Through the Snails

Friday, July 24, 2026

Good morning, Twfw. O/

Symbols and shapes, scratches in the sand. Tip-tap type, the hype of keyboard keys. Slap those thumbs, slide those pens, words aren't going to write themselves.

Make it new...

Someone's got to feed AI.

"It's a poet's morning journal filled with new ideas, lyrically wrote in his unique voice, of course."
-Favorite Wonder Fell Reader

"Yum."
-Every AI Chatbot

Original Intelligence (OI) is the economy of the future.

Nothing but OI every morning on Wonder Fell.

I do have Claude read each post and give its summation on why a modern day reader would find it interesting located in the metadata excerpt line. A tradition I started about a week ago for reasons listed here.

The way I use AI for Wonder Fell is like placing a book in a genre, or using The Dewey Decimal System. It tells an algorithm which shelf and section to put the piece on.

In fact, AI is like The Dewey Decimal System for Information. That's a much better understanding of what AI is. It's only a classification system of what it has access to online. Think of an LLM as a Library of information.

Not all info is helpful. Gossip and Scientific fact are both just sequences of code to a software algorithm.

The ethical issues with AI come from what weight the systems the code teams create place on the information.

The Library Director of your local library has a fascination with snails and thinks everyone should know more about them. So they set-up a large mollusk display right when you walk in the front door. Bright pictures and piles of interesting snail literature abound to make sure the whole community knows more about the lovely shelled slugs.

AI chatbot firms are just like the snail-loving Library Director.

And so the state of The Modern American Press, right now.

There's plenty of helpful tales of everyday heroics and humanity, but you got to get through the snails to see it.

At least the snails...

Chances are there's a whole lot of information weighted more important than what you're looking for first to wade through.

Amount of screen time on an image or article, swipes left or right, are not reliable metrics to gauge importance. Information is not a popularity contest.

What sells most isn't either.

What happens when we put a price tag on information?

Our current reality answers that question.

Twilight Zone modern media machine? No. An online library where information is for sale.

Chatbots are reference librarians trained to follow corporation guidelines.

Ethical? Depends on the corporation training manual.

Government guidelines are needed to protect the interests of every citizen.

Until then personal responsibility is dire. We must be specific in our search prompts and understand if we rely on an AI service for information, the results are always slanted to favor what the company who created the algorithm believes is most important for us to read.

Most reference librarians and creators of AI have good intentions, but they are fallible.

Best to steer clear of the snails, trust your judgement, and search on.