The Theft of WigglyPaint: When Creative Tools Become Spam

In early December 2023, I wrote a drawing program called WigglyPaint and published it on Itch.io. All the drawing tools in WigglyPaint are animated, providing a live, automatic Line Boil effect: Internally, WigglyPaint maintains three image buffers and edits them simultaneously, with different types of randomization applied for different drawing tools; many tools apply a random position offset between stroke segments or randomly select different brush shapes and sizes: We cycle through displaying the buffers at roughly 12 frames per second- a familiar speed for limited animation- though the drawing itself is processed more responsively. Three frames is something of a sweet spot: using only two frames produces an unpleasant jittering effect, and more than three frames offer a diminishing addition of fluidity.

The tool's design philosophy centered on strong defaults and discrete choices rather than infinite customization. Instead of offering millions of colors, WigglyPaint provides five colors at a time- lineart, background, and three "markers"- with striking preset palettes. Instead of unlimited undo, there's a single "Oops" button. The markers always draw underneath lineart, creating a layered workflow without the complexity of actual layers.

Built in Decker, WigglyPaint has another advantage: if something's missing, it's trivial to add it live using Decker's editing tools. I could create new brush shapes from scratch in seconds. This malleability was central to the tool's philosophy- empowerment over restriction.

After its initial release quietly gained traction within the Decker community and on Cohost, WigglyPaint eventually exploded in popularity among Asian artists on social media. The wordless approachability and strong aesthetic hit just the right notes. I went from a few hundred North American users to millions internationally.

Here's where the story takes a dark turn. If you search for WigglyPaint today, you'll find wigglypaint.com, wigglypaint.art, wigglypaint.org, wiggly-paint.com, and half a dozen variations. These sites offer WigglyPaint, usually unmodified copies of v1.3, sometimes with minor "premium features" glued on or my bylines removed.

These aren't fan sites or official ports. They're slop- slapdash imitations pieced together with Large Language Models. The sites are full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and unattributed art. They use LLMs to quickly fabricate plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary.

LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, and spammers. Every LLM is constructed by consuming massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution. They're useful to people who believe creative expression is worthless.

It's not just websites. People have shoved WigglyPaint into WebView wrappers and are selling "The App Version of WigglyPaint" for iOS or Android. These app store summaries use carefully ambiguous language to imply that paying them supports me. The subtler insult is that these "ports" seal off Decker's editing tools, preventing users from reshaping or customizing WigglyPaint.

The most successful project I've ever released is no longer mine. My audience is using stolen copies. They're sharing links to slop sites. They'll never know about my other projects, updates I publish, or documentation I revise. I have been erased.

That's all. back