It’s a small pleasure, but receiving an “I Voted” sticker after casting my ballot is one of my favorite parts of the whole voting process. I slap the sticker on my chest and spend the rest of the day feeling like I accomplished a little something. I participated in democracy and everyone who sees me will know it. Artificial intelligence robbed me of that small joy this year and replaced it with a small horror. My “I Voted” sticker is AI-generated slop. 

Getting a little sticker when you vote has been a tradition in the US since the 1980s. It’s a symbol of the election cycle. People take selfies and post them or share them with friends. It’s a celebration of democracy and a small way to pressure people into going to the ballot box. 

The voting sticker has been subject to every kind of discourse imaginable. Are “I Voted” stickers worth the cost? Wondered Marketplace in 2020. A cemetery in New York has spent time and money tending to the grave of Susan B Anthony because voters coat it in stickers during voting season. In 2008, companies like Starbucks and Ben and Jerry’s ran afoul of election laws for offering free treats to people who showed their “I Voted” stickers.

It’s appropriate but depressing that I got an AI slop “I Voted” sticker in 2026, the year it feels like the mainstream began to reckon with AI.

My sticker is ugly. It’s a busy circular nightmare. “I Voted” is spelled out in small bronze text at the top of the ring. Bronze laurels encircle a bronze bald eagle that stretches atop the American flag. Below this is more text: “250 YEARS ANNIVERSARY” and "SEMIQUENCENTENNIAL.” Below that, another line reads — as best I can tell — “CEKEVPATIVG EDELDOA.” I assume this was meant to say “CELEBRATING FREEDOM," but whoever churned out this slop wasn’t using the latest models and the fine detail is lost.

I put the sticker on reluctantly, but I was not proud. I sent a photo of the offending sticker to journalist friends with my face cropped out. They immediately noticed it was AI-generated. I did not post my sticker online. I shared it with no one else. My democratic joy turned to shame.

A few hours later, a friend sent me a selfie. He’d just left the voting booth. His sticker was beautiful, tasteful, a testament to the subtle art of the “I Voted” sticker. A red ring enclosed a blue field. The crescent and palmetto (symbols of South Carolina) sat elegantly behind a bold white “I VOTED.”

His sticker catches the eye. Passers-by will know exactly what the sticker says. They know he voted. Anyone looking at my sticker will wonder how I spilled some bronze paint on my chest. I trembled with indignation. One town over from me they’re giving out the good stickers and I’m stuck with slop. First my town of 12,000 installs 33 Flock cameras and now this? 

I spent some time scrolling through social media to see other “I Voted” stickers. So many are so beautiful. Michigan runs a contest where students can submit their own idea for a sticker and the state will print up the winners. Kentucky, Albany, and several other places around the country do the same. Louisiana commissions local artists to produce gorgeous stickers. My mouth hung up in a jealous scowl as I stared at pictures of New Orleanians bedecked with a sticker showing a hand drawn trumpet blasting out “I Voted” alongside Mardi Gras beads.

Only Denton, Texas (another place I’ve lived, weirdly) seems to also have AI-generated slop stickers. Denton’s sticker is, at least, personalized. The city’s court house is in the corner looking more or less correct. The “I Voted” is large and centered in the sticker itself. Like mine, the image is too busy. Too much text, too many fireworks, and the inclusion of the Liberty Bell clutters the whole thing up. The central message — “I Voted” — is bright white. It doesn’t sink into a busy bronze soup like on my sticker.

Complaining about AI-slop “I Voted” stickers may seem trivial in a world where AIs are choosing targets in warzones and vibecoders are reverse-engineering every piece of software ever written. But these little things are important. These small annoyances pile up until things like ChatGPT flyers are so ubiquitous that you don’t notice them anymore. The AI drive-thru works well enough and one day you stop worrying about it so much. You get an ugly AI slop “I Voted” sticker and you slap it on or toss it out. Enough of these build up until you don’t notice that AI all around you. And then, one day, it’s all normal.

Right now we’re figuring out where our AI lines are. Society is negotiating what the future will look like. We’re fighting data centers, figuring out how to burn tokens to keep our bosses happy, and learning what we will and won’t abide.

Me? I draw the line at AI-generated “I Voted” stickers.

It’s rare to see an executive go from fucking around to finding out so quickly. That’s what happened last week when Proton CEO Andy Yen announced he was canceling a planned re-interview process for almost all current employees that would have checked if they’re using AI enough. This follows extreme backlash from Proton users and workers against the company's aggressive pivot to AI. It’s been a wild ride internally, several employees past and present have shared with 404 Media.

Proton’s CEO Cancels AI ‘Re-Interviews’

On Friday, Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, cancelled a series of nearly company-wide ‘re-interviews’ that would have forced employees to explain how they are using AI, with the clear intention that they may be fired if not using it enough in the eyes of Proton leadership, according to six current Proton employees and audio of an around two hour all-hands meeting obtained by 404 Media.

The move came after 404 Media published an investigation on Thursday, which showed how Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton, in some cases despite security concerns from employees. In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

The re-interview cancellations likely don’t address the concerns of many Proton users, who are more focused on Proton’s deprioritization of security; many Proton users have blasted the company’s leadership on social media over the last 24 hours and explicitly called for Yen to resign.

MORE FROM 404 

Kinktober has come and gone. But Archive of Our Own (AO3), a massive repository for fanfiction and creative writing, is still down, and might be down for as long as a month after going down for "maintenance" following a security incident last week. The Organization for Transformative Works (OTW), the non-profit organization that runs AO3, posted on its status page that the site restoration will take around two weeks, but could take up to a month.

People are coping how they can. And they’re turning to anything but Wattpad to fill the void. One writer I spoke to who posts her writing and reads others’ writing on AO3 told me that she was in the middle of racing to finish a work that was deliberately timed to Kinktober and Halloween when the outage happened. She was hitting “next chapter” while reading a fic on Wednesday night when she got the message that the site was down for maintenance, “which I initially took as a sign from the universe to go to bed,” she said.