From Ayer to AI

Many people are noticing a huge shift in web traffic this year. I’ve noticed it in my blog stats. Nearly all of the web’s bandwidth, sending and receiving, is occupied by AI criminals now.

Bot READS are as old as publishing, but this is the first time that bots have been the ONLY readers and the ONLY writers!

Before the web several companies counted up businesses, publishers and advertisers. NW Ayer started in the 1880s, putting out complete lists of all newspapers and magazines along with their advertising rates, viewpoints, circulation, etc. Nielsen and others did the same job for radio and TV. Kellogg served up boilerplate features for small papers and also sold a list of those papers to advertisers. Bell’s yellow pages were a general-purpose search engine for all business, and Bell made money from ads in the yellow pages.

Pre-web SEO didn’t need to survey everything a trillion times each second!

Pre-web search engines never dominated the post office or the phone system with their surveying. Like Google they were mostly in the ad business themselves, so they were already finding out who was a likely customer for advertising. They published their guides as a service to all advertisers including themselves. If everyone knew who was in business, everyone including Ayer and Bell would benefit from increased trade.

I’ve been writing this blog for 21 years, on average the same type of writing and illustrations, same quantity of items per day, so it’s a good constant baseline. For most of that time the reading pattern was steady. Hundreds of bot reads and a dozen human reads each day. This year the pattern is dramatically different. Thousands of bot reads and zero human reads.

The most significant change is on the other end. Bots do nearly all of the WRITING as well as nearly all of the READING. This part is entirely new.

I wonder if NSA is bothered by this trend. They developed the web as a Skinner box for human responses. Deepstate sends out “news” and “trends” and “politics” to shape human behavior, then gathers info about human responses to the stimuli.

When the PIGEONS are part of the same mechanism, there’s no influence or spying, no chance to cultivate “terrorists” or “subversives” who will need to be “monitored”. The machine knows how the machine will peck the levers. Humans are factored out of the equation.