In 2012, as a 33-year-old staff writer at The American Prospect in D.C., I had the opportunity to travel around the country, looking for stories that would show how real people were connected to the decisions made by politicians inside the Beltway. On a trip to Colorado, while interviewing voters in a suburban swing district just west of Denver, I met a young couple staying in a homeless shelter who mentioned that they had previously stayed at a slightly rundown hotel, paying weekly rent, until they could no longer afford it. I had been looking for a chance to write a long narrative feature on the rise of suburban poverty during the Great Recession, and when I checked out the hotel, I found many other families living in it and in other hotels nearby.

Back in D.C., I pitched my editor and later returned to the Denver area to live in the hotel for about five weeks. I got to know the people living there—how they lost their home and what life living in a hotel was like. My article, “The Weeklies,” ran in March 2013. I remain incredibly proud of it, because it highlighted the struggle ordinary Americans were facing as the economy slowly recovered from the housing crash.

I thought of all of this recently when I came across a link to a website called In the Weights. Designed to look like a 1980s computer game, it’s a database where you can “find out whether you live on” in large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, and assigns a score based on your prominence. That’s how In the Weights frames it, anyway—a naked appeal to vanity. In reality, the site shows you how much of your work has been used to train AI chatbots. I found that a lot of mine was: I was given a “strength” score of 735, which put me in the top 5 percent.

So I turned to the chatbots themselves for details. Some would not divulge which works of mine were used in their training, but Gemini cited my work at The American Prospect and TNR:

Your Reporting on Class and Poverty: I have access to the core concepts and reporting from your career, such as your pieces for The American Prospect covering the shredded social safety net, food insecurity among military families, and health disparities, as well as your recent coverage of working-class politics and economic anxiety for The New Republic.

There have been more than a few times lately when I wanted to throw my laptop across the room, drop everything, and go live in the woods. This was one of them.

“The Weeklies” wasn’t just a 7,000-word article; it was months of work. In fact, you could say I’d begun work on it even before I’d formed the idea. I had spent most of my twenties in low-paid, low-level journalism jobs, building up the reporting and writing expertise to even contemplate tackling such a story. Journalism jobs famously do not pay well: Into my mid-thirties, by the time I was writing long narratives, my salary remained $50,000. I struggled to pay rent in D.C. while also repaying my student loans from journalism graduate school. (I am still making $611.31 monthly payments and likely will continue to do so until I retire.)

I don’t want to throw too much of a pity party, but as someone who went to college thanks to financial aid and then borrowed to go to graduate school because I didn’t know how else to move into my desired career, I never had family money or connections to …