AI Bots from Lanzhou and Ashburn are my fans

I was feeling rather pleased this week when Google Analytics showed a 64% traffic jump on my blog, venkatarangan.com. For a few moments, I thought my posts had finally become popular. Then I noticed two unfamiliar cities in the top eight: Lanzhou and Ashburn.

The list read like this: Chennai, Lanzhou, Bengaluru, Singapore, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, and Ashburn.

Chennai and Bengaluru made sense. But Lanzhou? I had to Google it. Turns out, it’s in China. Ashburn, USA, I later discovered, is not exactly a tourist hotspot—it’s “Data Center Alley.” Perplexity AI kindly confirmed that both are home to large AI server farms.

So yes, the 64% growth in readership was real—just not human. On the bright side, I’ll take comfort in knowing even AI bots have taste and seem to enjoy my blog.

Footnote

After I shared this post on social media, a friend asked, “How do you create the comic strips?”.

Here’s what I told him: This one was made with ChatGPT. I don’t jump straight to image generation, though. I first write a detailed description (you can see the actual prompt below) and ask ChatGPT to turn that into a proper image prompt. Once I’m sure it has understood what I have in mind, I use that to generate the image. AI still needs a bit of babysitting, especially when it comes to getting the text right.

Usually, I experiment with ChatGPT, Google Gemini (Nano Banana), and ChatLLM, which connects to several other models. In this case, Gemini and ChatLLM struggled with the text, while Microsoft Copilot surprisingly got it right on the first try. Both Copilot and ChatGPT gave good results, but I ended up using ChatGPT’s version.

Please rewrite this prompt for effective image generation. incorporate best practices that works with nano banana In my wordpress blog at venkatarangan.com, suddenly in google analytics I am seeing a lot of traffic from Lanzhou and Ashburn. the spike in traffic is 64% from previous year. The order of the top 8 cities are: Chennai, Lanzhou, Bengaluru, Singapore, Coimbatore, Hyderabad, Ashburn. Imagine and create a funny meme. it can be a meme that communicates the entire message of how I was delighted to see users spike in terms of visitors to my blog at venkatarangan.com. that's when i noticed it was odd to see Lanzhou in China and Ashburn in USA, in the top 8 cities from where traffic was coming to my site. even Ashburn I can discount, but a city from China that I haven't heard as the second largest source of traffic to my blog in english and tamil, was sure to be suspicious and indicating ai traffic. asking perplexity and it confirmed my suspicion that ashburn was called "Data Center Alley" which huge AI data centres and similarly true for Lanzhou, and the traffic spike I am seeing is likely to AI bots Something like this: Panel 1: I see huge spike in traffic for venkatarangan.com Panel 2: I notice Lanzhou (China) and Ashburn in top 8 cities Panel 3: I am disappointed because these two are cities where large AI data centers are present. Panel 4: AI Bots are happy and shouting "Thanks for the free training data"