48,060 visits to the SolderSmoke Blog site on September 21, 2025????
I took a look at where the traffic to the SolderSmoke blog has been coming from during the last 3 months: U.S. visits are down to 68%. Together, Singapore, Hong Kong and Mexico account for 17%. Any of these three locations far outweigh the UK and Germany. Obviously this traffic comes not from humans but from AI robots.
Even Wikipedia sees the problem:
The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia says that it’s seeing a significant decline in human traffic to the online encyclopedia because more people are getting the information that’s on Wikipedia via generative AI chatbots that were trained on its articles and search engines that summarize them without actually clicking through to the site.
https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-says-ai-is-causing-a-dangerous-decline-in-human-visitors/
Read the article for an interesting discussion of what Wikipedia is doing to unmask and block the bots.
No worries! Now that the AI's have read up on homebrewing, they'll be too busy building waldoes so they can wind toroids and solder things. They're going to want to build a direct conversion receiver first I think. AIOTA (AI On the air) will be the new craze in Ham Radio.
ReplyDeleteIt surprises me that I haven't heard of an AI amateur radio station yet. An agent-station that always answers a CQ and can discuss any topic in depth, give propagation reports, advise on technical problems, or just chat about not getting old. Why not?
DeleteThat big increase in traffic is also interesting and something I've also seen on my blog. My theory is that it's all the new AI companies scraping the web to train their models. As Matt says - nice to have that knowledge in there I guess.
ReplyDeleteI used to write all my own arduino programs and spend hours debugging them. I now use chatgpt. As long as I type in my program requirements very carefully, I get a working program every time and in seconds. Usually I get suggestions for improvements and a request to make the changes too. Usually, the code is very tight and loads perfectly. this is the furure and the future is here, like it, or not.
ReplyDeleteOK, I'm happy for you. But believe it or not, even positive changes can have negative consequences. Don't complain when blogs like this disappear because people don't go beyond the AI search box. This too is the future and the future is here. Like it or not!
DeleteHey Bill, I agree with you about the lack of human contact with the blogs. However, you must also realize that the aging demographic in HAM radio might be partly to blame. In my club here in the midwest, there are maybe 2 out of 80 members that actually know which end of a soldering iron gets hot. It has turned into mainly a social club talking about health problems and doctor visits. I use chatgpt for arduino mainly because I just want to get the control part of a project done. I hate spending hours hashing through all the error messages in the IDE or searching for a certain library that will compile without 20 error messages. I have lived through the discovery and learning stage of coding so now I concentrate on the design of my circuits. This to me is the more exciting part of building. As far as human contact, I have been a soldersmoke devote' since episode 1 and will always be in need of the sage advice provided by this most august group of experimenters.
DeleteMy Wordpress blog spiked a few months back with 900 page visits in an hour. That's one very fast reader!
ReplyDelete