“Now here’s the man for whom the news wouldn’t be the news without the news, Heeeere’s Dicky.” (Dan Rowan in Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In)
The laugh-in was a feature of my teenage years; it ran from 1968 until 1973. But I digress; here’s the news and it’s about AI. At the end of January there had been 1,800 visitors here in the past twenty-eight days and, key point, participation from Poland did not register.
Only about a month later there are 4,000 visitors, 15% of whom are in Poland. The United States has increased from 16% to 43% and I blame AI.
UK readership has declined from 60% to 28% but this is all smoke and mirrors. Poland has become a leader in AI, joining the US, and I guess this means it has facilities for harvesting internet content. Elon Musk, you may have read, has warned that “artificial intelligence is ”one of the biggest threats” to humanity. This is because humans face the threat of being outsmarted by machines for the first time.” (The Economic Times)
“The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement on Wednesday, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies.
The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.” (The New York Times, 27th December 2023)
Of course I am outraged that the content of my website should be plundered; on the other hand I am flattered. The only certain conclusion I can draw is that the data from Google Analytics is flawed and is meaningless as a measure of real readers.