Yeah. There probably was a fair bit of stealth-crawling up to this point, but the perps knew they needed to keep it on the down-low.

The AI bubble, on the other hand, lacks the ability to keep it subtle, making it plainly obvious people’s shit was getting stolen and showcasing AI bros/techbros’ utter disregard for anyone but themselves (e.g. by ignoring robots.txt).

Personally, I expect this will lead to much stronger scraping protections being developed to combat shit like this - Cloudflare’s already offering to block AI scrapers for its users and Kudurru’s offering a similar service, I can easily see a new market opening up here.

(Off-the-cuff prediction: anti-AI scraping measures will likely start feeding false info to AI scrapers they detect - beyond simply throwing a wrench into those models, it’d also make it less likely AI scrapers will realise “hey, our shit’s getting blocked”)