By Reid Creager

Jason Alan Snyder doesn’t hate artificial intelligence. In fact, most of his work during the past three decades has involved AI and machine learning.

But his long association and fascination with AI give him rare insight about aspects of it that dramatically demonstrate the importance of protecting human processes.

The audience was riveted by Snyder’s blunt but factual comments during his keynote speech at this spring’s IPWatchdog LIVE event. The fascination grew when I spoke with him briefly in the hotel lobby afterward.

Some eyebrow-raising highlights, interspersed with his brilliant, deadpan humor:

• “I asked an AI to write this speech for me, and it produced something genuinely brilliant. Eloquent. Persuasive. Extensively footnoted. It also cited four Supreme Court cases that do not exist. So, you’re stuck with the human version. I apologize in advance.”

• “A Pew Research study published in 2024 found that 38 percent of all web pages that existed in 2013 are now gone. Not hidden, not archived—gone. Twenty-five percent of all web pages created in the last decade have vanished. Fifty percent of URLs cited by the United States Supreme Court are dead links. More than 70 percent of URLs in the Harvard Law Review no longer work.”

• “Thirty-seven percent of consumers now start their information searches with AI, not Google. Not a library; not a database—an AI chatbot. And 59 percent say they expect AI to become their primary way of finding information within the next few years.

“Only 1 percent of people click on the sources that AI chatbots cite. People are accepting AI-synthesized answers as fact, without ever consulting a primary source.

“Now, here is what most people don’t understand about how these systems work: AI does not remember.

“It does not look things up. It has no database. No filing cabinet. No shelf of books it can check. What it does is confabulate: It reconstructs statistically plausible word sequences based on patterns in its training data. In the immortal words of my friend, super-genius and world-class tech attorney John Kheit, it’s a kerplinko machine.

“It generates text that sounds right. And sometimes it is right. And sometimes it is completely, confidently, articulately and totally wrong.”

• “Propaganda has an author. Propaganda has intent. You can trace it. You can counter it.

“AI hallucination has no author. No intent. No traceable source. It is a machine confabulating. And two billion people a month are treating those confabulations as fact.”

• “In an age when AI is generating what the Australian patent office calls ‘slopplications,’ and they’ve seen a 174 percent spike in self-filed applications, your role as curator and quality guardian has never been more critical. Because a patent record flooded with AI-generated garbage is almost as dangerous as no patent record at all.”

• “We are living through a moment where the tools of erasure have become invisible. No one is holding a torch to a library. No one is sending subscribers a razor blade. Instead, 2 billion people a month are asking a machine to tell them what is true, and the machine is making it up. And the real records, the actual sources, the primary documents, are quietly rotting behind dead links.”

When I happened upon Snyder later that day and praised his speech, he reiterated that his comments were not meant to say AI is a bad thing.

“But people need to be reminded of both AI’s powers and its limitations,” he said. “When the internet came along, we became too dependent on it as a replacement for human processes and records resulting from those processes.

“We need to remember that we have a responsibility to value and preserve human thought and creativity in lasting and permanent ways.”