Sloppy Copies

Last month, I wrote an article about my recent experience creating a hobby project in a web framework - Ruby on Rails - that hasn’t been “in fashion” for some time. The blog post gathered some interest and made it to various discussion sites like Hacker News and others. It caused a pretty big spike in traffic and my post got linked from some more places and generated some interesting conversations. I had fun, talked to some new users of my app (a simple, no-strings-attached free tool to organise bands), got to geek out for a few evenings and all was good. Then a few days afterwards I noticed some odd behaviour in my web logs and monitoring: I started getting a lot of bot/crawler activity, but unlike the usual Wordpress-vulnerability scraping, this was activity specifically targetting the public “About this site”, FAQ and Help pages, as well as probing for non-existent pricing and subscription URLs.

I wrote it off as a new form of the regular Internet background noise, and carried on working on the site in the evenings; Life moved on. Then a few days ago, I discovered something that really threw me for a loop - I found what seems to be a bunch of almost literal scammy copies of my app.

Now, to be clear: I’m not saying for a second that I invented the concept of trying to organise a covers band. Hence there are many well established and trustworthy commercial or free offerings that do a lot more than what my app does. But this looks like something else entirely: I found sites that were near-enough clones of my specific take on the concept, seemed to follow my proposed workflows identically and had domain names registered or updated a week or so after my article got picked up by Hacker News. Some of them only had splash pages, others appeared to have a basic working application behind it, just with ads or subscription model tacked on. I get that with the rise of AI tooling, suddenly anyone with an idea can quickly churn out something that kinda works with very little effort.

I’m not going to link to these “Sloppy Copies” here, not least because some of them looked sketchy as hell. But a quick glance at their landing pages - full of stock images, suspicious user testimonials that have a strong AI smell to them, or even screenshots stolen from other apps - set off the spidey sense.

I checked around in a few of these circles, and apparently the problem is endemic everywhere. Developers had seen their products copied, sometimes only a splash or “sign up” page, but more frequently now an apparently working application. Entire personal blogs had been cloned. I suppose a simple prompt is so simple to implement that there’s next to zero “barrier to entry” for any chosen target market now.

Maybe it’s always been going on, but AI tooling has for sure accelerated it and enabled these sort of drive-by cloning operations. I still think we should just view AI as a tool; It’s the intent of the person driving it that matters, I think. And sadly, it appears that there are a lot of complete dickheads out there. Whatever, I dunno - it’s just all kinda depressing and very “late-stage capitalism” where it looks like any idea someone may have, or anything created for pleasure can be instantly cloned, packaged, corrupted and have a price tag stamped on it by a literal machine. Sometimes, I really miss the old web.