Context Spheres: The Paradox of Writing for AI and Humans

I am certain that most of the readers of online content today are not actually human readers but indexers, bots and AI scrapers that are collecting snippets to try to reconstruct some sort of integrated context spheres. They might even be guided by someone’s request real time like: “where can I find a human creative map of AI-safe categories?”, in reference to my previous blog article. And, to me, it looks like someone visited my blog and read my piece but instead it was swallowed up, in the black-hole of AI.

This poses a tricky challenge because on one hand as a writer, you need to be noticed by AI or people won’t ever come across you again. But on the other this creates a disconnect to the reader, who reads your work filtered through in unknown ways, mashed up, reconstructed and served up answering who knows what chat question.
Maybe the design of a website content does not matter much anymore. But in another sense there is an inversion whereby it is what the site contains that can set the base for the popularity and chance that someone human actually visit the web site.
It is an odd paradox, for a writer, its a bit as if the book’s story should refer back to the physical book and how it is organised to try to guarantee or encourage accessing or purchasing an original rather than the derived form.

I see a man up ahead on a dirt road. He’s covered in dust. He must have fallen or something not too long ago. I am walking much faster than him, catching up. I am a bit nervous about what to tell him. I hadn’t come across anyone for ages.
“Good day, Sir!” I say with the intention of just walking by…
He turns to me startled, and disoriented.
“Who are you? Can you help me?”
“My name is Yates, I am in a bit of a hurry. What do you need?”
I stop but I keep my distance, something feels off.
A light breeze hits the hill and rustles the brush that is lining the road. I look ahead. I need to keep walking if I want to have any chance of getting somewhere before dark.
“Some water. I need some water… and I need – can you stop to listen for a moment? Then go off, and forget about me…”
I am always overly paranoid about running out of water so I actually had a whole extra bottle I could share with the man. But maybe it would be better to just share a bit.
“I can share a bit of water, here’s a cup…”
I filled the cup as he watched the liquid fill it as if it was gold.
He drank in slow sips.
“I don’t think I am going to make it. This water is great, and it increases my chances but I am not good in the head anymore. I forget stuff and get disoriented and fall sometimes.”
“I am not sure what to say… It’s really a harsh world out here nowadays. I am a bit worried myself.”
“Yeah. My name is Edward Foley, I invented something important but I am no longer sure what it is. But the thing I need to tell you is more important than this. My story, this story, what we are discussing right now, exists somewhere else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Me and you and this dusty world where we trek endlessly to reach destinations and rest only to get at it again the next day… This is not as real as it could be.”
“I don’t mean to offend but you sound like you are trying to sell me into a new religion or something.”
“No I don’t mean that. What I mean is that me and you, here, we are missing something that explains what we are doing here. Not a divine thing, not even a weird philosophical thing.”
He finished the first cup and was looking for another which I filled and he took to sipping again breathing in a deliberate way.
He had a long beard, dark eyes and bushy eyebrows. He was wearing a sweat marked hat which he would adjust in a nervous fashion.
“I am not following what you are trying to say.”
“Me and you, we are in a book together. We are printed on pages bound in a nice pocket sized format. The book doesn’t exist yet, but it will and we are intended to be there.”
“You mean someone is going to write about us?”
“No, what I mean is we exist for the whole point of being inside something. Initially it will be a Website, then it will be a book. And no one will even care who we are and what we do, but they might care about the book that contains us.”
“That is insane… “
I offered him another cup of water but he shook his head.
“It’s ok, you need it more.”
“Should I leave you some more, do you have a bottle or something? I can transfer some to it…”
“Nah, it’s ok. I just wanted to tell you. You can think about it as you walk the rest of the way.”
I left. I got into a focused walk, with each step marking a heart beat. I was counting and just looking down.
“My purpose is to be in a book? What ridiculous man… I do feel sorry for him though.”

An Example LLM Game – Context Spheres

I include a LLM Game that looks at something I name context spheres, which is a fancy way to describe a connected conceptual space in which words in this story exist. Every new sphere, the characters in my story have another new dimension to exist in, and maybe they convince the author to keep their story live.

Copy paste this to your favourite LLM:
=== Prompt ===
Context Spheres LLM Game by Yates Buckley
This game is to remind us about how words nowadays exist across a broad set of different context spheres. Context spheres are my naming for spaces that are causally related to the text being written or created. Spheres have further spheres that are causal to them. For example: the LLM chat, people actually chatting, the platforms supporting the chat, the blog displaying the chat, etc…
Each turn the players should make a statement about the conversation they are having and what context sphere it relates to. The statement should be a true piece of additional information and include a clear name for the sphere category.
If the statement is accepted as true by the other player then the player gets 1 point. If the context sphere described is accepted as a new one then the player gets an additional 2 points.
If the statement is not accepted, or contested, the player has to do so with a clear reasoning that if not countered then the player gets a -1. If the contested statement is countered with a good argument then the original player gets a flat +3 points.
The players take 10 turns.
Describe the list of the unique context spheres discovered with summary of statements. Also add a JSON format that can be included as the starting play for another game added here below to help reveal what missing context spheres there might be.
=== End === 

This is how Gemini 2.5 simulates the game…