I had some opportunities this past year to visit and learn from a school here in NYC that is truly unique in the city (and, from what I understand, the country) where deaf and hard of hearing children, hearing children of Deaf adults, and general education children learn side-by-side, all reading, writing, discussing, and signing around the same texts.

I learned a lot from those visits, and have continued trying to learn more about American Sign Language (ASL). Like so many others who have had little exposure to people who are deaf or hard of hearing, I had a lot of ignorance and misconceptions about sign language.

For starters, one of the first things that blew my mind about American Sign Language is that it is not some kind of subtitling or pantomiming of English rendered into the hands. This misconception was something I brought into my first visit: as I watched teachers and students signing and speaking at the same time, I assumed what they were signing was a direct mirror of what they were saying in English.

But what I soon learned was that what I was witnessing was not simply English translated to hands, but rather bimodal bilingualism: two distinct languages in two distinct modalities occurring simultaneously, one vocal, one gestural. One body and mind, running two linguistic systems all at once, in real time. If that's not the definition of translanguaging, I don't know what is.

Because the reality is that ASL is an independent visual-spatial language with its own phonology, morphology, and syntax. In fact, it's barely even related to English.

I have spent years thinking about the auditory environment and its impact on learning (proof here), and embarrassingly little time considering what language looks like when the auditory channel is not available. It has been eye opening, both literally and figuratively, and the more I've read and learned since (I'd suggest beginning with Karen Emmorey's “Ten things you should know about sign languages”), the more I've come to think that sign languages aren't just some niche thing off to the side of general language and literacy.

Instead, I think sign language presents us with a fascinating lens that can magnify so many critical aspects of language and literacy and cognitive inquiry, most especially as a window into grappling with all the complexities related to multilingualism, not to mention an accompanying window into all the complexities related to classifications and accommodations of disability. That's more than I can dig into in one post, so I may write a few more on the topic, as time and fancy may allow.

A parenthesis I didn't fully grok

Go back through what I've written on this blog and you'll find a small parenthetical added at times as a nod towards inclusion: “*spoken (or signed) language*“. I've been dropping it into sentences for a while now (see the inner scaffold posts) due to the presence of teachers from that very same sign language school who joined some of my professional learning sessions (long before I ever had the opportunity to visit their school). They would ask about how to think of sign language in relation to what I was describing with connections between spoken and written language, and they gave me pause to consider it, and to want to raise it as a critical consideration, but I still didn't understand much about it.

I still don't understand much about it. But I am fascinated and want to better understand it.

The current cuts a new channel

When deaf children grow up without much access to any conventional language model (no sign language or accessible speech), they will begin to build their own language. Researchers call these self-generated systems homesign and it points to the intrinsic human drive to communicate (Susan Goldin-Meadow's overview, The Mind Hidden in Our Hands, is a good introduction).

Consider a dammed river. The water will forge a new channel.

I've argued in the past that language, like reading, may not be innate, but closer to a cultural technology shaped across generations that has developed as a perfect fit to the infrastructure of our brains. It may appear that homesign settles the innate-versus-developed question against me.

It hasn't, because it can be said that homesign plateaus after forging that new channel. A homesigner may be able to build a system enough to run a household, but they will then most likely hit a ceiling, because their system of communication only exists isolated within that one household.

In Nicaragua around 1980, deaf children who had each been homesigning in isolation were brought together in schools for the first time. That first cohort then built a community of shared contact, and each new member who joined them began to systematize that communication further. Senghas and Coppola tracked one grammatical device across two cohorts and found that this systematizing came mostly from signers who arrived youngest (<10) and that within two decades they had developed a grammar no adult had ever used.

It took that community, and sequential cohorts of innovation and interacting to form a cultural evolution running within a time frame we could observe. So what is innate, and what is cultural? The drive to communicate lies within each child, and it will find a channel. But a linguistic system develops within a larger community over time, and requires a critical mass.

So consider again that school I described at the beginning, where some children may arrive from homes where their system of communication is homesign and known to no one else. For them school is not only about receiving instruction and gaining literacy and knowledge that connects them to previous generations of human culture. It's also about connecting them to an immediate social community of others they can interact and communicate with more systematically and deeply.

Where ASL comes from

ASL signs are built from combinable units (handshape, location, movement, palm orientation) in the same way spoken words are built from phonemes. And what's even more interesting is what happens at the same time with a signer's face: raised eyebrows mark a yes or no question, particular mouth shapes function as adverbs. Those expressions aren't emotive gestures per se, they're actually more grammatical in function.

There's a lot that's fascinating about ASL itself that I might try to dig into in another post, especially in terms of how a deaf child can learn to read without hearing the phonemes.

But first, here's a surprising thing I also learned about deafness that blew my mind: more than 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents (Harden's The Genetic Lottery has a chapter that led me to this). Roughly half of congenital deafness is genetic, and most of that is recessive. The rest has non-genetic causes and isn't inherited at all.

That the majority of deaf children are born to hearing parents makes signing truly unique among the world's languages. What that means is that most of ASL's users may not learn ASL from their parents or family. Instead, they learn ASL within a community of other deaf adults and children.

While one would assume that schools are the natural site for this, the darker truth is that while residential schools did first gather deaf children into the critical mass a language requires, they (for a century after the Milan congress of 1880) banned signing, dismissed Deaf teachers, and punished children for using their hands.

The international body that passed those resolutions apparently didn't repudiate them until 2010.

Sign languages have survived and evolved anyway, in dormitories and playgrounds and Deaf communities, carried from person to person, perhaps often in defiance of the institutions housing them. What such schools supplied may not have been the teaching so much as it was the gathering.

Here is where an interesting tension between civil rights for a disability and civil rights for multilingualism potentially surfaces. I may be over-extrapolating on this, but it seems to me that fewer and fewer deaf children may have an opportunity to gather together in schools today. Under IDEA, the mandate to educate children in a least restrictive environment tends to lead to the mainstreaming of deaf children, and they may thus become distributed across neighborhood schools. By the logic of individual accommodation that's a success.

But sustaining a sign language within an English dominant and speech dominant world requires a community. A placement may be the least restrictive environment available according to the spirit of the term, and simultaneously the most restrictive imaginable socially and linguistically. Now consider this also for deaf students who are also English language learners (somewhere between one in five and one in three of them, though it seems nobody has actually counted since 2014).

Which is why the school I visited struck me the more I learned about it. It isn't just remarkable because it recognizes the beauty of ASL or provides instruction in ASL. It's also remarkable because it serves as a space of Deaf community gathering: Deaf adults, deaf children, hearing classmates, and hearing children of Deaf adults, assembled into a critical mass where bimodal bilingualism is recognized and affirmed.

On one of my visits I passed a student in a hallway signing avidly and fluently with her classmate. The child, I was told, has parents who are hearing and had arrived at school with no signing ability. Her home did not equip her with that new language — the school did. And it did it alongside of a community of adults and children also using sign.

Looking across the channel

Sign languages bring so many interesting questions that should excite any language and literacy nerd out there. If I get my act together, I'd love to explore more about ASL, such as how deaf students can learn to read without sound, and maybe pick some more at the knot of deaf students who are also multilingual learners.

In the meantime, to help bring more interest and information to educators around ASL, I've put together a short guide on American Sign Language covering some of what seemed to be the most important things to know that you might not have known.

Please share if you find it useful, and even more importantly — especially if you are Deaf or hard of hearing, or you teach DHH students, or you interpret — please let me know where I may be missing something or have gotten something wrong.

Twelve million tracks. Played end to end, with no gaps, no sleep and no skipping the songs you do not like, it would take ninety-one years to listen to that dataset in full. A person born the year the recordings began would be dead long before reaching the last track. And yet the entire collection can be downloaded in an afternoon, copied onto a laptop, and fed into a machine designed to learn from it and then make more music in its image. The recordings inside it represent the accumulated labour of tens of thousands of musicians, living and dead, famous and obscure. Not one of them was asked. Not one of them was paid.

This is the picture that came into focus in mid-June 2026, when The Atlantic's AI Watchdog journalist Alex Reisner published an investigation that did what the industry had demanded for years: it provided proof. Reisner identified four music datasets actively circulating within AI development communities, downloaded thousands of times, and built a searchable tool that let any artist type in their own name and discover whether their work had been swept into the training corpus of the machines now flooding the platforms where they earn their living. The largest holds roughly twelve million tracks; a second around nine million; two more each exceed a hundred thousand — more than twenty-one million recordings in all. The names inside read like a history of recorded music: Taylor Swift, The Beatles, AC/DC, Kylie Minogue, Miles Davis, Bad Bunny, and tens of thousands of working musicians whose names you have never heard.

The reaction was immediate, and it was personal. The rapper Backxwash, finding her work in the database, wrote simply: “I dont like this.” The Toronto producer Tre Mission was blunter: “I'm 100% sure I never consented to this. Anyone who knows me, knows I HATE the use of AI in music, so this is very disappointing.” The producer DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ landed on the bitter irony at the heart of the whole affair: “to everyone who thought my music sounded like ai slop, did you ever think it was because Suno was using a dataset that contained 22 of my songs?”

That sentence deserves to be read twice. An artist's work is ingested without consent. A machine learns from it and generates derivative output that floods the market. And the human whose labour made the machine possible is accused of sounding like the machine. The appropriation is not only economic. It is a theft of authorship turned back against the author.

This is the story of how creative ownership came to be quietly redefined out from under the people who depend on it, why the technology industry's preferred legal solution would make matters worse, and what a genuine licensing framework — one built on consent rather than its absence — would have to look like.

Two Harms, Not One

To think clearly, you have to separate two injuries often blurred together because they share the same villain. They do not have the same solution.

The first is the output-side harm: the flood of synthetic music now competing with human work on streaming platforms. Deezer reported in April 2026 that AI-generated tracks accounted for forty-four per cent of all new music uploaded to its platform, close to seventy-five thousand fully synthetic tracks every single day. That is nearly half of everything arriving, and the figure had climbed steeply. Deezer began detecting AI music at around ten thousand tracks a day in January 2025; by January 2026 it was sixty thousand. The trajectory points one way.

A peer-reviewed paper published to arXiv on 16 June 2026 — “An Empirical Analysis of AI Slop in Music Streaming,” by Stanley Wu, Josephine Passananti, Viresh Mittal, Wenxin Ding, Haitao Zheng and Ben Y. Zhao — put hard numbers to what this deluge consists of. Analysing 256 million Spotify tracks, around ninety-nine per cent of the platform's catalogue as of mid-2025, they found that the overwhelming majority of AI music — ninety-three per cent of it — receives few if any listener plays and is rarely recommended. AI musicians, they observed, “spray and pray”, releasing enormous volumes across genres in the hope that something catches. AI-only artists uploaded at double the volume of human musicians, averaging twenty-seven tracks against thirteen, and at roughly five times the frequency — five releases a month against one, with an average gap between releases of sixteen days against more than fifty. Publishing their own AI tracks through eleven independent distributors, they found distributor policies inconsistent and largely unenforced, and detection unreliable. Their conclusion was that, as the cost of generation falls toward nothing, AI slop is on course to become a self-sustaining industry — a shadow economy of machine-made noise driven by the same incentives that drive email spam.

Spotify removed seventy-five million tracks it classed as spam in a single twelve-month action disclosed in 2025. The output-side harm is real, measurable and accelerating, and it is visible: you can see the slop, count it, and watch it crowd the shelves.

The second harm is quieter, and in the long run more fundamental. It is the input-side harm: the unlicensed ingestion of human creative work to build the machines in the first place. This is what Reisner's investigation exposed. The output flood is the symptom; the training data is the cause. You cannot have a machine that generates plausible Kylie Minogue without first feeding it Kylie Minogue — or, more precisely, tens of thousands of recordings whose collective stylistic DNA the model distils into something it can recombine on demand. Every synthetic track competing with a working musician is built out of that musician's labour and the labour of their peers, taken without asking.

The two harms compound each other in a cruel loop. The input harm produces the machine; the machine produces the output harm; the output harm dilutes the income of the artists whose work constituted the input. The musician is taxed twice — once when their work is taken to build the competitor, again when the competitor thins out their royalties. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ's complaint captures the closing of that loop exactly. The slop she was accused of resembling was partly made of her.

What “Ownership” Was Supposed to Mean

To understand what is being lost, it helps to be precise about what creative ownership has meant in music, because it is more intricate than the word “copyright” suggests.

A single recorded song is not one piece of property but a bundle of rights, layered and separately owned. There is the composition — the melody and lyrics — and there is the sound recording, the specific captured performance, each carrying its own copyright and often held by different parties. From these flow distinct streams of payment: the mechanical right, the performance right, and the rights in the master recording. When you hear a song on the radio, this hidden machinery routes fractions of a penny to the songwriter, the publisher, the performer and the label, each according to a right they own.

The edifice rests on a principle that has held, in one form or another, for more than a century: that the creator controls whether and how their work is used, and is entitled to be paid when it is. That principle is now under quiet assault, because the defining feature of the training-data regime is that the creator controlled nothing and was paid nothing. The bundle of rights was simply bypassed. The work was treated not as property to be licensed but as raw material lying around to be scraped.

Sampling, the closest historical analogue, built an entire clearance industry precisely because the law insisted that creators retained control. In the golden age of hip-hop sampling in the late 1980s, producers freely looped fragments of older records in a grey zone. Then the courts closed it. The 1991 decision in Grand Upright Music v. Warner Bros., concerning Biz Markie's use of a Gilbert O'Sullivan song, established that you could not simply take; the 2005 ruling in Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films held that even a two-second sample required a licence. The industry's response was not to abandon sampling but to build the infrastructure to clear it: clearance specialists, negotiated fees, credit and royalty splits. The principle of control was upheld, and a market grew up around honouring it.

The training-data regime inverts that history. It is sampling at planetary scale with the clearance step deleted. Where a lawyer once negotiated for a four-bar loop, the AI developer ingests twelve million whole recordings and asks no one. The difference in scale is so vast it becomes a difference in kind. And the industry's argument for why this is acceptable is not that it has found a way to clear twenty-one million tracks. It is that it should not have to.

The Carve-Out

That argument has a name, and a lobbying strategy behind it. The name is the text-and-data-mining exception — TDM for short — and the strategy is to persuade governments to write it into copyright law before the courts or the public can object.

The premise is seductively technical. Training an AI model, the argument runs, is not “copying” in the ordinary infringing sense; it is “mining” — extracting statistical patterns, analysing rather than reproducing. Ingesting a song to learn from it is, on this view, more like a scholar reading a library than a bootlegger pressing counterfeit discs. The European Union opened the door in its 2019 Copyright Directive, whose Article 4 permits mining by default unless the rights holder has expressly opted out through machine-readable means. The burden sits on the creator. Silence is consent. You must actively forbid the taking, in a format the machines can read, or the taking is permitted.

In December 2024 the United Kingdom government proposed importing exactly this model: a broad TDM exception with an opt-out for rights holders. The creative industries revolted. More than a thousand musicians released a silent protest album, “Is This What We Want?”, its tracks recordings of empty studios; McCartney, Elton John, Dua Lipa and Kate Bush lent their names to the opposition. When the consultation closed, the government had received 11,520 submissions, and the verdict was emphatic. Eighty-one per cent named mandatory licensing as their preferred approach; a mere three per cent backed the government's own stated preference. More than ninety per cent agreed that AI developers should be required to disclose the sources of their training material — a figure worth holding on to, because it identifies the remedy the sector actually wants. The exception was shelved, and by January 2026 the Secretaries of State Liz Kendall and Lisa Nandy were telling the House of Lords that the government had been “wrong” to express its original preference at all. Australia had already gone further, ruling out a TDM exception outright and telling AI firms they would have to negotiate licences like everyone else.

Which brings us to the most pointed institutional response to Reisner's investigation. APRA AMCOS, which manages the rights of more than a hundred thousand Australian and New Zealand songwriters and composers, seized on the findings as proof of a charge it had been making for months. AI companies, its chief executive Dean Ormston pointed out, were at that very moment lobbying the Australian and New Zealand governments for a copyright carve-out — dangling promises of data-centre investment and “productivity gains” — while simultaneously, demonstrably, using work they had already taken without licence. “No permission. No licence. No payment,” the organisation stated. “These are not bargaining chips — they are the life's work of Australian and New Zealand songwriters.” Ormston added that the major tech platforms had “not come to the table — not once.”

That last point is the tell. The carve-out strategy is not an attempt to negotiate a fair price. It is an attempt to remove the obligation to negotiate at all — to retroactively legalise a taking that has already occurred, and to license all future takings by default. The datasets Reisner identified are downloaded, copied and in use. The carve-out would not authorise a hypothetical future practice. It would launder a present one.

The geopolitical shape of the campaign reveals the strategy more clearly than any single statement. The lobbying happens at the tables where governments weigh data-centre investment, jobs and the prestige of hosting frontier technology against a sector that is, in raw economic terms, smaller and less able to promise headline capital expenditure. The pitch is unmistakable: relax the copyright rules, and the investment follows. That turns a question of property rights into one of industrial policy, on ground where creators are structurally disadvantaged. A songwriters' collective cannot promise a billion-pound server farm in a marginal electorate. A technology company can. The carve-out is sought not because it is just but because it can be traded for things governments want, and those whose work would be expropriated are not party to the deal.

That the strategy is not invincible was demonstrated on 15 July 2026, when the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, speaking at the University of Sydney, made the plainest statement any head of government has yet made. Unlicensed training on creative work, he said, is theft: “No company should use Australian books, music, art or news to build or train AI without the artist's control.” He announced a new Office of AI within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, put the framework to a National Cabinet meeting in August 2026, and committed to legislation to be introduced to Parliament in early 2027 — the first such framework any government has moved to legislate.

One detail deserves particular attention. Albanese rejected outright a proposal from Anthropic for a “shared creative fund” as an alternative to individual licensing: a pooled payment offered in place of consent. The refusal rests on precisely the ground this argument turns on. A fund is a price paid to a category. A licence is permission sought from a person. The first can be generous and still leave the creator with no say in whether their work is used at all — which is the thing that was taken.

What Is Wrong With “Fair Use”

The scholar-in-a-library analogy did not survive July 2026. On the fifteenth of that month, 404 Media published the contents of Suno's source code, obtained by a hacker who had used a supply-chain attack in November 2025 to acquire an employee's credentials. What the code documents is not analysis. It is industrial-scale harvesting, itemised by the hour: 113,879 hours logged as “youtubemusic” and a further 152,162 as “ytmtagged”; 62,117 hours from the stock library Pond5; 19,514 from the International Music Score Library Project; 17,615 from Genius; 12,287 from Deezer. More damning still, the code shows scraping requests routed through commercial proxy services using rotating IP addresses, for the express purpose of defeating YouTube's anti-bot protections. Suno confirmed a security incident, describing it as involving outdated source code and saying it had been contained quickly.

A scholar in a library does not rotate IP addresses to defeat the lock on the door. That detail collapses the distinction the mining argument depends on, converting a passive claim — that developers merely observed what was publicly available — into an active one. It also carries a legal consequence the fair-use debate has largely overlooked. Under Section 1201 of the United States Digital Millennium Copyright Act, circumventing a technological measure controlling access to a copyrighted work is independently actionable. It requires no proof of underlying infringement, and there is no fair-use defence to it. The mining question and the circumvention question are separate, and only one has ever been arguable.

The disclosure also gives the input-side harm something it lacked: a named commercial generator, rather than a dataset of uncertain provenance circulating among developers. And it lands hardest on the artists least equipped to respond. Deezer and YouTube are exactly where the independent catalogue lives — where the producer with a few dozen releases and no label puts their work so that people can hear it. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ's complaint about Suno was made before any of this was known. The code suggests the mechanism.

Beneath the specifics lies a deeper conceptual problem. The TDM and fair-use arguments treat the analytical character of machine learning as if it settled the moral question: because a model “learns patterns” rather than storing literal copies, no meaningful harm is supposedly done. But this conflates the mechanism with the consequence. It does not matter, to the musician whose income is being eroded, whether the machine memorised their song or abstracted its style into a vector of weights. What matters is that it could not exist without their work, and now competes with them. The “transformative” defence was designed for a world in which a transformation produced something that did not substitute for the original. A parody does not compete with the song it mocks. A generative model trained on a catalogue produces output that competes directly with that catalogue, on the same platforms, for the same finite pool of listener attention and royalty money. The substitution is not incidental. It is the entire commercial point.

European courts have begun to answer the question the TDM argument treats as settled. In November 2025 the 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich Regional Court ruled against OpenAI, finding that storing copyrighted content in a model's parameters during training constituted reproduction, and that the TDM exception did not cover commercial uses producing outputs closely similar to protected works. The same chamber, before Judge Elke Schwager, is due to deliver its verdict against Suno on 31 July 2026, postponed from 12 June for administrative reasons. The claim was filed on 21 January 2025 by GEMA, the German collecting society, which represents more than 95,000 songwriters, composers and publishers and holds a mandate reaching more than two million rights holders worldwide; it is the first European case to test AI training on audio. At a hearing on 9 March 2026 the judge had the original recordings and Suno's outputs played aloud in court, across six works including Alphaville's “Forever Young” and “Big in Japan”, Kristina Bach's “Atemlos”, Lou Bega's “Mambo No. 5” and Boney M's “Rasputin” and “Daddy Cool”. Under German law a first-instance ruling is immediately enforceable while appeals proceed, so GEMA could move for an injunction against Suno's European operations. Whatever the outcome, the proposition that training is analysis and analysis is exempt has already been tested in a European court and found wanting.

There is also a question of consent no technical reframing can dissolve. Opt-out is not consent; it is the absence of refusal, a very different thing. A regime that takes by default and asks the dispossessed to object after the fact, in a machine-readable format most have never heard of, is not a licensing system. It is designed to maximise the volume of work taken before anyone notices.

The Working Musician's Position

It is tempting, when the numbers run to twenty-one million tracks and ninety-one years of audio, to lose sight of the individual at the bottom of the pile. But the individual is the point: the harm falls hardest on those least able to absorb it.

Consider a mid-tier independent musician — not a superstar with a legal department, but a working professional with a few dozen releases, a modest but real audience, and an income assembled from thin streams: a little touring, a little sync licensing, a few hundred pounds of streaming royalties each quarter. This is the artist who distributed their music through an aggregator years ago, ticking a box they barely read, assuming the platform would help people find their work. They did not imagine that “distribution” might one day mean their entire recorded output copied into a research dataset and used to train a system that generates an infinite supply of music in roughly their idiom.

The consent question bites hardest here, because what this artist agreed to and what was done are not the same thing. They granted a distributor the right to place their music on streaming services so that human beings could choose to listen to it. It is a very long way from that to the proposition that the recordings could be aggregated into a corpus, divorced from any listening event, and used as feedstock to manufacture a machine designed to generate competing product at industrial scale. No reasonable reading of “help people find my music” extends to “build the thing that will replace me.” The Free Music Archive, one of the smaller datasets Reisner found, was assembled as a public resource for free and legal downloads; the LAION collection anchoring the twelve-million-track set was, its maintainers insisted, “released for research purposes.” Each was made for one purpose and repurposed for another.

Every link in the chain compounds the injury. The work was taken without consent — the input harm. The machine it helped build floods the platform with synthetic competitors — the output harm. The slop dilutes the shared royalty pool from which they draw. And when their genuinely human work resembles the machine output, they may be dismissed as slop themselves, their authorship questioned by the technology built on their labour. The producer who told MusicTech that “until the major labels go through their lawsuits, there's no way for artists or labels to fight back” was describing a structural powerlessness. A lawsuit is a rich entity's tool. The Reisner database gave this artist evidence — but evidence of a wrong is not a means of redress.

That erosion can now be sized. APRA AMCOS's AI and Music Report, the largest study of its kind, drew responses from 4,274 songwriter, composer and publisher members across Australia and New Zealand. Its central finding is that, without a mandatory licensing framework, creators face a twenty-three per cent hit to their revenues — a cumulative loss estimated at more than AUD$519 million over four years, half a billion dollars taken out of the incomes of people who, in the main, are not wealthy. Eighty-two per cent said they feared no longer being able to make a living from their work; ninety-seven per cent wanted policymakers to pay more attention to AI and copyright. Those are not the numbers of a sector resisting change out of nostalgia. They are the numbers of a workforce watching its economic base removed while being told the removal is progress.

There is also a category of injury the language of income and royalties cannot reach, and APRA AMCOS foregrounded it in its response. The datasets did not discriminate. Alongside the pop and rock catalogues they swept up sacred and culturally significant recordings by Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Māori artists — Yothu Yindi, Gurrumul, Warumpi Band, William Barton, Christine Anu, Dan Sultan, Emma Donovan, Barkaa and AB Original among them, and on the New Zealand side Stan Walker, Six60, Maisey Rika, Marlon Williams and Horomona Horo.

For a great deal of this material, the harm is not principally economic. Many such recordings carry cultural protocols governing who may perform them, who may hear them, in what context and at what time; some belong to a community rather than an individual, and some may not be reproduced at all outside particular circumstances. Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property is a body of rights and obligations that Western copyright was never designed to hold, and it does not convert into money. A royalty cheque does not answer the copying of a work that should not have been copied at any price, still less a machine producing imitations of it on demand for anyone who types a prompt. This is the clearest demonstration that consent, not compensation, is the load-bearing principle. A framework built purely on payment — the pooled fund, the levy, the blanket rate with no way to say no — would process these recordings as line items and fail completely. Some uses are not underpriced. They are refused.

This is the practical meaning of creative ownership in 2026: for the artist at the top, a portfolio defended by lawyers and eventually licensed on favourable terms; for the artist in the middle, a notional right they cannot afford to enforce, attached to work already taken. The concept has not been abolished. It has been hollowed out — left standing as a word while the substance drains away.

What a Genuine Framework Would Require

So what is the alternative? Not the absence of any framework — that is the status quo, and the status quo is the problem. The alternative is a framework built on the principle the carve-out is designed to erase: that the creator controls the use of their work and is paid for it. It would have to do four things, and do them together, because any one without the others fails.

First, consent — and consent means opt-in, not opt-out. The default must flip. A model trainer should have to obtain permission before ingesting a body of work, not after, and the absence of an objection must never be treated as agreement. This is the most contested point, because it is the most expensive for the technology industry and the most protective of creators. Opt-in is harder. It is also the only version of consent that deserves the name. The sampling-clearance precedent shows it is workable: the industry did not collapse when courts required samples to be cleared; it built the infrastructure to clear them. The objection that opt-in is impossible at the scale of millions of tracks is precisely the objection collective management was invented to answer.

Second, transparency and provenance. A genuine framework would require trainers to disclose what they trained on — to maintain and publish auditable records of the works in their datasets. This is the reform that commanded more than ninety per cent support in the British consultation, and its absence is what made Reisner's investigation necessary: the datasets circulate privately, and artists discover their inclusion only when a journalist builds a search tool, or a hacker leaks the source code. Mandatory provenance would invert that, letting any creator know as a matter of routine whether their work had been used, by whom, and under what licence. It is the precondition for everything else: you cannot pay for what you cannot trace, nor enforce a right you cannot prove has been violated. Credit belongs here too — the humans whose work shaped a model's capabilities should be acknowledged, not erased into a statistical soup.

Third, compensation — and the mechanism matters as much as the principle. The music industry already possesses the most relevant tooling of any creative sector, having spent a century paying large numbers of rights holders small amounts at enormous scale. The performing-rights and collective-management organisations — APRA AMCOS, PRS, GEMA, ASCAP and their counterparts — exist precisely to do what the carve-out lobby calls impossible: to license use collectively, collect the money, and distribute it to the right people. A blanket AI-training licence administered by these bodies, with funds flowing into a royalty pool distributed by usage and representation, is not a fantasy but the obvious extension of an existing model. The compulsory mechanical licence is another precedent: a statutory rate that lets anyone reproduce a published composition provided they pay the set fee. A statutory training licence, set fairly and administered collectively, would marry the certainty the technology industry says it wants with the payment the creator is owed. A statutory licence still compensates; the carve-out does not. One is a price, the other an exemption. And, as the Indigenous material makes plain, even a well-designed compensation mechanism must sit downstream of consent rather than in place of it.

Fourth, enforcement. A right that cannot be enforced is the right the independent musician already has, which is to say no right at all. A framework that left enforcement to private lawsuits would protect only the wealthy; one empowering collective-management organisations to police compliance, audit datasets and pursue violations for their members would extend protection down to the artist with twenty songs and no lawyer. The arXiv finding that distributor policies are largely unenforced, and detection unreliable, is a finding about the enforcement gap. Closing it requires both technical provenance and an institution with the standing to act.

None of these four is novel. Consent, transparency, collective compensation and enforcement are the pillars of every functioning rights system the music industry has built. The training-data regime does not confront the industry with an unprecedented problem, but with an old one — unlicensed mass use of creative work — at a scale the existing tools already, in principle, exist to address. The obstacle is not capability. It is will.

That will is no longer entirely absent. The Australian commitment of July 2026 moves toward something close to these four requirements: a statutory framework built on the artist's control rather than their failure to object, drafted by a dedicated office of state, and headed for Parliament rather than another consultation. Whether the bill that reaches the floor in 2027 retains that shape is an open question, and the lobbying that produced the carve-out campaign will be brought to bear on the drafting. But the claim that opt-in licensing is administratively impossible has now been contradicted by a government intending to legislate it, and the claim that a pooled fund is an adequate substitute has been put to that government and refused.

One further requirement sits above the other four, and it is the hardest: coordination across borders. Music is global, training is global, and the datasets Reisner found respect no jurisdiction. A robust opt-in regime in one country is worth little if a developer can ingest the same catalogue under a permissive exception in another and deploy the model everywhere — which is why the lobbying targets jurisdictions one at a time, probing for the weakest link. Protecting creators would require the collective-management organisations, which already coordinate through reciprocal agreements, to extend that cooperation to training rights, and governments to resist undercutting one another to host the data centres. That infrastructure is not hypothetical; it has paid songwriters across borders for decades. The question is whether the will exists to point it at this problem before the precedent of the unlicensed taking hardens into something that cannot be reversed.

The Choice Being Made

Strip away the technical vocabulary and the lobbying euphemisms, and what remains is a question of which principle a society chooses to uphold. Either creative work is property its makers control and are paid for, or it is a free resource lying around for whoever has the computing power to scrape it. The text-and-data-mining carve-out is not a compromise between these positions. It is a vote for the second, dressed in the language of the first.

The twelve-million-track dataset that would take ninety-one years to hear is a monument to a category error: the treatment of a century of human creative labour as though it were ambient data, like weather readings or traffic patterns, free for the taking because it happens to exist. It is not ambient data. Every track was made by someone who decided how the chorus should resolve, which take to keep, what the song was about. Each of those decisions is what copyright was built to protect, and each was overridden the moment the work was copied into a dataset without a word to its author.

The remedy is not to ban the technology, nor to pretend the machines can be uninvented. It is to insist that the principle which has governed creative work for a hundred years survives the transition: that you ask first, that you say who you took it from, that you pay, and that the asking, crediting and paying can be enforced by institutions strong enough to act for those too small to act for themselves. APRA AMCOS put it as plainly as it can be put. The songs are not bargaining chips. They are someone's life's work. A framework worthy of the name would refuse the one thing the technology industry is asking for above all others: permission it never sought, granted in advance, for a taking that has already happened.

The unasked permission is the whole of the matter. Restore the asking, and the rest follows.

References

1. The Atlantic / Music Business Worldwide, “Four music datasets holding millions of tracks are being shared among AI developers, The Atlantic reports”, 16 June 2026. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/four-music-datasets-holding-millions-of-tracks-are-being-shared-among-ai-developers-the-atlantic-reports/
2. Exclaim!, “Backxwash, Titus Andronicus Among Musicians to Find Their Songs in AI-Training Datasets Exposed by 'The Atlantic'”, June 2026. https://exclaim.ca/music/article/backxwash-titus-andronicus-among-musicians-to-find-their-songs-in-ai-training-datasets-exposed-by-the-atlantic
3. MusicTech, “A massive music dataset is allegedly allowing AI to train on 12 million+ songs without permission”, June 2026. https://musictech.com/news/industry/ai-12-million-dataset-training/
4. Stanley Wu, Josephine Passananti, Viresh Mittal, Wenxin Ding, Haitao Zheng, Ben Y. Zhao, “An Empirical Analysis of AI Slop in Music Streaming”, arXiv:2606.18052, 16 June 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.18052
5. Deezer Newsroom, “AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new uploaded music”, April 2026. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/04/ai-generated-tracks-represent-44-of-new-uploaded-music/
6. Music Business Worldwide, “Spotify has deleted 75m+ tracks in 'spammy' AI music crackdown”, September 2025. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-has-deleted-75m-spammy-tracks-as-it-unveils-new-ai-music-policies/
7. DLA Piper, “Training AI models: UK Government proposes EU style 'opt out' copyright exception”, 2025. https://www.dlapiper.com/en-us/insights/blogs/mse-today/2025/training-ai-models-uk-government-proposes-eu-style-opt-out-copyright-exception
8. Reed Smith, “UK copyright and AI report: the 'opt-out' is dead, but what comes next?“. https://www.reedsmith.com/articles/uk-copyright-and-ai-report-the-opt-out-is-dead-but-what-comes-next/
9. A&O Shearman, “UK Copyright and AI: Government Drops TDM Exception Plans”, 2025. https://www.aoshearman.com/en/insights/ao-shearman-on-tech/where-are-we-on-copyright-and-ai-in-the-uk
10. Attorney-General's Department / APRA AMCOS, “Australian Government rules out Text and Data Mining exception”. https://www.apraamcos.com.au/about-us/news-and-events/tdm-response
11. The Music (themusic.com.au), “ARIA, APRA AMCOS Heads Respond To Calls For Pro-AI Copyright Overhaul”, 4 June 2026. https://themusic.com.au/industry/aria-apra-amcos-heads-respond-to-calls-for-pro-ai-copyright-overhaul/vsJ80NPS1dQ/04-06-26
12. Complete Music Update, “APRA AMCOS says Atlantic investigation proves AI companies have plundered the 'life's work of Australian and New Zealand songwriters'”, 19 June 2026. https://completemusicupdate.com/apra-amcos-says-atlantic-investigation-proves-ai-companies-have-plundered-the-lifes-work-of-australian-and-new-zealand-songwriters/
13. APRA AMCOS, “PROOF OF THEFT: Investigation uncovers songs stolen for AI”. https://www.apraamcos.com.au/about-us/news-and-events/proof-of-theft-ai-investigation-the-atlantic
14. APRA AMCOS, “AI and Music Report”. https://www.apraamcos.com.au/about/supporting-the-industry/research-papers/aiandmusic
15. Billboard, “Australia's Prime Minister Commits to Copyright Protections In AI Age”, July 2026. https://www.billboard.com/pro/australia-prime-minister-commits-copyright-protections-ai/
16. Digital Music News, “Australian Gov't Commits to AI Training Protections With New Law”, 15 July 2026. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/07/15/australia-ai-law/
17. 404 Media, “Hack Reveals Suno AI Music Generator Scraped YouTube, Deezer, and Genius”, 15 July 2026. https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-suno-ai-music-generator-scraped-youtube-deezer-and-genius/
18. Music Business Worldwide, “Suno scraped YouTube, Deezer to train AI, hacked code reveals”, July 2026. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/suno-scraped-youtube-deezer-and-genius-to-train-its-ai-hacked-code-reveals/
19. MLex, “GEMA, Suno copyright ruling postponed by Munich court to July 31”. https://www.mlex.com/mlex/articles/2481789/gema-suno-copyright-ruling-postponed-by-munich-court-to-july-31
20. Fordham Political Review, “The Legal Limits of Creativity: Sampling, Copyright, and the Future of Music Law”. https://fordhampoliticalreview.org/the-legal-limits-of-creativity-sampling-copyright-and-the-future-of-music-law/
21. Wikipedia, “Mechanical license”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_license
22. WIPO, “Collective Management of Copyright and Related Rights”. https://www.wipo.int/en/web/copyright/collective-management

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

I made my dish today for the potluck dinner. It came out really badly and I almost started crying. I know that it’s not just this dish and it’s more realistically the fact that I haven’t been able to work out for the last two days and I also have been sleeping really late the last two days because of me going out and doing things with friends. I’ve been really busy and I guess I’m grateful for that, but also I just feel like such utter shit right now. I tried to make a kebab dish and my kebab completely fell apart and I ended up just making overly salty ground Lamb. I’m worried that people are going to make shitty comments or treat me in a patronizing way, which is somewhat fair because they are better cooks than I am. But I just feel a lot of shame and judgment and I’m trying to learn how to cook and it sucks because I never had someone to teach me. I didn’t get to cook with my parents growing up or anything like that and so it’s hard. There’s a lot of things that seem really normal or intuitive that you just learn overtime that I don’t know and it sucks because I feel like this has happened a pretty good amount of times where someone makes fun of me for something like that where I have inexperienced. And it hurts because it feels like even more for a reason for me to want to quit. It feels like someone is making fun of me and treating me like an idiot but I really am trying. And it’s scary for me to do things like this, I’m very out of my element and I’m incredibly anxious and I’m still here trying to make these dishes and shit like that, even though people make jokes about me being bad at cooking and trying to make a simple recipes. And I kind of said myself up for them, so I can’t play too much of a victim if I’m being honest. But I wish that the world would be kind of gentle to me today. I both don’t really want anyone to eat my dish, but I also feel already anxious about the shame of taking back a completely untouched Tupperware at the end of the night. I’m going for a little bit just to have said that I went, but I just wanna leave and I brought my gym clothes and headphones so that right afterwards I can finally go to the gym and I’m hoping that that will help me.

I sent the title as what I did because I was listening to the part of famous profits where it almost moved me to tears today, and I really love this part of the song and it just felt hollow. I thought to myself that depression is taking away my enjoyment of music again, and I would give so much to have those notes back. And then I also thought about how I shredded and flushed away the evidence of my relationship when I was in middle school with my best friend, and I wish that I had a copy of all of those coated love letters because that was one of the best memories I think I had and I would have loved to still have those notes also. I’m also driving right now. The same route that I used to go to see E and it doesn’t hurt, and my memory of her is fairly distant. It’s something that I have to pull rather than push away. And I think that’s a good sign at least that I have been able to heal past a breakup in the same way that every breakup always hurts people. That’s it about that. I don’t really wanna talk more about my ex. I did tell. J that I felt like shit because of my dish and I almost cried and she FaceTime me. I didn’t really expect that but I picked up and we just talked a little bit about random kind of stuff. Nothing too serious but me kind of just explaining that I felt like shit. She told me she would have my back and I’m really grateful for that. I know that the dish in this whole dinner really doesn’t matter and it’s more just a combination of the lack of sleep and exercise and exhaustion and lack of time for myself, but the thought of a friend, knowing that I am insecure about cooking and I feel bad about my dish and purposefully eating more of my dish and telling me that they like it even if I know it’s a lie. I think the idea of someone caring about me that much makes me want to cry and it sucks because I’m just about here and I am tearing up again, but it’s a very sweet thought to think about someone loving me and caring about me that much. And it’s such a stupid thing just eating and overly salty ground Lam dish but the thought that someone wants me to feel OK and not like a fucking failure when it comes to stuff like this is enough to make me cry, I guess. I don’t even know what is a realistic bar or something I can hope for or where this even lays in respect to that. I think it would be such a beautiful thing to feel safe and a place where I am accepted. What a strange dream.

In Summary: * Winding down a quiet Sunday. I did get some yard work done today, just a little bit because I started later in the morning. What little I accomplished was all in the back yard, mostly in the alley. Cutting a few of the larger branches that were reaching over the back fence, then dragging them and one other really big one that must have come down in an earlier big wind to a staging area back there where I can begin the process of cutting them into pieces to stuff into the green organics bin for the weekly pickup. There's enough there to fill that bin several times over, so I've got work to keep me as busy as I dare be for the rest of the Summer. Between that and the mowing... I swear. Roscoe is NOT gonna get bored!

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227.63 lbs. * bp= 139/82 (71)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:00 – 1 banana * 06:50 – 1 seafood salad and cheese sandwich * 09:00 – fresh apple slices, 1 banana, sausage, omelet * 18:15 – 1 dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:45 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:55 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 11:30 to 12:30 – yard work, back yard and alley * 13:00 – listen to Texas Rangers Pregame Show ahead of this afternoon's game vs. the Mariners, nap * 16:41 – And Settle wins this one, 6 to 4. * 16:45 – Listening to relaxing music on KAHL 1310 AM, San Antonio's Easy Listening Station.

Chess: * 09:20 – moved in all pending CC games

As caverns crawl with twisted rage my saunter pulls to chain. Think not where dull minds scribe as mage. Reap kindle from thwart's flame.

Bid question, but loom not for choice. Our threads reign slow in might. Nocturne does weep a strangled voice. Still, “Blaspheme!” rues my light.

Written July 26, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

Chapter 1: The Quiet Moment Before the Words

You are sitting in the dark with your phone turned face down on the table because one more message feels like too much. The room is quiet, but your mind is not. You know you should pray, yet everything inside you feels tangled. You could repeat the words you have said a hundred times, but tonight they feel thin. This is the hidden place behind this heartfelt message about why Jesus taught His disciples to pray: sometimes the hardest part of prayer is not believing God is there. It is knowing how to come to Him honestly.

Many of us reach that point after years of praying. We know the familiar phrases. We know when to bow our heads. We know how to ask God to bless the day, protect the family, heal the sick, and help us make good choices. But there are moments when those words no longer reach the real thing happening inside us. That is where this deeper reflection on learning to trust God in prayer belongs, because prayer was never meant to help us avoid the truth about ourselves.

The disciples did not ask Jesus to teach them how to pray on the first day they met Him. That does not mean Jesus was withholding something important. It may mean they first needed to watch Him. They had heard religious prayers before. They had grown up around people who knew the right words. What caught their attention was not simply that Jesus prayed, but that His prayer seemed connected to the life He lived.

They watched Him step away from crowds and make room for the Father when people were pulling at Him from every direction. They saw that prayer was not a public performance or a last-minute attempt to escape trouble. It was part of the quiet center of His life. Before they could understand the words Jesus would give them, they needed to see what prayer looked like in someone who trusted the Father.

They needed to learn that prayer was not a tool for controlling God, a way to look holy, or a speech meant to impress the people standing nearby. Prayer was where Jesus remained honest, dependent, and aligned with the Father. Most of us do not struggle because we have never heard a prayer. We struggle because we have learned how to say prayers without always learning how to be present with God.

A woman may whisper, “Please take care of my son,” while staring at a text message confirming that he is in trouble again. She has prayed the same prayer for months. What she may not know how to say is, “Father, I am scared that I cannot save him. I am angry that this keeps happening. I am exhausted from trying to hold everything together.” That second prayer sounds less polished, but it may be closer to the kind of honesty Jesus was teaching.

When Jesus began with “Our Father,” He did not give the disciples a magic opening line. He showed them where prayer begins. It begins in relationship. God is not a distant official waiting for us to make a perfect case. He is Father. Yet Jesus also taught them to honor God’s name as holy. The closeness of God does not make Him small, and His holiness does not make Him cold. Prayer holds both truths together. We come near, but we do not take control. We speak honestly, but we remember who God is.

This is where many of our prayers begin to drift. We may come to God with a full set of instructions. We want Him to change a person, fix a problem, open one door, close another, and give us the answer we have already decided is right. There is nothing wrong with asking for help. Jesus taught us to ask for daily bread. He understands that bills are real, bodies get sick, relationships break, and people we love make choices that frighten us. He did not shame human need.

Prayer becomes smaller than His intent when we only ask God to change what is around us and never allow Him to show us what needs to change within us. That is the quiet conflict many Christians carry. We want God’s help, but we do not always want His direction. We want relief, but not always surrender. We want Him to bless our plans, but we are not sure we want Him to question them.

Jesus did not teach prayer as a way to make God support the life we have already chosen. He taught prayer as a place where we bring the whole life to the Father, including the parts we would rather keep hidden. An honest prayer can therefore be simple: “Father, I do not know what to say. I want my way, but I want to learn to trust Yours. Show me what I am refusing to see.” Those are not weak words. They are the beginning of real prayer because they stop pretending.

The disciples asked Jesus to teach them because they had seen what prayer looked like when it was more than words. They had seen a life that kept returning to the Father. They wanted that life, not merely a formula. Maybe that is where the lesson begins for us too. It does not begin with longer prayers, better language, or greater confidence. It begins when we stop trying to sound like people who have everything together and come to God as people who know they need Him.

Chapter 2: When Prayer Stops Being a Performance

The morning comes too quickly after a bad night. The coffee is made, the house begins moving, and everyone seems to need something before you have even had time to think. You may stand at the kitchen counter with your hands wrapped around a warm mug and realize you have already started rehearsing the day’s problems in your mind. There is the conversation you do not want to have, the doctor’s call you are waiting for, the balance in the bank account, the mistake you made yesterday, and the person you are trying not to disappoint. You know you should pray, but part of you wonders whether prayer will change anything.

That question is not a sign that faith has disappeared. It is often the moment when prayer can become more real. Many Christians have been taught to hide uncertainty from God, as though honesty might offend Him. We think we must arrive with confidence already in place. We try to sound calm when we are not calm. We say, “I trust You,” while our thoughts are racing in every direction. But Jesus did not teach His disciples to perform certainty. He taught them to come to the Father.

That changes the purpose of prayer. Prayer is not where we prove that we are strong enough to deserve God’s attention. It is where we admit that we are not enough on our own. The words Jesus gave His disciples move us away from self-sufficiency. “Give us this day our daily bread” is a prayer of dependence. It is the prayer of someone who knows today has needs that cannot all be controlled.

Daily bread can mean the food on the table, but it also teaches us to live one day at a time. We often want God to show us the whole road. We want the answer for next month, the guarantee for next year, and the promise that nothing painful will happen. Jesus brings us back to today. He does not deny tomorrow. He simply reminds us that grace is often given in daily portions.

A man driving to work may be carrying a decision that could affect his family. He has looked at the numbers, asked for advice, and still does not know what to do. His prayer does not need to become a speech. He can say, “Father, give me wisdom for the next right step. Keep fear from making this decision for me.” That prayer may not remove the responsibility, but it places the responsibility where it belongs: in the hands of someone who is willing to listen rather than merely react.

Jesus also joined prayer with forgiveness. That is where the prayer becomes uncomfortable. It is easy to ask God for peace while holding tightly to resentment. It is easy to ask Him to forgive our impatience while refusing to forgive someone else’s failure. Jesus did not connect these things to make forgiveness feel earned. He connected them because receiving mercy should change the way we carry the failures of others.

Forgiveness does not mean pretending the wound did not matter. It does not require us to trust someone who remains unsafe, and it does not erase wise boundaries. But prayer brings our anger into the presence of God so it does not quietly become the ruler of our life. We may begin by saying, “Father, I am not ready to feel differently, but I do not want this hurt to own me.” That is an honest place to begin.

This is one way Christian prayer can reflect the intent of Jesus. It becomes a place where we stop hiding. We bring the unpaid bill, the medical fear, the strained marriage, the regret, the envy, the exhaustion, and the resentment. We do not bring them because God is unaware of them. We bring them because we are choosing not to carry them alone or pretend they are not shaping us.

Christian prayer misses His intent when it becomes only a request for better circumstances. We can spend years asking God to remove every difficulty while never asking Him to form patience, courage, mercy, and wisdom within us. We may ask Him to take away every hard person, every closed door, and every season of waiting. Sometimes He does change the situation. Sometimes He changes us while we are still standing inside it.

That does not mean every painful circumstance has been sent to teach us a lesson. It means no circumstance is beyond God’s ability to meet us there. Jesus never treated suffering as a simple classroom exercise. He wept with people. He healed people. He carried pain Himself. The lesson about Jesus is not that He stands far away telling us to pray harder. The lesson is that He understands what it means to bring a real human life before the Father.

Jesus prayed in moments of pressure, grief, decision, and suffering. He did not pray to escape being human. He prayed as the Son who trusted the Father completely. His example shows us that prayer is not a sign that we have failed to handle life. Prayer is part of how we live life honestly with God.

There may still be mornings when you do not know what to say. There may be nights when the words will not come. In those moments, prayer may be no more than sitting quietly and saying, “Father, I am here.” You may open the prayer Jesus taught and move through it slowly, not as a formula, but as a way of returning your heart to what is true.

When you say “Our Father,” you remember that you are not alone. When you honor His name, you remember that He is God and you are not. When you ask for His kingdom and His will, you place your own plans beneath His wisdom. When you ask for daily bread, you trust Him with what this day requires. When you ask for forgiveness, you stop defending what needs to be confessed. When you pray about forgiving others, you invite God into the hurt you keep carrying. When you ask Him to lead you away from temptation, you admit that fear and pride can pull you toward choices that will not make you whole.

The words are simple, but the life they invite is deep. Jesus did not teach His disciples to pray so they could sound more religious. He taught them to live near the Father. He taught them to bring their needs without shame, their sins without excuses, their relationships without pretending, and their future without demanding control.

That is still the invitation. You do not need to become impressive before you pray. You do not need to clear your mind, solve the problem, or find the perfect words. You can come tired. You can come uncertain. You can come with faith that feels small. The important thing is not that you arrive with everything together. The important thing is that you come.

And when you come, Jesus is not merely giving you words to repeat. He is showing you the Father.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

The apiary be Scottish run to mute Late December this hugger And seeing simply rise What time in Hearst for Will Enough of oak And seeming simpler For five octet and lane And pasture by the law Economy forever- and nines to the Moon Giving ray to God And night shall let us be- the end of war.

Sudden And Unusual (Fire Me)

For the time this week And known purchases to comply Based on a long trip It was Eesti and Reunion But to Marshall the pretend And signs of rupture to Maghreb We were the universe And the dollar bill and its army And the anguish of a hundred And of an angel And a country To see the solemn survive To review And to take rest In timely we view The place in need of secure To feel and not pretend That enemies lay unprotected So surely to invoke The night of one regret Sitting and careful then On the twentieth we have war And made amends- to the grief of an aging course The repetition in union And solely reported by men And to the new unlabour speaks might There was something of May about Nothing says to the incline Of a past to restruggle the evident To the Eastern laity of war Thoughts for the tide and umber sea The days to King and Commonwealth We stayed upon the open sea And to retract all returning The West at due May course To front every place but our prism And sailing to the better of men Portions inland The legacy of war And returning our inland sea To the abode of a distant and weary men This water to the knees and on time In Justice, youth re-une In highly react-to at war And the sympathy of maiming still What is war and whatever is LCD To discourage the damage And to be fine with the greatest of men We will not live underground And we will have Victory at last.

To the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Patron and Saint at war.

And in the time of supposition We were weary for a few The working wheel And signs to ransom A day of pages like before A prayer for peace For feeding first to Beckham The litmus of a daygood And in this column,- thirty voids An Ark of the Covenant For Geert Wilders to atone And in this dying hour The lights refused to dim For the Good Lord And letting last to fieldsright Preternaturally decayed But all the wooden collections And the sturdy ones denote A place for Earthen Heaven And in it to avoid As the days are made for good And in this verse were lines Of the uncontaminated view That God is good to land And great to better seas And in a line of Crosses Perchance to see Saint Peter Adjusting to the schism Of the stalwart incantations And in this poem, an America That is bursting at the seams Of a dream for Oprah Winfrey Days of flight unto the night And every golden sister Has a drop of Mothers’ land- the only noise, abound Freedom tines in air For near to fortune time forgot In separated view This September to the stream Of every mannequin’s name Shall be blessed into the fold

I sit and nightly view The forms and future words And dreams, and stalls of gear In the separations of time For broken hearts to beat Every fragrant will and rose- and I adore the forms of depth To a star unto its range The polylacrymal Sun Fighting views unto the Henge And days do not infer to wreck The Son of Man upon a ship For all the distant passages Of their Holiness of time- of great departure And of Christ Jesus- Celebrant of creation If the mighty blackened locks Innovations free and bare A fissure to the leaf would happen fast- in lights if too much Heaven But never they- our honest World And beguiling sense of Wonder Distant Women And a song for better free- Heights of weight and worship ever Raptured then To Her night of trystic joy And off in ten To Chicago’s year of wheat And tribulations- But we hear And cast despondence Insofar as knowing every June There is distance unto our walk And every Man can solify These days are meant for Blackness And futures, and escape Barren lands to heave with rain In nine steps out of ten We were with her- and still know The aching of a star Dispossessed of heights of mutiny To her as much as more In mystery ten and then The Persephone and a floor Rigs for light and ship The sound of Earth and solemn Away with every star To the Good Women clad in wise Bearing Winter afraid And in the night unsure Turning to God’s Children Who will count one Oprah Winfrey Always standing nights in Gayle, Coretta, and Luther King Every drop of Earthen Water Filling hands of grateful then Today is unaccounted For the souls of Christ at will In barren dust to Dover Lighting stars to form and see Hallowed journey to this talk- of expectations And experience And of land becoming full In solemn flame And made of Water And the supplication free On our journey to this side Where days are rife And sustenant breathing Escaped to here- our land for us And a joy- to solemn roads And this is what we have And share to Royal as the Other Witness, Lord, of us In flying high The clouds of effervescence Light the isle- and what is right And offer downpour- for the livid- who will not see the sky- as Oprah would- and just for you And we will walk on- on this day as men will render- verdant bliss Into our own To solemn be And hopeful here Chicago keeping For this land..

..In solace and prayer For peace and gratitude Light of Heaven- Christ the Lord First and last In all who seek.

Schon gefühlte Jahrzehnte ist es her, dass Blogs in Mode waren. Für mich sind sie es immer noch: Seit Google angefangen hatte, das Internet mit seinen Suchalgorithmen kaputt zu machen (Stichwort SEO als Beruf(!)), hatten es Blogs immer schwerer. Gefühlt hatte ich bei der Google Suche die ersten x-Suchergebnisseiten übersprungen, um die kleinen, nischigen Blogs zu finden. Die, die Qualität über Suchmaschinenoptimierung stellten, mich zum nachdenken anregen, mich auf etwas stoßen, dass ich noch nicht gedacht habe oder hatte. Die, die sich der Wahrheit verpflichtet sahen und sehen, die, die ihr Wissen, ihre Gedanken, Ideen und Anregungen zum Wohle aller zur Verfügung stellten und stellen. Blogs, die ich schon Jahre nicht mehr bei Google suche, aber bis vor kurzem bei DuckDuckGo fand (aktuell bin ich auf der Suche nach einem brauchbaren Ersatz.), und schon länger bei Mastodon entdecke. Kurzum, auch in Zeiten von LLMs (KI/ML eierlegende Wollmilchsäue)ja werden Blogs bestimmt eine Rolle spielen. Weiterhin als Nische wie seit vielen Jahren nach dem großen Hype, aber immer weiter. So glaube ich mit meinen sechzig Jahren doch noch einmal in die Welt hinauszublasen, was mein Hirn an brauch- und unbrauchbarem angesammelt hat. Wenn es gefällt, freue ich mich, dann war es nicht völlig umsonst. Wenn nicht, macht es auch nichts. Denn etwas ist gewiß: seit dem das Internet besteht, wird neben den oben genannten qualitativ hochwertigen Inhalten auch viel nicht wichtiges bis überflüssiges in die weite Welt geblasen. Ich hoffe, dass ich nicht zu letzteren geselle. Wenn nicht, hoffe ich wenigstens auf die Selbsterkenntnis, dass ich das selbst erkenne und das Bloggen lassen werde. Denn noch mehr Datenmüll zu produzieren ist nicht in die Idee diesen Blogs.

Omenom

Het was er eerder nog nu staat het niet meer op de kaart ik had er iets voor over nu is het niks meer waard het is allemaal van voorbijgaande aard ik haalde het schoon uit de lade na het malen is weer de vaat ik weet nog waar het vandaan kwam maar heb geen idee waar het heen gaat ik wist waar het altijd stond weet alleen niet meer waar het staat het is allemaal van voorbijgaande aard ik kon het allemaal weg dragen nu is niks meer gesneden op mijn maat tegen de stroom in gaan werd gewaardeerd nu noemen ze het hoog verraad het is allemaal van voorbijgaande aard er zit geen spanning meer op maar ooit heb ik me over alles druk gemaakt ik bleef steken in problemen die ik nu met groot gemak achter laat ik sprak heel veel over stomme dingen waar ik nu nooit meer over praat het is allemaal van voorbijgaande aard het was toen eind januari maar nu is het half maart gisteren ging het niet zoals het vandaag gaat morgen kijk ik wel hoe het er dan voor staat het is immers allemaal van voorbijgaande aard allemaal de welvaart, regelmaat het prijsje op de kaart keuzes op menu en namen op de land kaart de grenzen van de staat de kleuren en vormen van het gewaad de heilige onderneming hun wapenvoorraad en bijbehorende krijgsraad van voorbijgaande aard

Eclipsed, this bayonet forsworn. Braided in a pity of harmony, and dilapidated to bow, I rise to the sharpness of a monstrous rebuke. Let Fate tsunami against me. I shall swallow every tide with a saccharine smile, and cleave wave after wave of mismanagement into a foundry of foreboding care. Yes, I dare...

That has always been both the problem and the solution.

Written July 26, 2026. © 2026 AnOublietteofThought.

Substack’s new AI detection

Substack introduced a tool that detects “AI-assisted writing” in posts. Of course they did. Many of the most successful Substacks are run by professional writers, who are naturally concerned that AI could help others compete with their content. So creating a culture where using AI for writing is generally frowned upon is appealing to them.

Of course, using an AI-based tool to detect AI writing is the sloppiest way to fight AI slop. It does not consider the quality of the result, only the tools used. Useless content predates AI – it used to be called clickbait, often created by humans in so-called content farms.

It is better to continue using your own judgment about whether a piece is worth reading, rather than relying on a simple metric that tries to assess how much of a text is “human.”

25 July 2026

Autopsy (working title): a small 8x10 inch painting of what began from close observation of a peeling decorative vinyl house address number I saw on a Wood Green recycling bin. Became a kind of totem upright in the night (memories of standing at the base of Sankaty Head Light). Or a garden and a butterfly, or a fake garden and a projection of a butterfly, or two visitors trying to mirror each other, or experience shifting into two dimensions (less time with the act, more with the storage). Serendipitously found a wax seal on an old envelope as the impulse to add an insect in flight arrived (it really helps to keep anything and everything around; ideas don't die but they hide). Yena said she has been writing about seeing cicada shells on the ground during walks in her neighborhood. I could also say that this work feels like childhood revisited with new tools, or a compressed and frozen metamorphosis, or a record of an imprinting. So content is coming around (by which I mean I'm not even considering it anymore), but I feel that the materiality needs to hurry up and dissolve. I'll let this one stand regardless—it's an okay waypoint and painting is logrolling.

“As a very young man he had spoken of his art as “andacht zum kleinen” (devotion to small things). In the Microcosm of his own visual world he worshipped the Macrocosm of the universe. This was his revolution.” – Sibyl Moholy-Nagy on Paul Klee in the introduction to Praeger Publishers' 1972 print of his Pedagogical Sketchbook (1953).

FILE 003. How Orthodox Judaism views Christianity

This post is created out of disbelief regarding the one-sided love of the Christian communities towards Orthodox Jewish communities. I am sure that Christians have good theological reasons why to support Orthodox Jewish communities.However, I think that it is important that people know that it is one-sided.

Let's make it very clear, most Orthodox Jews think of Christians as “Idol worshipers”.

Here are some sources:

1# Rambam – Hilchot Avodah Zarah 9:4 (uncensored manuscripts)

The uncensored manuscripts contain wording identifying Christians with idol worship. Chabad's annotated edition explains:

“This statement appears to label Christianity as the worship of false gods. That view is clearly stated in Hilchot Avodat Kochavim 9:4.”

The original Hebrew manuscripts contain the phrase:

הנוצרים עובדי עבודה זרה הם

Translation:

“The Christians are worshippers of idolatry.”

This wording appears in the uncensored manuscripts discussed by scholars and later editions.

(found in uncensored manuscripts and critical editions of the Mishneh Torah. For centuries, many printed editions in Christian Europe had passages about Christianity altered or removed by censors. Modern scholarly editions often restore these readings based on manuscripts.)

2# Rambam – Commentary on the Mishnah, Avodah Zarah 1:3

In his commentary, Rambam writes (uncensored text):

דע שזאת האומה הנוצרית כולם עובדי עבודה זרה הם

Translation:

“Know that this Christian nation ... are all worshippers of idolatry.”

He continues that their houses of worship are:

בית עבודה זרה בלי ספק

Translation:

“A house of idolatry without any doubt.”

(found in uncensored manuscripts and critical editions of the Mishneh Torah. For centuries, many printed editions in Christian Europe had passages about Christianity altered or removed by censors. Modern scholarly editions often restore these readings based on manuscripts.)

From my personal experience, I can only say that, to the best of my recollection, I have never spoken to an Orthodox Jew who believed that Christianity is not idolatry.

However, there are rabbis who do believe that Christianity is not idolatry. They are, however, a minority. Nonetheless, many Christians are giving money to Orthodox communities while they are generally not really welcome to attend a synagogue service on Friday evening or Saturday. One time (in Europe) a rabbi invited a high profile priest with his entourage but the community was not very happy with this. Even though most of the community was not shomer shabbat. I would have expected a more moderate response from the community but I only heard mocking and vile remarks. Even people that are Jewish according to Jewish law (halacha) but are Christian are being mocked. The general Orthodox Jewish perspective on Christianity can be summarized as follows: their (Christian) theology is not even close to our sophisticated Talmud and Torah study, besides they belief in ridiculous things like the virgin Marry.

I understand, from a historical perspective, that most Jewish families are against Christianity. Look at the forced conversions and all the pogroms that happened against Jewish communities. However, your average Christian is not fully aware of these things and therefore their approach is often very naive.

#judaism #orthodoxjudaism #christianity #rambam #maimonides #halacha #talmud #torah #avodahzarah #theology #religion #Interfaith #InterfaithDialogue #InterreligiousDialogue #ComparativeReligion