What AI reveals about authorship, visibility, and the quiet afterlife of personal archives.
Why do I keep circling back to the early Internet, somewhere around 1994. Because I recognise the mood. Not just the AI revolution itself, but the performance around it. The certainty. The anxiety. The quiet satisfaction of those who believe they have already seen the end.
We have been here before.
Back then, too, there were the doomsayers. And next to them, the composed theorists, always ready with a polished conclusion. In the nineties, I remember writers who refused, on principle, to exist online, while more fashionable voices calmly announced the death of print.
Now the chorus returns. Only slogans have changed. Websites are dead.
“But what about your readers?” I would ask, still naïve enough to think the question mattered. “They need to find you, don’t they? Or is invisibility part of the appeal?” It rarely landed. Five years later it did. By then, for some, it was no longer relevant.
And yes, I understand the statement that websites are dead. It sounds convincing because it contains a fragment of truth. We no longer search the way we used to. No one willingly scrolls through pages of links to find something that is not trying to sell them anything. We ask AI. We receive an answer. We move on.
Efficient. Clean. Slightly suspicious.
Websites, then, are not dead. They have been repositioned. No longer destinations, but sources. Not places for people, but material for machines.
Recently, I came across a text about my photography work on a website. It was so detailed that it felt almost intrusive. I had no idea this much knowledge about my work existed in one place. Naturally, I assumed it had been assembled by AI. The modern human abandoned thoroughness some time ago, and rarely looks back.
Not all of it was correct. But accuracy has never been the defining quality of information about me. Not even when it was gathered by journalists whose authority went unquestioned.
So why did it feel convincing?
Because it was built on something that is. My own websites.
That is where the machines learned to speak for me, from a body of work that can still be traced and checked, rather than remembered.