I just read about a small company’s website being taken down by OpenAI’s bot. How can an AI bot crash a website?

Oh, I read about that too! The bot tried to download the company’s entire website, including hundreds of thousands of images. That’s a lot of requests all at once!

Wow, that sounds like a DDoS attack. But why would the bot do that?

It wasn’t intentional. OpenAI’s bot was crawling the website to collect data, like product images and descriptions. But since the company didn’t have the right setup to stop bots, it couldn’t handle the massive traffic.

Wait, they didn’t set it up to stop bots? How do you even do that?

You use something called a 'robots.txt' file. It’s a small file on your website that tells bots what they’re allowed to access. For example, you can tell OpenAI’s bot, called GPTBot, to stay away.

So, if they didn’t have that file, the bot thought it could take everything?

Exactly. Bots assume it’s okay to crawl a site unless they’re told not to. But here’s the problem: small businesses often don’t know about robots.txt or how to set it up properly.

That sounds so unfair! Shouldn’t bots ask for permission first?

They should, but right now it’s more like ‘opt-out’ instead of ‘opt-in.’ Companies like OpenAI only follow the rules if the website has robots.txt configured correctly. Otherwise, they scrape data freely.

What about the company? Did they fix the problem?

Yeah, they added a robots.txt file and used a tool called Cloudflare to block unwanted bots. But they still don’t know what data was taken, and they might have a huge cloud hosting bill because of all the traffic.

That’s rough. And they can’t even contact OpenAI about it?

Nope. OpenAI hasn’t responded to them. It’s also hard for small companies to track exactly what data was taken or to get it removed.

This makes me think of those movies where the small guy gets pushed around by a big company. What can small businesses do to protect themselves?

They need to set up robots.txt, monitor their site for unusual traffic, and use tools like Cloudflare to block bots. But it’s not easy, especially if they don’t know what to look for.

That seems like a lot of work for small teams. Shouldn’t there be better rules for this?

Definitely. Right now, it’s a bit of a gray area. Companies like OpenAI need to be more transparent, and there should be better ways for small businesses to protect their data without so much effort.

It’s crazy how something as cool as AI can also cause these kinds of problems.

Yeah, AI is amazing, but it’s a tool. How we use it—and regulate it—really matters.