More AI on Kurt Vonnegut

Jay Karamales, the co-author of The Hunting Falcon, asked Copilot AI the same question. I pick up his narrative here:

“It replied (in its long-winded way, which I excerpt here):

“No—they could not have known each other.

Buddecke died in 1918, and Vonnegut wasn’t born until 1922.”

Fair enough. Then, with hopes soaring, I asked:

“So their lives were not contiguous and they didn’t know each other; but were they related?”

Sadly, its answer:

“No—they were not related.

They belonged to entirely different families, countries, and social contexts, with no known genealogical or historical connection.”

Oh well. I guess, like all but about 15 of the Earth’s population, it has not read our book. I will ask Grok the same questions when I get home tonight.”

Anyhow, he (Jay Karamales) posted his comments to the previous blog post, but I (Chris Lawrence) choose to report in a separate blog post, seeing how AI is supposed to replace us all and take over the world.

Part of its (Copilot) confusion is that it assumed Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Almost certainly Hans Buddecke knew Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. He was a regular visitor to the Albert Lieber household and came to the United States according to his account with the encouragement of tall beauty Edith Lieber. She married Kurt Vonnegut in November 1913 and had their first child (the famous scientist, but not as famous as his younger brother) Bernard Vonnegut on 29 August 1914. Hans Buddecke never met Bernard Vonnegut, having started in trip back to Germany in early August, but he certainly knew of him.

That is the problem. AI does not read books. Books are protected in the U.S. by a 70-year copyright law. So anything that has been written about in the last 70 years is not available to AI unless it has been reposted in some form on the internet. Most authors have other things to do with their time (other than service AI).

AI also does not go to the archives either. Apparently does not search the on-line newspaper files, which would show that Lieber and Buddecke are related and working together in 1914. In particular is the article in The Indianapolis News, Friday 31 July 1914 “Birdman Flies over Western Part of City”, which identified “Johann Buddecke” and “…his uncle, Albert Lieber.”

Christopher A. Lawrence

Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.

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One comment

Clinton Reilly

June 18, 2026 / 4:35 pm Reply

Yes, the copyright gap in AI’s knowledge is a major problem for it. I have repeatedly found this when asking AI about major military history events. For example, most recently the Battle of the Coral Sea in WW2. There are many excellent books it is simply unaware of them and it cannot access the archives, so its responses suffer accordingly.

It also has an annoying habit of “correcting” my emails. Most recently it has been changing “AI” to “as”!