This - but unironically. It has been striking how fast the public Web has descended into bot wars. I think something new will probably start to take over relatively soon.

People who used to contribute valuable content have pulled it because the bots were scraping it and reusing their work for free. Of course that was always technically possible but it used to be considered bad manners and not enough people did it to break the whole model. That's evidently no longer the case.

People who want to access real content are now interrogated with the assumption that they're probably a bot before they can even see a basic web page. Those interrogation systems are themselves are now running through a very small pool of providers with far too much influence and control to be healthy.

One of the most valuable means of communication and shared knowledge we have ever invented is being effectively destroyed before our eyes. I don't know what the solution will be - though I fear that the idea of privacy and anonymity online will suffer serious collateral damage - but I suspect that some new information network only available to people willing to identify themselves as a specific real human being in some relatively robust way will be a big part of it just as many sites are now gating their content behind user accounts.

I wonder whether the latter might be sufficient: have your terms state that user accounts are only available for real people and by using any automated system to attempt to create one the operator agrees to pay the site operator some ludicrous amount of money in recognition of the damage to their operating model that is posed by deceptively allowing automated access. And then make sure that such terms actually stand up in court - by legislating to enable them if necessary - in enough of the world to kill the AI scraper/bot model.