Theft

If you're wont to cast an eye down my blog's sidebar there, to keep tabs on my Google Pageviews over the the last 30 days,  then you're possibly wondering how the hell my regular 70-100,000 views has rocketed up to 760,000 (and counting).

Is it that I've suddenly become immensely popular?

Nice idea, but no. Something else is going on.

I don't know for sure, but I have a theory. It's related to those posts that, according to the blogger software, are the most popular this month.

Now, Libertarian Sus's posts are nothing if not entertaining, but she hasn't written here since 2009. Equally, Julian Pistorius hasn't stood for Libertarianz in Mt Albert since 2009. And the debate about the Pike River mine being open-cast takes us way back to 2010.

So what's going on? 

It's not because readers are beating a computer path to those allegedly wildly popular posts, good as they are. It's because computers are cutting a track there. I think what's going on is related to AI. Specifically, I reckon it's AI bots "scraping" this site to hoover up text for one or other Large Language Model.

In other words, my words will become theirs. That is: they're being stolen.

It's not just this blog either, it seems to be every blog using the Blogger software (which, if you weren't aware, is a Google service). So for instance—looking around just the local blogosphere—Lindsay Mitchells blog, which is criminally under-visited, has also leapt from its regular 30-50,000 pageviews (as assessed by Google) to more than triple that. Eric Crampton's Offsetting Behaviour seems to have a similar thing happening. And although Liberty Scott doesn't have a Pageview counter on his front page, I reckon if he looked under the hood he'd find something similar: i.e., that Google et al are stealing our words to sell them as their own.

And there's bugger all we can do about it.