Tag Archives: technology

Are Bots Chomping at my Blog?

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Does my blog have bot-ulism?

I know I have talked about this before; my stats are booming. In January I had 7.7K views and 7.4K visitors. To put those stats in perspective, prior to this a typical month for me would be around 600 views. The most popular post in January was: https://stopdraggingthepanda.com/2019/02/14/indignatron-b-as-seen-on-tv/

Lots of views, but no likes, no comments and the visitors were mostly from The United States, Singapore and Hong Kong with the majority being from The United States. And it’s still continuing.

So I dug deeper. WordPress stats lists not only countries but also cities where the viewers are located. Apparently I am very popular in North Bergen, New Jersey; 4.7K views in January alone. Before this I did not know North Bergen existed. Although I did spend a summer in Bradley Beach, New jersey working as a student in The La Reine Bradley Hotel. But that’s another story.

North Bergen apparently has a population of approximately 60,000. According to Google AI, it “thrives on a diverse economy heavily anchored by transportation, logistics and warehousing”. This doesn’t explain why I am so popular in North Bergen. The answer could be , of course, that I am not popular at all in North Bergen and yes, there’s a bot chomping on my blog.

On the other hand, if some of you nice people in North Bergen, New Jersey are actually reading my blog, hey, make a comment, say hello! I’m waiting.

Could AI write a Novel

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A more relevant question would be : Could AI write a good novel? And the answer would be: Probably not!

Novels aside, I have always wanted to draw cartoons but I don’t have the drawing skills so when WordPress added the ability to generate images using AI, I thought this is my chance. A fat chance it turned out to be . The instruction I gave for the image above was AI writing a novel. Hard to tell what that robot is doing but it has some pencils nearby in a cup, one has an eraser, very old school!

For a recent post, which I have since deleted, I put in an instruction to generate an image of Donald Trump leading a flock of sheep off a cliff. This what AI generated:

Not bad but Donald appears to be leading the sheep away from the cliff’s edge and what is that sheep’s head doing on Donald’s lapel? And that electrical pole in the background, is it connected to anything?

So I tried keeping it simple and just wrote “sycophants” as an instruction. These folk turned up:

I don’t know…is it a birthday party?

So I tried the opening line of my favourite joke….A giraffe walks into a bar…

Well that’s a little better, it’s a giraffe and a bar. Of course you all know the punchline.

AI can generate the obvious but can it create humour? To use a music analogy, AI is the equivalent of a cover band, it can at best produce a copy of what has gone before. But can it take what has gone before, throw it up in the air and create something original?

I for one…….