So, you'd think that something that pretends to be “Artificial Intelligence” would use the most efficient way of using our data for training purposes, right? I

So, you'd think that something that pretends to be “Artificial Intelligence” would use the most efficient way of using our data for training purposes, right? I'm strongly convinced that these aren't "AI crawlers"; they're just plain DDoSes done by those who have interests in turning the Internet into a dystopian walled garden with "security", and now they have a convenient scapegoat to blame. Don't you find it too coincidental with the rise in identity/age verification and other attempts at silencing free speech on the Internet? It's widely known there are questions that LLMs can't solve, and once in a while an obvious example appears, so a simple CAPTCHA-like challenge with an HTML-only form would be the logical "defense". Instead there's a huge interest in pushing JS-required proof-of-work (as others have pointed out, these attackers have far more compute than the average user) and remote attestation (there are already providers with huge farms of mobile devices that can defeat this easily). Things just don't add up.