Tired of Wondering Whether Anyone Made This

I caught myself doing it again last week. A short video of a fox in the snow came up, beautiful light, and before I'd even finished watching I was looking at its paws. Were there four? Did the tracks behind it make sense? Was the snow falling the same way in the corner as in the middle?

The fox was probably real. I'll never know. That's the part that bothers me.

I don't think I'm unusual here. Talk to almost anyone who spends time online and they'll describe the same small habit: you see something, and the first question isn't whether it's good or funny or moving. It's whether a person made it. We've all become amateur forensic examiners of our own feeds, and it's tiring in a way that's hard to name until you notice you're doing it twenty times a day.

The checking is the tiring part

Generated pictures, voices and clips aren't new, but the volume is. A few years ago you'd stumble on one now and then and it was a novelty. Now there are whole accounts, whole channels, that are nothing but output. Same lighting, same faces, same slightly too smooth skin, posted on a schedule no human could keep.

And people have noticed. You can see it in the replies. Half the comments under a striking image are some version of “is this real?” Somebody zooms in on the hands. Somebody else points out the text on the sign in the background is gibberish. A third person says it doesn't matter, it's still pretty, and gets argued with for an hour.

What I've started to see, and I suspect you have too, is people quietly walking away from anything that feels made by a machine. Not out of principle. Out of fatigue. If nobody made it, it's hard to care about it, and caring is the whole reason most of us look at pictures in the first place. A drawing a friend made is interesting even when it's not very good. A flawless image that nobody made is interesting for about two seconds.

So there's a kind of sorting going on. Things that carry a person's effort are starting to feel valuable again, and things that don't are starting to feel like wallpaper.

Not everyone has learned to check

I want to be careful here, because the fatigue I'm describing belongs mostly to people who grew up online. We learned the tells. We expect to be fooled, so we look.

A lot of people didn't grow up that way. A relative of mine forwarded me a clip a while back of a well-known public figure saying something completely out of character, with a link underneath asking for money. The voice was right. The face was right. She wasn't foolish to believe it — the thing was built specifically to be believed by someone who trusts video the way she was raised to trust it, as a record of something that actually happened.

If you've got parents or grandparents who are newer to all this, it's worth having the conversation. Not a lecture. Just: video can be made now, voices can be copied, and if a clip asks you to send money or click something urgently, call me first. It's a two-minute talk and it might save somebody a lot of grief.

What we lost before any of this

Honestly, I think the fatigue started earlier than generated media. It started when everything went flat.

I still have a birthday card my grandfather wrote years ago. It's four lines long. His handwriting slopes downhill, he pressed so hard the pen went through the paper on one letter, and he crossed out a word and wrote it again. I've read a lot of longer, better-written messages since. I don't keep any of them in a drawer.

There's something in a hand-made thing that typed text never quite carries: the pressure, the hesitation, the mistake left in. When you could see someone's hand in it, every word cost them something, and you could tell. Somewhere between autocorrect and suggested replies and now fully generated messages, a lot of us stopped feeling the weight of individual words. A message became something that appeared rather than something somebody wrote.

I don't want to be the person who says it was all better before. It wasn't. But that particular feeling, holding something and knowing a specific person spent a specific bit of their life making it for you, has gotten rare.

Why the faces here draw themselves

This is the part where I tell you about the thing we built, so fair warning.

DRAWMYFACE is a wall of faces people draw by hand, on a phone or with a mouse. Every stroke is saved in the order it was made. When you tap a face that someone else drew, it doesn't just open. It starts drawing itself, line by line, in the order it was drawn.

That was a deliberate choice, and it's the one I'm proudest of. You've already seen the finished face on the wall, so the popup has nothing new to show you except the one thing you can't fake by glancing: somebody sitting there, deciding where the eyes go, going back to fix the hair, adding that last small line at the corner of the mouth. You watch the hesitation. You watch the effort. A few seconds of it say more about whether a human was there than any amount of squinting at paws in the snow.

And because it's the whole point, you can give it to someone. Make your own wall (it's unlisted, so only people with the link can find it), draw the person you're thinking of and send them the link to that one face. When they open it, it plays for them too. They don't just get a picture of themselves. They get to watch you make it.

There's no message box anywhere on the site. That's on purpose as well. Whatever you want to say has to go into the drawing, which turns out to be a pretty good filter for what's worth saying.

Nobody needs to be good at drawing for this to land. I've watched people with no training at all spend five minutes on a friend's face, getting the glasses just right, and the person receiving it didn't care one bit about the proportions. They cared that somebody tried. You can save it as an image or a short video afterwards, if you want something to keep.

I'm not going to pretend a wall of hand-drawn faces fixes the internet. It doesn't. But if you're tired of wondering whether anyone made the things you look at, it's a nice feeling to open one and know for certain. Someone did. You can watch them do it.