The Little Badge That Insists It Was Made by a Human

Somewhere on the internet, a small stamp-shaped icon has been quietly making the same modest request for a while now: please believe that a person made this. It doesn’t ask for much. It doesn’t want your email, your subscription, or your soul. It just wants to sit in the corner of a blog post, an album cover, or a painting and say, gently but firmly, “not by AI.”

That badge belongs to a site called notbyai.fyi, and it is one of the more stubbornly optimistic ideas I’ve come across in a while.

Meet the Badge

If the badge could talk, it would probably introduce itself a little sheepishly, aware that it’s swimming against a very strong current. Its whole existence is built on one simple, slightly old-fashioned belief: that human-made things are worth clearly labeling as human-made, now that the internet is being flooded with content nobody actually wrote, drew, or played.

The badge comes in three flavors depending on who’s using it — one for writers, one for visual artists, one for musicians and producers — and it doesn’t ask for perfection. Under what the project calls its “90% Rule,” you’re allowed to have used AI for inspiration, for boilerplate legal text, or for a grammar check, and still wear the badge honestly. It’s less a purity test and more a statement of intent: I was here, doing most of the work, on purpose.

It’s a small thing, technically. A downloadable image, a project page, a bit of copy about “human-centric content.” But small things sometimes say something large, and this one is trying to say: humans haven’t stopped mattering just because a machine can now finish their sentences.

Why the Badge Exists at All

Here’s the part of the pitch that actually got my attention, and it isn’t sentimental — it’s almost mechanical. If AI-generated content keeps piling up across the web, and future AI models keep training on whatever’s out there, then increasingly they’re training on each other’s leftovers. Recycled content, feeding recycled models, producing more recycled content. The badge’s argument is that somebody needs to keep making the original stuff — the odd, imperfect, genuinely new material — or the whole ecosystem quietly starts eating its own tail.

Framed that way, the badge isn’t nostalgic. It’s closer to a small act of ecological maintenance. Somebody has to keep planting real trees if the forest is going to keep producing oxygen.

The Case for Recommending It

I like this project, and I think it deserves the recommendation. Not because AI-generated writing is bad — plenty of it is fast, useful, and perfectly fine for what it’s meant to do — but because speed and soul are different axes entirely, and lately everything is being optimized along the first one and almost nothing along the second.

There’s a particular kind of writing — a memoir chapter that took someone eleven drafts because they weren’t ready to say the true thing yet, a song written the week after a breakup, a blog post that rambles exactly as much as the person’s actual thinking rambled — that isn’t better because it’s slower. It’s better because it’s theirs, mistakes and hesitations included. That kind of work deserves a place to stand and be recognized as what it is, especially now, when the fastest, cheapest version of almost anything is one prompt away.

A badge won’t stop AI-generated content from spreading — nobody involved seems to think it will, and to its credit the project doesn’t pretend to be an AI detector or a gatekeeper. It’s not trying to catch anyone in a lie. It’s opt-in, almost quaint in its trust: it simply asks people who did the work themselves to say so, out loud, in public, where it counts.

The Small, Stubborn Point

What I keep coming back to is how unfashionable the whole idea is, in the best way. In a year when everyone is racing to ship faster with AI, here’s a tiny badge quietly insisting that some things are worth doing the slow way, and that the slow way deserves a name and a symbol, not just silent extinction by comparison.

It’s a small piece of internet infrastructure with an almost naive kind of hope attached to it — that if you give people a simple way to say “I made this myself,” some of them will keep doing it, purely because someone finally asked.

Summary

I recently came across this thoughtful little site: https://notbyai.fyi/, and in an era when AI runs wild across the internet, there will always be people whose ideas refuse to follow the crowd. My take on it: recommended. AI-generated content arrives so fast now that it arrives without a soul — and for the people still writing with one, we owe them a little room to exist. A site that offers a place to prove that is a good way to do it.