I’m not that popular

A sudden spike in my blog views

This weekend, when I logged into my WordPress account, I was startled to see that my blog views had skyrocketed overnight. My usual numbers are anywhere from 50 to 150. On Saturday I logged 27, 768.

This wasn’t due to the fantastic post that day because, despite all those views, the number of likes and comments was distinctly average. The number of visitors was only marginally higher. Since this post is number 3,538, that meant a few people had looked at every single post on this site at least six times, on the same day!

There is a simple answer of course. My blog has not been visited by people, suddenly interested in life on the Big Island. It’s been scoured by AI scrapers, which harvest information, copyrighted or not, for training the various AI models. This is nothing new. Tech companies have been gathering data from everyone on the web for years. AI training is just a boost in the scale of this behavior. But rest assured, it’s all for our benefit. It’s so that those AI models will be able to help us out even better than they do now. And because it’s for our benefit, we shouldn’t even think about asking the tech companies to pay for our work harvested in this way.

Now, like most of us, I haven’t read the multi-page terms of use of these companies. However, I strongly suspect that if I was to use any tech company’s copyrighted material for my use, without paying for it, I would soon be visited by their legal department, and treated the way a lame chicken is treated by a pack of hungry wolves.

Food for thought.

Posted for Bushboy’s Last on the Card. See more here.

25 thoughts on “I’m not that popular”

  1. kzmcb's avatarkzmcb

    Oh Graham, I completely agree with your final comment. And AI accessing my information doesn’t sit easily with me, nor using AI for any purpose at this stage, believing that the whole concept needs a bit more thought about consequences. Aaaarrrggghh.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Graham's avatarGraham Post author

      I’m not totally against AI. There are lots of plusses. I was reading just the other day where an AI stethoscope can detect dangerous heart diseases in just 15 seconds! My beef is that AI companies just take copyrighted material to train there models and will then use the end product to put those people out of work.

      Like

  3. bushboy's avatarbushboy

    That’s a wow Graham. I wonder if you took and used one of your own photos from another “stealers” site, would they send the lawyers in to ultimately defend the indefensible?

    Thanks for joining in 😀

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Graham's avatarGraham Post author

      I don’t think they use what they glean to pass off as their own work. It’s to buff up their AI models. Ultimately, AI might use that input to generate it’s own version, but try proving that in a court of law!

      Liked by 1 person

    1. Graham's avatarGraham Post author

      It’s not suspicious subscribers, it’s just big computers sucking up information. Basically, anything public on the internet is liable to have this happen. Goodness only knows how they found my blog, but it’s going to be three days now of more than 20,000 views.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Terri Webster Schrandt's avatarTerri Webster Schrandt

        I had to come back to let you know my stats have gone sky high since last Wednesday. Its either the Yellowstone tag and title or AI bots. I had almost 1000 views yesterday. 😳 Another reason to keep our images small. If I was a professional photographer I’d be pissed, but it doesn’t matter.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Graham's avatarGraham Post author

          It might be Yellowstone. I think AI bots would generate much bigger numbers. I was over 25,000 views for three days and views were still crazy high for the two days following that!

          Liked by 1 person

  5. The Snow Melts Somewhere's avatarThe Snow Melts Somewhere

    I average around 3 views a day, now that I’m not posting very often! My last post got 70 views. But who’s counting! I don’t really care. As for the bots, now they know all the coolest fish names and have amazing photos to go with them. At least they can’t steal your full resolution pics from your camera! But yes, it’s good that AI is fully trained in that department, tropical fish are probably amongst the most frequently asked questions!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Graham's avatarGraham Post author

      I wouldn’t mind except that the tech company’s doing this are just hugely hypocritical. They’re not doing it for the good of anyone other than themselves. They want to grab as big a share of the AI market as they can to glean as much information as they can, which translates into more income for them. I find it all very depressing.

      Liked by 1 person

  6. Marie's avatarMarie

    Interesting. I have a couple of followers I wonder about that could be doing something like this. When I do a new post, no matter what time of day, the follower likes it almost immediately, as if programed to like it rather than viewing it.. But it doesn’t have a blog and I can’t find out anything about it. I’ll have to key an eye on it.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Graham's avatarGraham Post author

      Not sure what that would be, but mine is just giant computers scouring the internet for material to improve AI models. There’s no likes or comments. It just shows up as views.

      Liked by 1 person

  7. Susanne Swanson's avatarSusanne Swanson

    That’s a lot of views! 😉 🙂 I sometimes wonder whether my own content/photos are being used without permission (not that they’re great, but still.) I recently noticed in my stats that I’m getting ‘referrals’ from the NewsBreak app and wondered how that’s possible, since I never heard of it before. One more thing I’ve decided not to worry about.

    Liked by 2 people

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