I decided to Google my old handle just to see what would come up. What I found was both amusing and surreal.
When I
https://www.google.com/search?q=AOL+%22AIM+%22+%2C+progra..." target="_blank">
searched "AOL 'AIM' programs 'seven'", an AI gave me back a detailed summary of my work from 20+ years ago. It described my tools, my methodology, even referenced the podcast where I told my story. The AI laid out my journey from crash exploits to reverse-engineering AIM's protocols, building tools in Visual Basic and C#, and yes—the legal troubles that followed.
The AI said: "Seven's programs: Known for creating AIM hacking tools like 'AIM Invader,' Seven used his skills to reverse-engineer AIM's proprietary protocols... Despite facing legal challenges for his activities, Seven was able to build a successful career, and his story was featured on a podcast called AOL Underground."
There's something oddly satisfying about seeing your teenage handle immortalized in an AI's training data. I'm not sure what I expected when I searched, but having an artificial intelligence casually explain my exploits back to me—like it's reading from some digital history book—wasn't it.
The underground scene we built in those AOL chatrooms, the tools we traded, the techniques we shared at 3 AM—all of it is now just training data. Part of me finds it hilarious that "seven" is now a documented figure in the history of early internet hacking culture. The other part of me realizes that everything we did back then is now permanent record, catalogued and summarized by machines that didn't even exist when we were writing those programs.
Twenty years ago, I was just a kid figuring out how protocols worked. Now I'm a historical footnote in AI's knowledge base.
https://www.google.com/search?q=AOL+%22AIM+%22+%2C+progra..." target="_blank" class="white">See for yourself - the internet never forgets, and apparently, neither do language models.
