Vomit On My Sweater Already, Will’s Spaghetti

Remember that cursed video of Will Smith eating spaghetti? I’m going to hold your hand when I tell you that it’s been more than 3 years since it was generated. Time flies when you’re waiting for our AI overlords to come online! The video was funny because it was terrible—surreal hands, noodles fusing with skin, a face melting into marinara. Nobody was fooled, and that was the entire point. AI video was a party trick—something you showed your friends so you could all laugh at the absurdity.

That innocent era is over.

In less than three years, AI-generated imagery has completed a full transformation in purpose. It is no longer a creative tool, it is overwhelmingly a deception tool. The product has shifted from “look at this obviously AI-generated art” to “look at this real thing that happened.” The people making that shift have clear agendas: engagement farming, political manipulation, romance scams, and outright commercial fraud.

Oops, No Guardrails!

When OpenAI launched Sora 2 back in September 2025, it became the most downloaded free app in the App Store within a week. Every output carried a visible watermark and invisible C2PA metadata. Both protections collapsed almost immediately. Watermark-removal tutorials flooded YouTube and TikTok within days. The Pro API tier shipped outputs with no watermark at all (almost like they knew why people were paying for the Pro tier). By March 2026, OpenAI shut the entire Sora app down, citing a number of reasons (the most likely was costs and a lack of financial return). The tool’s primary legacy wasn’t creative expression. It was industrialized lying.

NBC News documented Etsy storefronts selling crochet patterns marketed with AI-generated images of plushies that real yarn physically cannot produce. Even recipes haven’t been spared, with CNN reporters being duped into baking a recipe from Pinterest that turned out to be entirely AI-generated and didn’t work. Pinterest’s CEO conceded on an earnings call that no platform can catch 100% of AI-generated content. The marketplace has become a minefield where the product photos are fiction and the patterns are impossible.

On a more dangerous topic, Sumsub’s 2025-2026 Identity Fraud Report found that deepfake fraud now accounts for 11% of all global fraud, with dating apps tied as the single most-targeted sector. A French interior designer handed over €830,000 to scammers running an AI-generated Brad Pitt impersonation. The FBI’s 2025 IC3 report logged roughly $20.9 billion in total losses, with romance fraud among the costliest categories and over 22,000 AI-related complaints. These aren’t edge cases. This is one of the primary commercial applications of the technology.

Creatively Bankrupt

There is a reason these tools are being used for deception rather than creation: the creative industries have made it socially radioactive to admit you used AI. SAG-AFTRA struck for eleven months over AI in video games. Studios have had titles canceled over AI asset backlash. Wizards of the Coast was caught using AI art for Magic: The Gathering despite publicly pledging not to. The message from Hollywood laborers, gaming, and the art world is clear—use AI openly at your own risk.

That stigma is obviously earned. AI art should remain a personal tool—something you use for fun to share with friends and family. It has no place in commercial creative work where a thing with no soul, no experiences, no taste, no worldview, no self-awareness is displacing real human artists. The unfortunate consequence of this is that the path of least resistance becomes deception. Passing AI output off as a real photo, a real person or a real product carries no professional penalty if it’s never caught.

Every Man For Themselves

The regulatory response is basically a finger wag and a stern look. The EU AI Act’s watermarking mandate doesn’t take full effect until August 2026. The United States has no comprehensive federal labeling law. Platforms rely on an honor system where uploaders self-disclose AI content—a system that scammers defeat by stripping metadata and cropping watermarks. TikTok can host every AI-generated video in existence without ever being required to prove whether it’s real. C2PA metadata, the industry’s best technical solution, is destroyed every time an image is laundered through WhatsApp, iMessage, or Facebook’s upload pipeline.

The technology will only get better. The regulations will continue to not exist. And every day, the gap between what AI can fabricate and what platforms can detect grows wider. We moved from Will Smith eating spaghetti to industrialized fraud in under three years. The next three will be even worse.

As always, zack.wall@icloud.com for feedback and suggestions.

We Were So Naive

Depending on your age and the corner of the world you grew up in, it may be difficult to remember life before the internet. I was born in 1991 and for practically all of my formative life, I had access to some form of the world wide web through NetAccess and AOL, then followed by Road Runner and Spectrum when we could finally afford broadband. Some of my earliest memories are of being kicked off the internet during chat sessions with friends on AIM so my parents could make a phone call.

When the internet hype engine took off, it truly felt like the next leap of human evolution. What happens when I can chat with someone across the world in a near-instant? What does society look like with all of human knowledge an Ask Jeeves search away? Will Walmart be destroyed by e-commerce? What the hell is online dating?

Every day in the early 2000s, a new website popped up, a new product was announced, a new internet gadget was unveiled and the hype seemed infinite. Yeah, yeah the Dot-com crash happened. Who cared? Myspace kicked ass, Facebook was up-and-coming, Netflix was going digital, 2-day shipping was magical, and the world felt right.

When we were of the age and knowledge to start shaping Web 2.0, we needed no permission. Geocities, Tumblr, Blogspot, Club Penguin, Newgrounds, Second Life, and thousands more places were created by and for millennials to congregate, discuss, troll, dream, hope, and build.

The Wide Web Narrows

Contrast that to today’s internet, where you can count on two hands the number of websites and apps you open or visit on a weekly basis. Nilay Patel calls The Verge “the last website on earth”, and as much as I love reading The Verge, I think there can be no stronger indictment of the modern web than that.

At some point you logged out of Club Penguin or Facebook or Newgrounds for the last time. “That’s just called growing up.” No. I reject that. We were happy once, and then enshittification happened. When people discovered that they could make money on the internet, the vibes changed overnight.

Consider that Roblox and Fortnite are no longer innocent corners of the internet for kids to experience safe, wholesome fun. They are extraction zones designed to get children addicted to spending and gambling real money on fake digital goods—that’s it.

Just like the disappearance of kid-friendly public spaces, kid-friendly internet spaces are also experiencing an extinction event, and so-called Age Verification laws will be the final nail in the coffin for them. There is a dark irony in the billionaires and Epstein-associates, who are funding and writing these laws, telling us that mass surveillance is required to protect children from predators.

If we sand off every sharp corner that the internet is made of, what exists but an emasculated promise, murdered by surveillance capitalism, manufactured safety, and short-term profit gains?

The concept of the borrowed web has disastrous long-term implications. What has Gen Z built that it truly owns, and how much of what they interact with is actually a rat maze masquerading as a funhouse? The teens are getting more and more creative with how they inhabit the spaces they inherited, and they are genuinely shaping internet culture in fascinating ways, but those aren’t spaces that they own or created.

A long time ago, a millennial college student wasn’t satisfied with MySpace, and so he built Facebook. If a Gen Z programmer isn’t happy with TikTok, who’s going to fund their short-form video startup? Long has consolidation been the enemy of invention. Many smaller ideas merge to become a few dominant ideas, and then the people in charge embrace, extend, and extinguish competing ideas. That’s why you have 10 apps on your phone and every one of them sucks.

Decentralized Park

So what’s the play here? Do we accept that there are simply never going to be any new ideas? Do we mumble that the internet had a good run and then get back to scrolling slop on Reels? If things are going to change, it’s time for Gen Z to demand ownership of their online spaces.

Part of existing on the modern web is knowing who you actually are. Your interests, your tastes, your opinions—are they yours, or were they given to you by a machine? When you open TikTok, do you do it with purpose, or are you waiting for an algorithm to decide what slop to feed you? Did you curate your Spotify playlists with passion, or did you accept what was put on your plate?

To know the power of the algorithm is to know the face of digital ecstasy. It’s the reason you randomly pick up your phone to scroll your feeds. It’s an invisible hand shepherding you to sugary treats for your brain. The more you engage with it, the more it learns how to get you hooked. That’s what a decentralized web promises to free us from.

In a decentralized system, you decide what algorithm governs what you see, or you can elect to have none at all. What a concept! The idea of federated spaces is in its infancy (right now it’s called the Fediverse), though the greater concept of federated communications is an old one.

Your email is already decentralized. You have an email address, but you can use any software you want to send and receive email to that address. You can take your entire inbox and outbox with you to any email application, and if you decide that you no longer want to use that email address, you can create a new one and get your old email forwarded. We don’t even think about it anymore, but email is kinda magical in this regard. In fact, open standards used to be the norm until corporations started locking things down.

Decentralization isn’t limited to email. We can see it happening with social media on platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, and Pixelfed. However, as important as it is to have ownership of those spaces, we need to be thinking of the bigger picture.

In the near-term future, our digital spaces will shrink considerably. We’re already seeing this happen with mass migration from social media forums and into group chats and Discord servers. It’s become more important than ever to have a circle of close friends and family members that you communicate with on a regular basis. We aren’t shouting our opinions to the whole internet via status updates any longer. We’re sharing memes with the group chat, and in many ways that feels right.

The more our governments crack down on privacy and online speech, the more we are driven to those local webs where we feel that we have more control, even if it’s an illusion. This is why ownership of the complete stack is necessary. As the saying goes, the heroes have to win every time, but the villain only needs to win once.

Chat Control, Age Verification, Anti-Encryption—these are the enemies of a free and open internet. Our current system is vulnerable to these laws because only a few players are in control of everything we interact with, which means that only a few of them need to cooperate for it to ruin everything for all of us. Open source hardware, decentralized software, private communications—these are the foundational tools of a free society.

We have a chance to launch a hardware and software revolution that will define the internet for decades to come, but the moment can’t wait until we’ve already been stripped of the freedoms that net-dwellers have enjoyed since the beginning. Go build something you don’t need permission to run. Self-host a Fediverse server. Tinker with a Raspberry Pi. Set up a VPN.

The best time to start owning your digital presence was 10 years ago. The second best time is when you close this tab.

As always, zack.wall@icloud.com for feedback and suggestions.