More Thoughts On Robot Writers and The Tech Dystopia

by Michael Sahno | Nov 14, 2022 | Articles | 0 comments

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post here called When Will the Robot Overlords Replace Us? Apparently, I’m fairly obsessed with this stuff, because every time I come here and empty my brain, it seems to come up again.

Today is no different. Part of the reason, of course, is that I’m posting on my own website, which is a WordPress site with frequently-updated Wordfence protection. If that’s all gobbledygook to you, don’t feel bad: I can barely keep up with the updates myself.

Lately, it feels like every login to my site is a minefield of some sort. Wordfence lets me know that I need to update plugins, check my firewall….am I living inside a computer yet?

And On Another Subject

I know, that was a terrible segue. But WordPress doesn’t like it when I go for more than 300 words without a subhead, so I’m just going to preempt the possibility with a completely pointless one. (How meta is this post getting now?) Also, Wordfence tells me that my site gets attacked between 12 million and 18 million times each hour, for a total of around a quarter to a half million times every day, on average. So that makes me feel dandy, too.

And, as if that weren’t enough, about every five or six updates, it seems, WordPress decides to revamp its Divi builder, which I use to create the basic layout for the posts. When Divi gets an update, I have to learn something about something. Yeah, I’m that good of a programmer.

What the Heck, How About Another?

Oof, these subheads are going downhill fast. Anyway, now I know why most heart attacks occur on Mondays. Last week’s post had a weird, random-looking bar right across the middle, which I couldn’t figure out how to fix if I wanted to post on Monday, as opposed to Tuesday. Much to my amazement, I figured out how to fix it right before posting this week’s blog.

I feel like I’m still a tech novice, but at least the robots haven’t taken over yet!

That reminds me: today’s topic (not that anything can save this post at this point, Yoast SEO and Readability scores notwithstanding). What got me back on this robot overlords track again was a sponsored ad on my Instagram feed: evidently, someone thought it was a good idea to advertise “blog posts written by bots” to me.

I did not respond with kindness. Sorry/not sorry.

And now, I’m going to go back to my current assignment from one of my clients, which is all about machine learning and Python programming, and…ah, never mind.

Happy Monday, friends. Please don’t have a heart attack today.

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