Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I personally dislike AI on the grounds that it does not enhance knowledge, it takes away incentive to pursue and learn. Anyway, I was scanning my stats and noticed that twice I have been viewed and possibly, hopefully, ‘recommended’ by Artificial Intelligence as a source for two readers. Okay, that’s kind of flattering but what post of mine was viewed/recommended? Who was the reader? Will this offer any benefit to me?

Importantly, have I been acknowledged as the original source?

I guess once I put my work out there, it stands to reason it will be seen and read and maybe used, but we bloggers always acknowledge our source or include a website link especially to anything we re-post.

Artificial Intelligence (like most of the internet) has been launched on the world wide web without workable social, legal, ethical or cultural boundaries. Humankind may melt down into one homogenous mass. Perfect conditions for a maniacal dictator.

Lots of questions need to be answered, especially since an AI ‘borrower’ cannot be traced. At least not by me, so I may never know the source or where my material ends up. How can I truly know where my blog posts end up anyway? Certainly readers can cut and paste anything they like but they are genuine readers. I think a faceless nameless Artificial Intelligence is invasive until proven otherwise.

Ask a human novelist about AI rip-offs and AI non-existent royalties.
Meta allegedly used pirated books to train AI.
Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin and others have filed a class-action suit, still unresolved, alleging OpenAI Inc copied their works without permission or payment.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/sep/20/authors-lawsuit-openai-george-rr-martin-john-grisham

Of course many people will benefit. There are quite a lot of AI sites out there, Gemini, Claude, Copilot, etc, the first being Perplexity AI. Also Character.ai is a neutral (as if!) language model chatbot service. Another human job lost? Of course, there are strong opinions on all of this and numerous disagreements for various reasons.

We humans like shortcuts more than memory retention. Ask anyone studying. Internet users can take a detour but often it can misdirect or misinform, as in the case of a person who used ChatGPT for a literary book club review and gave a dry, soulless analysis of the story. In my opinion, do your own homework.

I like to personally do my own web surfing and pick up interesting and genuinely human stuff along the way – alternatively I read words on real paper. Under my mythical (as in not real) Creepy or Could-be section, I imagine one future day an AI bot will activate a microchip implant in a school student’s brain which will find web logs (blogs) or text books and release classic volumes straight into their grey matter.

Unlike young generations before them who opened a real book and discovered the works of Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, J.K. Rowling, John Marsden, Jackie French and Maurice Sendak, they will probably use an inside-head reading app. I certainly hope not but who knows!

💗 © Gretchen Bernet-Ward 2025