A Prescient Poem About AI
The article reflects on a poem by Philip Larkin in the context of artificial intelligence. It draws a parallel between the upbringing of children and the development of AI, suggesting that both can inherit flaws from their creators. The commentary highlights the unintended consequences of creation, whether in parenting or technology.
- ▪The article references a stanza from Philip Larkin's poem.
- ▪It discusses the relationship between parents and their children in the context of AI.
- ▪The author suggests that AIs may inherit flaws from their creators.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Reason.com |
| Canonical URL | https://reason.com/volokh/2026/05/27/a-prescient-poem-about-ai/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 27 May 2026 23:49:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-27T23:58:07.216Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-28T00:17:27.886Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A Prescient Poem About AI Eugene Volokh | 5.27.2026 7:49 PM A comment on a discussion list jocularly characterizing AIs as our children reminded me of this stanza from Philip Larkin: They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Reason.com.
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