique is that it automatically applies what artists call the line boil effect to anything you draw, making it seem as if everything is wiggling (hence the name). Even if you’re not aware of the line boil effect, you’ve surely encountered it several times in your life. The tool may seem simple at first glance, but as Earnest details, he’s put quite a lot of thought into the little tool.
WigglyPaint was well-received, but mostly remained a curiosity – that is, until artists in Asia picked up on it, and the popularity of WigglyPaint positively exploded from a few hundred into the millions. The problem, though, is that basically nobody is actually using WigglyPaint: they’re all using slopcoded copycats.
The sites are slop; slapdash imitations pieced together with the help of so-called “Large Language Models” (LLMs). The closer you look at them, the stranger they appear, full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and plenty of unattributed (stolen) art. This is what LLMs are best at: quickly fabricating plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary. It is no surprise that the same people who have total contempt for authorship find LLMs useful; every LLM and generative model today is constructed by consuming almost unimaginably massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution, just different enough to hide where it came from (usually). LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, spammers, and everyone who believes that creative expression is worthless. People who extract from the world instead of contributing to it.
It is humiliating and infuriating to see my work stolen by slop enthusiasts, and worse, used to mislead artists into paying scammers for something that ought to be free.
↫ John Earnest
There’s a huge amount of slopcoded WrigglyPaint ripoffs out there, and it goes far beyond websites, too. People are putting slopcoded ripoffs in basic webviews, and uploading them en masse to the Play Store and App Store. None of these slopcoded ripoffs actually build upon WrigglyPaint with new ideas or approaches, there’s no creativity or innovation; it’s just trash barfed up by glorified autocomplete built upon mass plagiarism and theft, “made” by bottom feeders who despise creativity, art, and originality.
You know how when you go to IKEA or whatever other similar store to buy picture frames, they have these stock photos of random people in them? I wonder if “AI” enthusiasts understand you’re supposed to replace those with pictures that actually have meaning to you.
I can think of two TV shows in the US that used that effect, and both shows were fantastic – “Dr Katz, Professional Therapist” and “Home Movies”
Well, I guess Dr Katz might’ve just been okay. I don’t remember it much. But, Home Movies was great.
Unless he was using a different effect, I remember Bill Plympton using it before those guys.
Give it a rest.
Funny you should write that, this is exactly my thought every time the software on one of my devices coerces me into losing some screen real estate and compute/bandwidth resources over its “AI features” that I absolutely do not need or want.
Pretty please, just “give it a rest”.
Both can be true at the same time.
You first.
As a commenter, I cannot do it first, by definition. Also why should I? Who is going to challenge this little echo chamber once I’m gone?
I don’t think you understand most of what you just said.
Thank you! It’s been a long day and I needed a good belly laugh.
Sadly, you didn’t return the favor.
I’m literally here to read Thom’s opinions. This is his blog! What did you think this website was? XD
I’ve been reading OSnews for years and I’ve learned that Thom is always right. About DRM. About patents. About Windows. About the benefits of CDE.
And I don’t know personally but I assume he’s also right about Fiona Apple. 😉
Thom is never going to leave it be. AI ‘took our jerbs’ happened directly to him, recall? It’s not speculation for him, AI is something that took food out of his mouth. Naturally he hates it!
The poop will hit the fan when someone takes a leaked source code for Windows 10 or the Windows Research Kernel (available as “Shared Source” by Microsoft), “vibe codes” a rewrite using an LLM, and then tries to pass it off as their reverse-engineered effort (basically tries to pass it off as their own ReactOS). That’s when we get our landmark case regarding “vibe-coded” LLM rewrites.
“…artists in Asia…”
Um, okay.
“…bottom feeders who despise creativity, art, and originality….”
Oh. I guess there are creators, maintainers, and destroyers, right? And Asians can only copy and can’t actually create?
Straight out of Mein Kampf. Or more recently, the discriminatory Harvard selection panels.
Let’s not reinforce that 19th century “slop” here.
That’s referring to people who use “AI” to copy other people’s work in slopcode, not the artists. Wtf are you on about?