Freya Holmér

Freya Holmér is a Swedish game developer, tools creator, and educator based in Stockholm. She co-founded Neat Corporation, maker of the VR stealth game Budget Cuts, and built two of the Unity ecosystem’s best-known tools: the node-based shader editor Shader Forge and the vector-graphics library Shapes. Her YouTube lectures on the mathematics of game development — including the widely praised “The Beauty of Bézier Curves” — have made her one of the most trusted teachers in the field.

A parasitic cancer

In January 2025 Holmér published “Generative AI is a Parasitic Cancer,” a video essay that opened with a mundane frustration — a Google search for the .glb file format returning pages of AI-generated sites and videos that cited each other as sources — and built into an indictment of what generative AI is doing to the web, to search, and to the people who write things because they care about them.

Holmér was precise about her title: generative AI is parasitic, she argued, because it depends on human creativity for training data while eroding the incentive to produce it, and cancerous because it succeeds by passing itself off as the real thing — “a core metric of what makes a good AI is the degree to which it fools you.” Notably, she distinguished AI from crypto and NFTs, which she called pure grift: AI, she conceded, “actually does make you more productive if your goal is to create products” — her objection is to what that productivity costs. The video drew over a million views and extensive discussion across Hacker News and the game-development community.