Of course, I had to start looking at my niche of Quaker websites. Yes, behind my laid-back demeanor I can be quietly competitive, so I ranked them. The count is “tokens,” which the article describes as “small bits of text used to process disorganized information — typically a word or phrase.” This is a Google AI chatbot but presumably all of these bots are scraping the same open website data.

• friendsjournal.org 1.44m
• quakerquaker.org 620k
• afsc.org 300k
• qhpress.org 290k
• westernfriend.org 230k
• nyym.org 210k
• afriendlyletter.com 160k
• pym.org 150k
• fcnl.org 140k
• quakersintheworld.org 140k
• quakerpodcast.org 130k
• quaker.org.uk 130k
• fgcquaker.org 120k
• Quaker.org 110k
• Quakerspeak.com 100k
• quakercloud.org 58k
• friendscouncil.org 39k
• quakerinfo.com 32k
• quakerinfo.org 22k
• thefriend.org 29k
• fwcc.world 12k
• fwccamericas.org 5.8k

There’s been a flurry of blog posts by Quakers typing things into ChatGPT. See Mark Pratt-Russum’s “A Quaker Pastor Asks ChatGBT to Write a Sermon” or Chuck Fager’s “Chatbot Names Top Quaker Issues; Makes Blog Obsolete?”

If the ChatGPT results sound like a rehashed Friends Journal article, as Chuck implies, well they mostly are: with Friends Journal and QuakerQuaker (huh!) accounting for as much of ChatGPT’s content as the next dozen-ranked sites put together. (Am I missing any content-rich Quaker site?)

So yes, you could type queries into a chatbot that has no idea what it’s thinking. Or you could, you know, support the Quaker media that Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, etc., are training their bots on. Real Quaker writing by real Quakers who write. I’ve long thought big tech is the biggest threat to Quaker media but now they’ve started competing against us with our own words. It’s really quite nuts.

Changing hats to wear mine as senior editor of Friends Journal. The reason our website seems to rule the roost of AI content-scraping is that we don’t have a paywall. Generous donors, mostly everyday readers, allow us to make all of our articles and QuakerSpeak videos and Quaker.org explainers free to read. Yes, chatbots are “reading” it, but so too are isolated seekers looking for a faith path and spiritual answers and stumbling on Friends Journal. Think about becoming an FJ sustaining member and at least join the free email list from the box on the homepage. I’m a bit surprised and humbled that QuakerQuaker is so high up.

Think about it: a donate to Friends Journal and QuakerQuaker will help ensure quality chatbot answers for generations to come!