How AI bots are threatening your favorite websites

A growing number of organizations, including Wikipedia, Reddit, news publishers and cultural institutions say that artificial intelligence crawlers threaten the existence of websites you love. They say that the crawlers, acting like demanding relatives who overstayed their weekend visit, are hammering websites with extra traffic and costs they can’t bear and delivering little in return, such as habitual readers, that could generate income or other value for the websites. Now there’s a growing fight between AI crawlers and the people who hate them, who are using aggressive technology and financial demands to punch back. This battle will help decide whether there’s room for both AI and the websites that you rely on.