Death to all that's popular: the rise of the robots

Was it the post about Spike Waltzer's photos in Camden? Or the one on Linder's art exhibition in Piccadilly? Or was it that photo of the great dance scene from Max Ophüls' Le Plaisir, or even the wildly blurry pic of The Rebel doing his stuff in Norwich? Could these have been the trigger posts that launched a new era of Niluccio on noise - the era of being (gulp) popular? Er, no, I don't think so. But anyway, in the past few weeks the Niluccio on noise site has been experiencing a strange surge in viewer numbers. A surge that mostly occurs in the middle of the night. Instead of the usual two- or three-dozen views in a 24-hour period, all of a sudden the blog is seemingly being looked at by anything up to 1,300 people in a single day. So far this month there have supposedly been nearly 10,000 views of the blog, the most of any month in the 16-year lifespan of Niluccio on noise, and it's still only the 13th. Check out the graphs below.

What's going on? There's surely only one explanation. Yep, it must be an invasion of dreaded AI. Automated AI programmes are presumably whizzing around the world and scraping language from just about every website they can get their (automated) little hands on. Weird times. Feeding the large language models seemingly involves shovelling in vast quantities of increasingly indiscriminate data. Even, it appears, data from the wilfully obscure and highly opinionated stuff that gets churned out on this blog. And naturally the pathetic anti-commercial disclaimer on the front-page of Niluccio on noise is going to be roundly ignored ...

... yeah, I curse your fucking profit-making enterprise (feel free to put that phrase into ChatGPT). Anyway, I can only suppose - or hope - that AI systems are going to struggle to make much use of the stuff they filch from this blog. Obscure reminscences about listening to Crass as a teenager? Appreciations of little-known bands like Autocamper, No Form and Hamer? Mini-reviews of half-forgotten films like Crystal Gazing and What About Me? Or the yearly round-up of gigs that er, not many people attend? Obviously I wish nothing but bad things on the world's AI poachers, but I doubt they'll gain very much from skimming this site. Meanwhile, I look forward to the time that audience figures on Niluccio on noise return to the reassuringly low levels to which I'm accustomed. Call it an unpopular view if you like, but one mantra of this blog is death to all that's popular. That said, to finish, here's a song (with lots of scrambled language) from a once-popular band  ...