AI Vampires Visit My Blog

Today is my 20th anniversary of blogging. I wrote my first blog post on September 8, 2006, on my blog “Filter & Splice,” which is on the Blogger platform.

 

Filter & Splice still exists in all its pink and green glory. It reminds me of a watermelon.

When I started blogging, I never thought I’d still be at it 20 years, and multiple blogs, later.

I blogged at Filter & Splice for just over a year, then created The Woo Woo Teacup Journal on WordPress, which I ran from October 23, 2007 until November 23, 2014. At that point, I started Without Obligation, which didn’t begin with that title. My first blog post here was on November 11, 2014 and I was blogging under my name. I switched the title to Without Obligation around 2018.

As a historian, can I just say that I love that every blog post is automatically dated? It makes tracking down the history of my blogs fairly easy.

Throughout these 20 years, I have started 10 blogs, many of them short-term project blogs. For a full list of my blogs, see my Websites page.

When I began blogging in 2006, blogs were in their heyday. Because it was easy to set up a blog and Facebook was only rolled out to the masses in 2006, it seemed like everyone had a blog to share some aspect of their lives. Bloggers were encouraged to link to each other and keep blogrolls of their favorite blogs. We’d share memes, which weren’t the clever, jokey images we know of as memes today. Instead, they were questions or topics bloggers were encouraged to write about and share with other bloggers, helping to link us together and grow the blogosphere.

As Facebook grew in popularity, it killed personal blogging for a broad swath of people. It was much easier to share life snippets and photos on Facebook, and there was no pressure to post on a schedule or maintain a website, so people shuttered their blogs and moved over.

Twitter, which was called a microblogging platform, was founded in 2006-07, so that also siphoned bloggers off to a new platform.

Long-form writing on the web seemed to go dormant for a time, but it wasn’t dead. People just didn’t want to have to maintain a website. (Personally, it is a pain to constantly have to update plugins and weblinks on my site, so I get it.) This led to the rise of sites like Medium (2012) and Substack (2017), blogging platforms that allow people to write without having to maintain the site infrastructure. Sites like this also provided a way for writers to more easily build a following and earn income from their work. Readers can subscribe to specific writers and receive an email when a writer has published something new.

This move to email subscriptions and other platforms that support them (like Ghost, Beehiiv, MailChimp, and Buttondown) is a response to the flood of content available on the web. It’s too difficult to continually check in on our favorite writers by visiting their websites. With an email subscription, new content comes right to you. (Before email subscriptions, RSS readers were popular for tracking new blog posts. Though they aren’t used as much now, they still exist.)

This was the milieu of blogging and long-form writing on the web until generative AI entered the picture on November 30, 2022 via the release of OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT. I have written so often about AI through the course of work that that date is seared in my memory.

To train the large language models behind ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, like Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini, the companies developing this form of AI scraped the web of every piece of content they could access. That includes anything that was under copyright, including my blogs. (https://maryewarner.com/2023/04/22/my-websites-are-being-used-to-train-ai-is-that-a-good-thing/)

Online creators had no say in this scraping and no compensation. It reminds me of the cheesy knock-off blogs that came during the height of blogging – the ones that “reproduced” (a.k.a. stole) entire posts from other blogs to drive traffic to themselves for ad revenue. They’d often link back to the original post, as though that made the practice okay, which is how I discovered my posts were used for this purpose. I didn’t like that practice, and I certainly don’t appreciate billionaire tech bros wholesale scraping the entire web and my blogs for generative AI that’s being pushed on the rest of us, whether we want to use it or not. (All with the promise to take everyone’s job and destroy the world, no less. ‘Cause that’s what we all begged for, surely.)

Because the large language models behind generative AI require constant sources of original content, AI companies have also turned to books. Amazon is outright destroying books in its quest to vacuum up all human knowledge. https://www.snopes.com/news/2026/09/01/amazon-destroying-books-ai/ – (Ask me, a book lover and historian, how I feel about this and you are likely to hear a boatload of swear words.)

It’s against this backdrop of content scraping and the insertion of AI into internet search results that I noticed something curious with my blog stats at the beginning of 2026.

My blog hasn’t ever been read by lots of people. For years, I typically saw 30-40 views per day, with 60 being a good day. So, when my blog was suddenly seeing well over 100 views per day at the beginning of the year, I took notice.

 

In February, views actually spiked to 250 on a couple of days.

I couldn’t figure out why my stats were elevated. Then it dawned on me that maybe the traffic was coming from AI bots, artificially making my blog look more popular than it is. I have a handful of posts that are consistently hit by people, so I suspected these were still getting human traffic, but I started seeing a long string of posts in my stats that had only 1 view. These are posts that likely had a handful of views within a day or two of my posting them, then they disappeared into oblivion. Until AI came along and dredged them back up. This really isn’t human behavior. It has to be AI bots causing a sudden spike and long stretch of elevated views.

Just as suddenly, my views collapsed, dropping from 140 views to 35 views between August 17 and 18, 2026. It was like AI vampires had attacked my blog and sucked up everything I had written. I had gotten accustomed to seeing elevated stats for months, so it was disappointing to see them drop, but it was also a relief. Maybe the AI vampires were done visiting my blog.

 

Alas! After 9 days of normal stats, they jumped once again. The AI vampires were back.

 

I much prefer people to read my posts than to have AI do so. For as much as the billionaire tech bros want to believe their AI bots are this close to achieving human intelligence, they aren’t, not by a long shot. With their algorithmic simulation of thought, they aren’t my intended audience. You, human reader, are.

Other websites have taken to blocking AI chatbots from searching or scraping their content. WordPress, the platform this blog sits on, actually has a setting to discourage search engines from indexing a site. I’ve grown so weary of stats being driven by the AI vampires that I’m considering activating this setting.

What do you think? Should I prevent search engines from indexing Without Obligation? You should be able to get here by typing my web address, maryewarner.com, into the search bar. Plus, if you subscribe to my blog, you will get an email when I post something new (typically 2-4 times per month).

You can subscribe to my blog using the Subscription box at the top. (Sorry, I don’t use those annoying pop-ups to nag you into subscribing. 😉 )

When I began blogging in 2006, I never imagined that AI would become so invasive that I’d be tempted to prevent my blog from being found online. This is a shame because I still love the format, but the internet is an ever-shifting place. I guess I’ve just got to roll with it.