The AI fatfinger economy has come for my receipts app

Cory Doctorow argues that the "fatfinger economy" — in which tech companies replace useful UI elements with traps that inflate engagement metrics — has now been extended to AI, as product teams swap working buttons for AI ads to prove "user interest" to investors. He describes how his receipt-scanning app Genius Scanner replaced the small "x" that cleared a default date-and-time title with a button advertising $40/year AI tools, forcing him into 16 backspaces per scan. He frames this as reward hacking at the interface level, where every metric becomes a target and is thereby rendered meaningless.