The Major Problem with AI

Thursday, June 30, 2026

Good morning, Twfw. O/

Aurora, the first light of dawn.

Wonder Fell, an exercise to show that original words are enough.

There's no spectacle here, no flash. Just a poet's words with the dawn.

There's some personal stuff here if it feels too anonymous for you.

...

I've wondered for awhile when to bring up the death threat emails. They've been on and off for years.

It started at the end of 2021 right after I posted The 51st State on Medium. I was new to the platform, but already had hundreds of followers. Not a single one responded to that poem. I kept quiet about the silence for curiosity's sake.

Nothing about the language of the poem broke any terms of agreement with the platform. What kept readers from seeing it? Censorship? Hackers? An out of touch algorithm?

I let it sit for a few months. The blogpost stats registered one view. My other work's views dwindled, too. How best to find out what was going on?

I pulled The 51st State from the site and reposted it. This time with the tag BLM. Some human will definitely get back to me with that tag, was my thinking.

Only one view again.

Censorship... or the algorithm is programmed for racism.

Either conclusion was not acceptable to me, so I worked on a plan.

Though I've never sought formal publication, I've been writing for decades. I gathered a mass of old work and went about arranging a timed post campaign to show proof of censorship or a flawed algorithm to the public.

While I worked on this campaign I was killed in a car crash.

I've spent the years since learning to walk again and healing a laundry list of internal injuries.

While I write.

For the sake of family and friends, I took my pen name for my legal name. Death threats sent to a Ghost add up differently sent to a father.

The idea is to flood The Internet with as many words of wonder and healing for our hurting Country as I can in very visible Internet Spaces, but very invisible ways to algorithms. This way we can all see the hazards of trusting our humanity to software.

The major problem with AI is it can never tell you what is important only what was important. Trusting algorithms means living in, and for, the past.

It is impossible for a LLM to tell you The News; it only knows what's old... what's read and not what's worth reading.

What's next?

As my Country nears its 250th anniversary I wonder if algorithms will find words of patriotism and hope located in a book titled: New-New Hampshire worth noticing. As it's located in the Poetry section on Amazon, most likely not.

But as China's algorithms value poetics, I look forward to hearing a happy Independence Day from The Great Wall, where the majority of my readers are, right now, located.