Are you here for the content or for me?

I noticed, the other day, that in August my blog began to see a dramatic spike in traffic (hi, China). Google analytics allows you see the origin of that traffic (hi, China). Many thousands of views of each post, after a previous average of several hundreds of views (hi, China). 

I don't think that my blog suddenly speaks to more than a handful of Chinese residents and citizens (and you are always welcome, here), yet suddenly that country is this blog's main source of views.

This is a screenshot of a right-now scenario.

The best conclusion I can draw is that AI bot farms in China are training themselves to...what? Write about gardens? Write about food? Foraging? Cats? Canadians? Be me? 

It's an interesting age we live in. For content creators - not to be pedantic, but that would be people who create content as opposed to those who use it (writers vs readers, photographers vs viewers, recipe developers vs cooks, etc.) - AI is to original research or creativity, to reporting and to documenting, what digital media was to most print publications, which went out of business.

If you google "what killed newspapers and print media" the first result you will find at the top of your screen is the AI summary. And many, many people will not go further than that summary, not even to the first cursory, algorithm-prompted search result. Nor will they visit the linked citations in the AI summary. 

Jeff Bezos was right: We humans are inherently lazy. That is why he is a gazillionaire. (Want something? Click.)

All of which is to say, the balloon plant, the hairy balls, the southern African milkweed, the Gomphocarpus physocarpus, are glorious in the last days autumn of this tiny terrace.

And it means that if you are looking for the answer to something, anything, that someone once took a great deal of time to write, based on a great deal of real life experience or real research (how to move citrus trees indoors, for example), the chances are increasingly good that you will never reach their work, because AI found it first, summarized it, and spat it out at the top of the page for you. It also found some inaccurate work, and smooshed that in there, too, because AI doesn't really know how to move citrus trees indoors, or what a chanterelle really looks like; rather, it relies on everything that has ever been written on the subject, and cherry picks. 

I don't really know what that huge spike in traffic means. I don't like it, and I have been in some existential despair about the fate of the truth for some time. In general, I mean. It is very hard to tell what is real. And obviously my concern isn't about citrus trees overwintering indoors.

For me, the only thing between us and the abyss is true journalism, which is increasingly marginalized, because it takes time, training, and money. To me, journalism is simple. Real people reporting real things, without bias. That's it. 

So go give it some money. Now.