Notes
2025/10/29
After long days of pairing sessions spread out over multiple months at the Recurse Center, the result of my collaboration with Victoria Ritvo is finally live:
It's slightly unhinged, so here's some context.
Slayerfest '03 is a fictional academic conference on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which simulates the full academic process of researching, writing, reviewing and re-writing papers until they are accepted and presented at the conference.
All the abstracts, peer reviews, revisions and final papers are AI generated, but they are all based on raw material, meticulously crafted by humans without any AI in the loop:
All papers are based on the 5000 messages that Victoria and I exchanged about Buffy (and philosophy) as I was watching the show during my time at the Recurse Center.
Our goal was to lean into AI as much as possible (which is why the entire tool that orchestrates the various bots is entirely vibe coded) but also pose a question about AI slop:
What counts as AI slop? Is it AI slop if the papers are recognizably our ideas, just using a more academic language? How much of academia has always been AI slop without the AI?
The project started simple enough: what if we automated the entire academic pipeline? Graduate student bots summarize conversations. Postdoc bots rate relevance. Research assistant bots find supporting episodes. A professor bot writes the paper. Reviewer bots accept or reject it.
If rejected, the paper goes back to the professor for revisions. The cycle continues until all papers are accepted. It takes about five hours to generate a full conference, with built-in pauses for rate limits (and to let the grad students rest, of course).
The result? Papers with titles like “Maternal Panic and Mob Mentality in 3x11 'Gingerbread': A Nietzschean Analysis of Slave Morality” and “Hyperreality and Baudrillard in Buffy's 6x17 'Normal Again': The Asylum as Simulation.”
They're deeply sincere. Rigorously argued. Completely automated. And based entirely on two people texting about TV.
(I know this sounds like a joke, but the papers are actually pretty close to some of our core ideas about philosophical readings of Buffy.)
But we didn't just want the papers to feel academic. We wanted the entire website to look like it had been photocopied in a basement office in 2003, left in a filing cabinet for twenty years, then scanned by someone who couldn't quite get the pages straight.
The key to the degraded photocopy look of the website came from SVG displacement filters applied to our typography. We used two primary open source typefaces: Xanh Mono for headings and Nimbus Mono for body text, and ran them through custom filters that simulate the way toner spreads and warps on photocopied paper.
The magic happens in the feDisplacementMap element, which pushes pixels around based on the turbulence pattern. (We are using different filters for headings and body, as well as for high-res and low-res displays.) It's the digital equivalent of a photocopier's toner bleeding and shifting as it heats the paper.
The papers themselves needed to feel like physical documents: slightly crooked, a bit noisy, with that characteristic barrel distortion from scanning equipment that's seen better days. This is where a simple bash script using imagemagick comes in, which...
The rotation varies per page, so even within a single paper, no two pages sit at quite the same angle. It's the kind of detail that sells the fiction—these documents have been handled, copied, scanned, and archived by people who had better things to do than ensure perfect alignment.
You can explore the full conference at slayerfest.org, where all eight accepted papers are available for download (complete with scanned authenticity and peer review history, of course).