OpenAI's bot crushed this seven-person company's web site 'like a DDoS attack'

AI companies cause most of traffic on forums - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42549624 - Dec 2024 (438 comments)

They really are trying to burn all their goodwill to the ground with this stuff.

The IP addresses in the screenshot are all owned by Cloudflare, meaning that their server logs are only recording the IPs of Cloudflare's reverse proxy, not the real client IPs.

Also, the logs don't show any timestamps and there doesn't seem to be any mention of the request rate in the whole article.

I'm not trying to defend OpenAI but as someone who scrapes data I think it's unfair to throw around terms "like DDOS attack" without providing basic request rate metrics. This seems to be purely based on the use of multiple IPs, which was actually caused by their own server configuration and has nothing to do with OpenAI.

Just follow the golden rule: don’t ever load any site more aggressively than you would want yours to be.

This isn’t hard stuff, and these AI companies have grossly inefficient and obnoxious scrapers.

As a site owner those pisses me off as a matter of decency on the web, but as an engineer doing distributed data collection I’m offended by how shitty and inefficient their crawlers are.

That and the fact that they're using a log file with the timestamps omitted as evidence of "how ruthelessly an OpenAI bot was accessing the site" makes the claims in the article a bit suspect.

OpenAI isn't necessarily in the clear here, but this is a low-quality article that doesn't provide much signal either way.

Now everybody calls this abuse. And a lot of it is abuse, to be fair.

Now that has been mostly blocked. Every website tries really hard to block bots (and mostly fail because Google funds their crawler millions of dollars while companies raise a stink over paying a single SWE), but it's still at the point that automated interactions with companies (through third-party services for example) are not really possible. I cannot give my credit card info to a company and have it order my favorite foods to my home every day, for example.

What AI promises, in a way, is to re-enable this. Because AI bots are unblockable (they're more human than humans as far as these tests are concerned). For companies, and for users. And that would be a way to ... put API's into people and companies again.

Back to step 1.

In years of running webcrawlers I've had very little trouble, I've had more trouble in the last year than in the past 25. (Wrote my first crawler in '99, funny my crawlers have gotten simpler over time not more complex)

In one case I found a site got terribly slow although I was hitting it at much less than 1 request per second. Careful observation showed the wheels were coming off the site and it had nothing to do with me.

There's another site that I've probably crawled in it's entirety at least ten times over the past twenty years. I have a crawl from two years ago, my plan was to feed it into a BERT-based system not for training but to discover content that is like the content that I like. I thought I'd get a fresh copy w/ httrack (polite, respects robots.txt, ...) and they blocked both my home IP addresses in 10 minutes. (Granted I don't think the past 2 years of this site was as good as the past, so I will just load what I have into my semantic search & tagging system and use that instead)

I was angry about how unfair the Google Economy was in 2013, in lines with what this blogger has been saying ever since

http://www.seobook.com/blog

(I can say it's a strange way to market an expensive SEO community but...) and it drives me up the wall that people looking in the rear view mirror are getting upset about it now.

Back in '98 I was excited about "personal webcrawlers" that could be your own web agent. On one hand LLMs could give so much utility in terms of classification, extraction, clustering and otherwise drinking from that firehose but the fear that somebody is stealing their precious creativity is going to close the door forever... And entrench a completely unfair Google Economy. It makes me sad.

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Oddly those stupid ReCAPTCHAs and Cloudflare CAPTCHAs torment me all the time as a human but I haven't once had them get in the way of a crawling project.

"As Tomchuk experienced, if a site isn’t properly using robot.txt, OpenAI and others take that to mean they can scrape to their hearts’ content."

The takeaway: check your robots.txt.

The question of how much load requests robots can reasonably generate when allowed is a separate matter.

It seems that any router or switch over 100G is extremely expensive, and often requires some paid for OS.

The pro move would be to not block these bots. Well I guess block them if you truly can't handle their throughput request (would an ASN blacklist work?)

Or if you want to force them to slow down, start sending data, but only a random % of responses are sent (so say ignore 85% of the traffic they spam you with, and reply to the others at a super low rate or you could purposely send bad data)

Or perhaps reachout to your peering partners and talk about traffic shaping these requests.

[1] https://crawlspace.dev

https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/plans/free/

It's time to level up in this arms race. Let's stop delivering html documents, use animated rendering of information that is positioned in a scene so that the user has to move elements around for it to be recognizable, like a full site captcha. It doesn't need to be overly complex for the user that can intuitively navigate even a 3D world, but will take x1000 more processing for OpenAI. Feel free to come up with your creative designs to make automation more difficult.

>“We’re in a business where the rights are kind of a serious issue, because we scan actual people,” he said. With laws like Europe’s GDPR, “they cannot just take a photo of anyone on the web and use it.”

Yes, and protecting that data was your responsibility, Tomchuck. You dropped the ball and are now trying to blame the other players.

It's one thing if a company ignores robots.txt and causes serious interference with the service, like Perplexity was, but the details here don't really add up: this company didn't have a robots.txt in place, and although the article mentions tens/hundreds of thousands of requests, they don't say anything about them being made unreasonably quickly.

The default-public accessibility of information on the internet is a net-good for the technology ecosystem. Want to host things online? Learn how.

EDIT: They're a very media-heavy website. Here's one of the product pages from their catalog: https://triplegangers.com/browse/scans/full-body/sara-liang-.... Each of the body-pose images is displayed at about 35x70px but is served as a 500x1000px image. It now seems like they have some cloudflare caching in place at least.

I stand by my belief that unless we get some evidence that they were being scraped particularly aggressively, this is on them, and this is being blown out of proportion for publicity.