A Meta Bot Hit an Artist’s Website 550,000 Times -- AI Brief November 4

Good day %%first_name%%. A Meta bot got stuck pressing “remove from cart” on one artist’s shop, a vibe-coded AO3 clone lasted a single day, and OpenAI and Anthropic ran election war rooms. Plus Mamdani on Sam Altman and how workers across Asia and Africa really use AI.

Meta Bot Hits Artist’s Shop 550,000 Times Business Insider

* What happened: San Diego children’s author and illustrator Chelsea Paulus told Business Insider that a Meta bot hit her website more than 550,000 times and overwhelmed her hosting. Fast Company reports the bot, Meta-ExternalAgent, got stuck in a loop on her site’s “remove from cart” function, making more than a hundred hits a minute. After she blocked it, a second Meta bot, Meta-WebIndexer, pushed her CPU to 100% and crashed the site.

* Why it matters: Paulus told Business Insider she edited her robots.txt file and put up a firewall, but “those can also take 24 hours to take effect, and I needed to stop the bots immediately.” The fix that finally worked was code from her host, pasted into a hidden file on her site. Paulus, who used to work in web design, called it “an incredibly stressful week, even with some of my technical knowledge.”

* What everyone’s saying: Meta’s answer: “website managers can decide how our crawlers interact with their sites through tools like robots.txt,” a spokesperson told Business Insider, adding that the company respects “the preferences site owners set.” Fast Company ties the episode to the scrutiny Meta faces over announced changes to its terms that, in its words, “essentially, allow AI crawlers to run wild across business accounts.” Three days ago we covered the one robots.txt line four labs will honor.

* My read between the lines: “Just use robots.txt” is true the way “just lock your door” is true: it helps, and it works after the thing has already walked in. The machine built to read the whole internet got trapped by a shopping cart button, and the cost landed on a woman with four websites on one hosting plan. On Monday we covered Amazon’s stance on Meta’s Muse. Small shops don’t have Amazon’s bouncers.

📖 Further reading: AI Agents Can’t Find Your Business. I Tested Mine. — the other side of the bot problem: why the big sites are blocking agents, and what a bot actually sees when it visits a small business’s website.

Chelsea Paulus is a working artist who got dragged into server logs and hosting tickets when she should have been drawing. The same thing happens to every small business: the unglamorous stuff piles up while you’re busy doing the work you’re actually good at. Marblism sells AI employees that work inside the tools you already use, and Eva is the executive assistant: your inbox, your calendar and your meeting notes, checking in with you when she needs an approval. No prompting skills needed. New users get 10% off for life, and there’s a 7-day money-back guarantee. Meet Eva →

Vibe-Coded AO3 Clone Dies in One Day 404 Media

* What happened: ao3.life, a vibe-coded site that scraped fanfiction from Archive of Our Own, reposted it and charged for AI-generated audiobook versions, went down Monday evening. Its creator said it received more than 2,000 takedown requests in the single day it was up, and that “a swarm of AI Agents controlling 40 virtual machines” did the scraping, 404 Media’s Samantha Cole reports.

* Why it matters: The clone appeared after AO3 itself went down Thursday following a security incident. The Organization for Transformative Works, which runs AO3, says it could be down for as long as four weeks, with no data lost. AO3 hosts nearly 18.5 million works. Authors who had “archive locked” their stories to keep out bots reported the lock didn’t stop it: “I had everything archive locked on ao3 and it’s still all here,” one wrote on Bluesky.

* What everyone’s saying: Readers and authors responded with widespread backlash on social media. The creator, who signed the apology “a 17 year old from India that thought they were doing something good,” said the site drew 126,592 unique users in 24 hours and sold “like 11 audiobooks.” Cole also notes some readers are now trading Google Drive links to works downloaded earlier, which alarms authors too.

* My read between the lines: The takedown process asked authors to prove ownership by leaving a note on their AO3 profile. AO3 was down. That is an opt-out system whose proof step ran through the site the scraper had just replaced. The 91% author payout was a promise to hold money “indefinitely” for people who never agreed to be paid by a stranger. It’s a startup pitch that skipped a step: asking.

📖 Further reading: The Font That Beat AI for About a Week — another anti-AI shield that failed in public, and what it says about the doors we leave open.

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