Baloney

51% of web traffic is now bots. 74% of new web pages contain AI content. People can't tell what's real anymore, and there's no easy and non invasive way to check.

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posted an update —

Thank You, MAD Data

First and foremost, thank you to the organizers, mentors, judges, and every participant at MAD Data 2026. Winning 1st Place was an incredible honor, but honestly, the best part of the weekend was being surrounded by people who share the same passion for "creating with code." Meeting the wonderful judges, volunteers, and sponsors gave us a glimpse into what working in the software industry looks like, and we had a blast every hour of it.

Winning the hackathon has inspired us to continue scaling Baloney. In coming up with the original concept, we noticed that the tools to generate AI content had outpaced the tools to detect it by an order of magnitude, and that nobody was building the consumer-facing solution. Building Baloney in 24 hours proved that the concept works. Winning proved that other people think it matters too. And the conversations we had with judges and fellow participants after the demo convinced us this is worth pursuing seriously.

What We've Built Since the Hackathon

We didn't stop when the hackathon ended. In the days since, we've been building Baloney for real users:

  • Chrome Web Store submission We're currently waiting to hear back on whether our extension submission was approved. We've taken extra attention into ensuring we don't violate and privacy or web scraping policies, and hope that our tool is released to the public soon.
  • Open-source community edition frozen at github.com/nategarelik/baloney under MIT license — you can audit every line of what the extension does

You Can Still Use It

The content analyzer is live right now. No extension needed, no signup required:

baloney.app/analyze — paste any text, upload any image, or submit a video to run it through our full detection pipeline. You'll see the verdict, the confidence score, and a breakdown of exactly which detection methods contributed and how much each one weighed in.

We built this to be transparent to the internet's users. We want to provide people with the ability to filter their social feeds, inform them about how to detect AI on their own, and bring back clarity.

A word of advice: AI detection is probabilistic, not definitive. Baloney gives you a confidence score and shows its work. Treat it as a strong signal, not proof. Use it alongside your own judgment, especially for anything high-stakes. We'd rather give you an honest 78% confidence than a dishonest 100%.

Where We're Going

We're incredibly proud of what we put together in 24 hours, and we're passionately scaling this into a professional product.

v1.0 — Public Launch (in progress) Chrome Web Store extension under review. Privacy policy, terms of service, and support pages live. Consent-first onboarding with explicit community sharing opt-in. Host permissions narrowed to 10 explicit platforms. The extension we demoed at the hackathon is being refined for real-world users.

The long-term vision hasn't changed: every user is a sensor. The more people who install Baloney, the more comprehensive and accurate the map of AI content across the internet becomes. That network effect is what turns a detection tool into an intelligence platform.

Stay Up to Date

We're building in public and we want the MAD Data community along for the ride:

Thank you again to everyone at MAD Data 2026. This is just the beginning.

— Nate & Ben

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