After receiving so much AI-generated email spam filled with inaccuracies about myself and my career, I got curious about what the robots were saying about me. Despite much of my actual biographical information being easily verifiable in decades of newspaper articles and press interviews, rather than do some basic research, both artificial intelligence and many advertisement riddled websites choose to invent fantasies about my personal life and career and present them as fun facts.

If you need an accurate biography to introduce me at a reading or to write an article about me, please go to my official biography to verify facts or reach out to me directly if you need something more up to date. Some of what is posted online about me is hilariously inaccurate, so please don’t believe everything you read online.

This birthday website claims that I grew up in “a small town in Germany,” and that I studied English Literature at a “prestigious University in Germany.” It presents a handful of well known 20th century poets as my influences. None of this is true.

Indeed I was born in Germany and spent a handful of summers there in childhood, but I was educated at American institutions in Louisiana and Oklahoma, and my major at university was Film & Video Studies. I graduated from Enid High School, Northern Oklahoma College, and the University of Oklahoma.

My poetry did not magically catch the attention of literary agents and publishers straight out of college, nor was writing the focus of my career ambitions in my 20s. My publications go through the slush pile, competing with countless other submissions just like every other published poet.

I self-published the first edition of Tea & Sprockets in 2004 through CafePress while I was still in college. At the time I had no ambitions for my debut poetry book other than to preserve an archive of my teenaged writings solely for sentimental reasons. I was in my 30s when I started sharing my poetry on a wider scale both in print and on stage.

This Myers-Briggs personality website claims I wrote a poem called “A World Without War” that won a grand prize at the 2001 Spring Fling Poetry Contest in Santa Barbara. While I’ve certainly written numerous poems against war since the mid-1990s, I do not have a poem with that exact title.

I tried to find out any information about the Santa Barbara News-Press Spring Fling Poetry Contest to see if it actually exists, but I only found that Google’s AI then uses this wholly fictitious biography as a source and presents it as confirmed fact.

The same website also falsely claims that I wrote a poem called “Tea Leaves” that won an honorable mention at the 2014 San Francisco Book Festival. I have no association with this festival at all, nor do I have a poem with that title. My guess is that this word salad is referencing Tea & Sprockets, and perhaps, my having filmed the Enid music festival A Fling at the Springs for PEGASYS. While I did win filmmaking and academic awards in the early 2000s, I did not start winning any awards for my writing until 2015.

Artificial intelligence is even worse about getting the facts wrong about poems that I actually did write. It often invents inaccurate summaries of my poems. For example, let’s look at my poetry describing my former hometown of Enid, Oklahoma.

“East Maine Noms” is a humorous take on the East Maine railroad bridge which is notorious for the number of semi-trucks that collide with it. Instead of providing a real summary, the Bing AI hallucinates that I am writing about “local eateries.”

“Blanton-Kiowa Line” is about a real railroad line that once existed until the mid-1990s, and is not as the AI suggests “a metaphor for personal growth.” I became fascinated with Blanton, Oklahoma due to there being a large sign for the railroad stop near Oakwood Nature Park where I would play with my friends as a teenager. I did years of research about W.B. Blanton, and the Enid News & Eagle even published my article about it. This rail line no longer exists and the City of Enid has plans to convert it into a walking trail.

“Dining with Your Skeleton” was my first attempt at romanticizing Enid and it contains references to numerous historical figures connected to Enid. I wrote it while staying in a motel room in Marin County almost a decade after relocating from Oklahoma, and not in one of “Enid’s quiet corners.”

Searching my real name, married or maiden, brings up wholly inaccurate information about me in the summary at the top of the page. It links me to people who are not my relatives, places me in career fields I have no experience in, and often confuses me with other persons of the same name.

The Enid newspaper referred to Grey as “Enid’s own musician Grey” in a headline about one of my many film projects featuring Grey, yet somehow AI confuses me for him. While I did play second violin for five years in school orchestra in the 1990s, have dabbled in electronic music, and I do love music, I could hardly be classified as a musician let alone known for it. It scrapes an and describes Liquid Wind as a company instead of an extreme sports documentary. Google’s AI has also erroneously decided that I worked a visual effects artist on The Lord of the Rings.

Of the major search engines, Bing’s automated summary of my career seems to be the most accurate and well sourced, but Google gets easily verifiable facts completely wrong. It even second guesses information printed in the legitimate newspapers where I have tried to clear up frequent confusion about myself and Diana Lang, the local realtor, stating that we “appear to be the same person.” We are two distinct people both notable in Vallejo for vastly different accomplishments within the community.

My net worth is absolutely nobody’s business, yet sites like this exist to give people financial facts that are outright lies. I am not and have never been a millionaire, let alone a multi-billionaire as this website would have you believe.

The point is artificial intelligence or random websites claiming to have inside information about personality types, birthdays, astrology, or net worth are often presenting inaccurate information about public figures. Always go to the source or verified third party news outlets for your research. If they can misrepresent me in their automatic summaries even with so much accurate source material available, they are likely doing the same thing with information about everyone else.

And besides, our water supply is much more important, than receiving a microwave instant summary about whatever subject you are looking up on a search engine.

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