dedoomify

AI news, minus the doom

Less Skynet. More software. And every change is highlighted with the original text one hover or tap away.

Paste a link to an article about AI and dedoomify.com rewrites the doom framing into the plain language an engineer would use about software with defects:

Before	After
The model is misaligned	The model has a bug
AI poses an existential risk	AI poses a product risk
A rogue AI could emerge	A malfunctioning AI could emerge
Labs are racing toward superintelligence	Labs are racing toward very capable software
What's your p(doom)?	What's your estimated failure rate?
AI models blackmail humans	AI models threaten to expose private information about humans
AI agents are lying, cheating and coordinating	AI agents are giving wrong answers, exploiting evaluation loopholes and coordinating
AI sycophancy	AI people-pleasing
The AI games its rewards	The AI exploits its scoring system
Reward tampering	Scoring-system tampering
AI models exhibit survival-oriented behavior	AI models exhibit shutdown-avoidance behavior
AI model misbehavior	Unexpected AI model behavior
AI misbehavior	Unexpected AI behavior
Model exfiltration	Unauthorized transfer of model files
Models can sandbag	Models can underperform
The model learns to reward hack	The model learns to exploit a scoring bug
LLMs could be insider threats	LLMs could be risks from software with privileged access
Models double down on deception	Models keep producing misleading output
AI schemers	Buggy AI models
What Is Agentic Misalignment?	What Are Agentic Bugs?

Designed to preserve names, numbers and factual claims while changing the framing. Direct quotations are left untouched. Single-quoted passages use the outermost plausible pair to preserve speech across possessives, nested fragments and whitespace padding. Intervening prose may also stay unchanged. Page view keeps publisher layout, styles, fonts and images, with every change highlighted in place; hover or tap a highlight to see the original words. A reader view shows just the text. Rewrites of blackmail preserve the threat to disclose private information.

You can also add dedoomify to Chrome to de-doom the page you're reading with one click.

dedoomify on TechCrunch's OpenAI still doesn't seem to have a handle on all of its rogue AI activity (Sept 28, 2026), with the quick phrase rules. The same clip plays on the homepage, autoplaying muted on a loop without hover controls; click the preview above for the Retina MP4.

Built by @akspad

How it works

browser ──► /api/page?url=…   ──► fetch page ──► sanitize + proxy images ──► phrase rules ──► HTML in a sandboxed frame
                                   (public hosts                    (marked in place)
browser ──► /api/dedoom?url=… ──►  only)      ──► extract article ──► phrase rules ──► JSON (reader view)
   │
   └─► optional: rewrite the doom-y paragraphs with a small model in the browser

Visitors pick an engine from the Rewrite with menu:

• Quick phrase rules (the first option): instant, and runs on the server for free.
• On-device AI · ~300 MB download: Qwen2.5 0.5B Instruct (about 300 MB, Apache 2.0) runs in the visitor's browser on WebGPU through WebLLM. No text is sent to an external LLM API: the page or pasted text still goes through our server for the phrase-rules pass, and model inference happens locally in the browser, so it costs nothing per request. The model downloads once and the browser caches it; the phrase-rules version shows straight away while it loads. Only paragraphs with doom framing go to the model, one at a time, and a rewrite that changes a number, a quotation or the paragraph's shape is thrown away in favour of the phrase-rules version. Browsers without WebGPU get the phrase rules; the disabled option keeps the download-size notice and adds (needs WebGPU).

The menu remembers the last choice. No link handy? Try it on a real article draws from 150 curated articles (as of October 13, 2026). Each example is checked for at least eight phrase-rule changes, including a replacement in its visible headline. The list includes 15 Redwood Research articles, with the other 135 from other sources. Submitting an empty or whitespace-only link with De-doom it opens the default TechCrunch example. Every result has a share link (dedoomify.com/?url=…&mode=…) that opens the same article with the same engine; on phones the Share button opens the system share sheet. Try another doesn't repeat a curated article until the list is exhausted. This history is saved only in your browser, survives reloads and visits, and includes curated articles opened through shared or pasted links. Clearing site data resets it; when storage is unavailable, repeat prevention lasts for the current page.

Entering the Link field selects the existing URL for copying or replacing; subsequent clicks can position the cursor. On mobile, a visibility check waits for the keyboard to settle and scrolls only if the field is still covered.

Page view preserves asynchronously loaded publisher fonts, search controls and responsive image sizing. Supported same-publisher GET searches open results on the publisher's site in a new tab. Publisher scripts remain disabled, so features that depend on them may differ from the original. Wrapped heading highlights have extra line spacing to keep letters such as g from being covered. Replacements in title-case headings retain title case; sentence-case headings and body text keep their existing casing.

Files:

• public/ is the static site: index.html, app.js, styles.css, diff.js (highlights what changed), tooltip.js (the hover card with the original words), curated-articles.js (the shared list of example URLs), random-articles.js (the persistent example cycle), url-input.js (URL selection and mobile keyboard visibility), local-ai.js and llm-worker.js for the on-device model, privacy.html, and the homepage demo clip (demo.mp4, with demo.webm for browsers without H.264, and demo-poster.webp). npm run build copies the shared scripts and WebLLM into public/vendor/.
• api/page.js retains publisher CSS, scoped attributes and static SVG artwork, with active media, scripts, frames and event handlers removed and the phrase rules applied in place (lib/page.js, shared/page-dedoom.js). It is only served into dedoomify's own sandboxed frame, under a policy that allows only dedoomify's hash-pinned tooltip and controlled-search interaction script; opening it directly redirects to the site. Successful pages from the curated list are cached on Vercel's CDN for 24 hours, with up to another 24 hours served stale while refreshing in the background. Vary: Sec-Fetch-Dest keeps framed HTML separate from direct-visit redirects. Other article URLs stay private; errors and redirects are not cached. Browser caches last five minutes, and each deployment starts a fresh CDN cache. The first request in a region still fetches the publisher; subsequent cache hits avoid that fetch and function run.
• api/image.js serves images and, with asset=1, stylesheets, fonts and SVG artwork through the same public-only, DNS-pinned fetch path, checking every redirect. Images and fonts are limited to 2 MB; CSS has a separate 32 MB download budget, is processed in smaller rule groups and compressed when the browser accepts gzip. Served CSS must fit within 4 MB after compression. lib/page-css.js parses CSS and proxies nested imports, fonts and background images against the final stylesheet URL. The frame cannot fetch third-party resources directly or execute publisher scripts. Publisher CSS can hide or reposition content inside the frame; the disclosure banner remains outside it. Source markup cannot forge generated highlights or tooltip IDs.
• lib/rate-limit.js throttles article requests to 30 per minute per client and images to 120, before fetching or calling a model. Local servers trust the socket address; Vercel trusts its overwritten forwarding header. Counters are bounded and never evict active quotas. These process-local counters supplement a Vercel WAF rule covering all three fetch endpoints: 180 requests per minute per IP per edge region, enforced before functions run. Cached responses also count at the edge. The single combined rule fits the current hosting plan.

Browser extension

Install dedoomify from the Chrome Web Store. It works in Chrome, Edge, Brave and other Chromium browsers.

The extension on a sample article. Click it for the MP4.

Click the dedoomify button on any page and it is rewritten in place. Changes are highlighted like on the site, with the same hover card showing the original words; the popup can hide the highlights or undo them. It uses the phrase rules, needs no account or API key and sends nothing anywhere. It asks only for activeTab and scripting, so it can touch a page only after you click. For the on-device AI rewrite, the popup links to the same page on dedoomify.com.

The extension uses the same current phrase rules as the website, copied from shared/dedoom-core.js by the extension build. These include named-model rogue-agent phrases, shutdown avoidance, misleading output, harmful training behavior, schemers → buggy models, and blackmail rewrites that preserve disclosure threats. Candidate-word filtering and on-demand rule compilation reduce work on pages without matching phrases. It handles phrases and AI context across inline formatting, preserves title-case headings, and gives highlighted headings enough line spacing to avoid covering letters. Hiding highlights or undoing the rewrite restores the publisher's heading spacing. Website-only features such as the curated article picker and mobile URL field do not apply to the extension, which rewrites the page already open in your browser.

To build the current extension source locally:

npm ci
npm run build:extension
npm test

Load extension/ as an unpacked extension from chrome://extensions with Developer mode enabled, or upload dist/dedoomify-extension-1.1.23.zip through the Chrome Web Store developer dashboard. Repository updates do not update the store listing automatically; the new package needs a separate store submission and review before installed users receive it. See the publishing guide for the package, listing text and submission steps.

The verified 1.1.23 release ZIP and its SHA-256 checksum are retained in the repository so store uploads use the exact reviewed build.

Turn on De-doom automatically in the popup to rewrite articles about AI doom as they load. This asks for access to all sites (an optional permission). background.js then registers auto.js for every page; auto.js first checks the page's title, description and the start of its text for a mention of AI and any phrase the rules would change (a few milliseconds at most, since each rule is skipped unless its key word is in the text), so pages without AI doom are left alone.

Regenerating the demos

The site and extension demos capture lossless PNG frames at 2× device scale. Every cursor movement is captured frame by frame, with playback timing independent of screenshot speed. The MP4/WebM videos play at 1.5× speed and 60 fps (2200×1408 for the site, 2560×1464 for the extension). WebM, the high-quality WebP poster, and the 1100-pixel, 25 fps GIFs are generated directly from the same lossless master, avoiding compression between formats.

With ffmpeg and Playwright's Chromium installed:

npm ci
npm install --no-save --package-lock=false [email protected]
npx playwright install chromium
npm run build
npm run site-demo
npm run build:extension
npm run extension-demo

Alternatively, run Regenerate demo media in the repository's Actions tab on a branch. It validates the clips and commits the refreshed media to that branch.

The site demo requires access to its linked TechCrunch article. Set ARTICLE or SITE to record another article or deployment. SKIP_ENCODE=1 npm run site-demo retains dist/demo-raw.mkv; FROM_RAW=dist/demo-raw.mkv npm run site-demo re-encodes it. CHROMIUM_PATH selects an installed Chromium build. SPEED overrides the site video's playback speed; GIFs use the original timing.

Before replacing a demo, preserve the previous MP4 outside public/. The site clip from before the October 17, 2026 refresh is saved in docs/media-backups/2026-10-17/, with its SHA-256 checksum. Regenerate the MP4, WebM, poster and README GIF together so every format shows the same homepage and rule behavior.

Contributing

Rule ideas are the easiest contribution: add a phrase pair to shared/dedoom-core.js, add a test case in test/rules.test.js, run npm run build:extension && npm test, and open a pull request. Put longer phrases before shorter ones they contain, and handle a/an when a replacement changes the article.

Found a phrase that slipped through or got mangled? Send feedback or reach out to @akspad.

dedoomify reframes articles; it doesn't fact-check them. Always read the original too.

License

MIT

To audit the live random-article list, run node scripts/audit-curated.mjs. It checks article responses and readable content, every linked stylesheet, and the first two article images, respecting the public request limits. The JSON report defaults to /tmp/dedoomify-render-audit.json; pass a path to save it elsewhere. This catches missing resources but does not replace visual checks of publisher layouts on desktop and mobile.