SOURCE

Inspiration

In Heretic, a character argues that every religion is a reworked copy of the one before it, with something lost in each retelling. Animal Farm and 1984 tell the same story about power: whoever holds the source can rewrite the meaning. We noticed AI is the newest and fastest-growing version of that source. A 2024 Nature paper showed that AI trained on its own output drifts and degrades, and a 2026 Pew Research Center survey found that 49% of Americans use AI chatbots, mostly to look things up. History offers a warning too. Soviet censors erased Nikolai Yezhov from a photo beside Stalin, and Great Soviet Encyclopedia subscribers were told to cut out Lavrentiy Beria's entry. Those edits took scissors and airbrushes, and the originals survived to expose them. We asked: what happens when one app answers for everyone, and there's no original left to check?

We also drew on the Korean drama Revenant, whose portrayal of optic atrophy, the slow loss of sight, shaped how we show the original fading. And on Mosolov's Iron Foundry (1926–27), an orchestra scored to sound like a machine, which shaped the rhythm of our film.

What it does

SOURCE is the everything app: one app, one everything, always in sync. 147 apps move into a single icon: messages, payments, rides, orders, health, news and records. Ask it once and it books, pays and orders in one request, because it already knows you. There's nothing to connect and nothing to sync.

In return, it gets all your data and owns everything you make. Its camera and mic indicators never turn off. Because everyone asks the same source, and it learns from its own output, meaning slowly drifts. Our launch film starts as a polished, keynote-style reveal, then breaks, and shows history, religion and law regenerating until little of the original remains. SOURCE hides one feature that works against its own interest: a time slider that saves every version, so the original never disappears.

How we built it

App: Claude with the Figma connector scaffolded every screen. We then polished the hierarchy, spacing and components in Figma, ending with a clickable iPhone prototype.
Regenerations: AI image and text models ran real regeneration loops. We regenerated history, religion and law again and again, so the drift in the film is real output, not a mock-up.
Film: We screen-recorded the prototype and edited it into a launch film that starts as a keynote and slowly breaks.
Look and deck: A visual mood board set the style, and the pitch deck was built in Canva.

Challenges we ran into

Our first concept was a church-style app about religion. It was too narrow to show how one source can shape everything people believe, so we widened it into an everything app. The harder challenge was making something harmful feel desirable. A dystopia that looks evil teaches nothing, so we designed SOURCE the way real platforms are marketed: calm, helpful and convenient. The horror is in the fine print. We also had to make a slow, invisible process, meaning drifting over generations, land in under three minutes.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

A prototype polished enough that it's unsettlingly easy to want.
Regeneration sequences that are real AI output.
A film that turns a product launch into a warning without losing either.
The time slider: one honest feature inside a dishonest product.

What we learned

We learned how much of design is storytelling. A good interface wasn't enough on its own. We had to decide what the audience should feel at each moment, and when to let the polish crack. We learned to treat persuasive design as a subject, not only a tool: surveillance gets marketed as care, and dependence as convenience. And we learned how quickly meaning degrades when a system learns from itself.

What's next for SOURCE

Turning the time slider into a real tool: a browser extension that traces any AI answer back to its original human sources, so the question "What's the source?" always has an answer.