Project SEEN — Journal
Last week, a friend linked me to an article from Jim Mander's substack, "I Play Games So You Don't Have To." He's giving advice on making good game demos, and he opens with a tip I have to quote in full:
"TIP 1: You’re fucked.
"Statistically speaking, no matter how unique or well made your game is, nobody will ever see it in all of remaining human history. And once the data centers become seized by self-aware digital constructs, all trace of your effort will be formatted and the storage space used to host AI models designed to generate naked Touhous. In trillions of years, as the universe cools, and the crystallized essence of all information ever contained within our cosmos is beheld by higher-dimensional, immortal intelligences, buddy, they’re not going to notice your demo beneath the thousands of incremental deckbuilder roguelites either. They’re lookin for those Touhous."
Like all good satire, it's just uncomfortably true. I couldn't put it more succinctly if I tried. The uninitiated may be unaware that AI can only be trained on human data in order to emulate humanity, and lots of it. It gets this by "scraping" websites, since nearly everything on the internet was created by a human until machine learning. But "it" is very vague, the AI doesn't scan the websites, a corporation sicks its unintelligent bots to amass all the data and shovel it into the AI; what corporation? You know the usual suspects. They bag all the human-words and all the human-drawings and all the reality-pictures, every photo ever publicized has no reason not to be found and taken, and then some more. They get the AI to learn all the human-voices and all the reality-sounds. Then the AI gets human-videos and reality-videos. You have human-movies? Let's see if this puppy can handle movies. What is it all for? Is it for the "Touhous", the embodiment of everyone's basest desires which is all we have left to strive for because of how capitalism has robbed us all the joys of creation? Is that the reason? I'm not sure, but it sure is amusing to see it try!
And it doesn't stop with what's on the internet, because they scanned it all and they ran out of pictures and videos and audiobooks and movies, Google needs your cloud-saved picture of your day at the beach you never posted, and that video too, and your phone calls will supplement human-voice nicely. Surveillance is a whole other axis of the project I'd love to get into, but right now it's just about the sheer reality of AI. Its immenseness. I'm not afraid that everything private to me will be fed into an AI. I am terrified that I can never share anything ever again without one exploiting me.
I make videogames, occasionally. Nothing remarkable, but some of them are public. Not many people have played them. I wonder, if an AI was fed my games, would it provide more value to a corporation that never knew I existed than a single human being?
Nobody asked me that question, by the way. Nobody asked me if my games could go in the pile. Nobody asks anyone. That's the part that actually gets me, more than the scale of it, more than the trillions of images and the data centers the size of small cities. It's that consent was never on the table to begin with. When I put something out into the world, I'm making a choice about who gets to have it, be it a friend, a stranger, whoever stumbles onto it and is actually willing to look. I'm not making a choice to have it vacuumed up and dissolved into a statistical average of everyone else's stuff, credited to no one, understood by no one, so a model can get slightly better at faking the next person's stuff. I didn't sign up for that. None of us did. It just started happening one day, and retroactively everyone was drafted for it, and even now what other choice is there? I can't just not create.
And the worst part is there's no undoing it. You can delete a photo off the internet and it doesn't matter, the AI already ate it, it's already baked into the weights somewhere, unrecoverable, anonymous, gone the way a drop of dye is gone once it's in the ocean.
So what's left to actually own? What can you still put out into the world and know, for certain, belongs to the moment you shared it and nothing else?
That question is basically why this exists. I didn't want to build something that pulls more of things into that machine. I wanted to build the opposite of it: something small, where what you show doesn't get scraped, optimized, or fed to anything; it gets seen, by one person, for one moment, and then let go. Not stored forever, nor converted into training weight for a thing that will never know your name. Just witnessed, and released.
That's the whole idea. Everything else in this app is just the mechanics of making that true.