I can't disagree with being against badly behaved scrapers. But this is neither a new problem or an interesting one from the idea of making information freely available to everyone, even rhinoceroses, assuming they are well behaved. Blocking bad actors is not the same thing as blocking AI.
Similarly it doesn't make sense to talk about what happens if AI bots were well-behaved. If they are, then maybe that would be okay, but they aren't, so we're not talking about some theoretical (or past) situation where bots were well-behaved and scraped in a non-disruptive fashion. We're talking about the present reality in which there actually are enormous numbers of badly-behaved bots.
Incidentally, I see that in a lot of your responses on this thread you keep suggesting that people's problem is "not with AI" but with something else. But look at your comment that I initially replied to:
> Blocking AI training bots is not free and open for all.
We're not talking about "AI". We're talking about AI training bots. If people want to develop AI as a theoretical construct and train it on datasets they download separately in a non-disruptive way, great. (Well, actually it's still terrible, but for other reason. :-) ) But that's not what people are responding to in this thread. They're talking about AI training bots that scrape websites in a way that is objectively more harmful than previous generations of scrapers.
Imagine if Chinese or Russian criminal gangs started sending mail bombs to the US/EU and our solution would be to require all senders, including domestic ones, to prove their identity in order to have their parcels delivered. Completely absurd, but somehow with the Internet everyone jumps to that instead of more reasonable solutions.
My Ithaca friends on Facebook complain incessantly about the very existence of AI to the extent that I would not want to say I ask Copilot how to use Windows Narrator or Junie where the CSS that makes this text bold or sometimes have Photoshop draw an extra row of bricks in a photograph for me.
The same people seem to have no problem with Facebook using their words for all things Facebook uses them for, however.
It wasn't okay, it's just that the reasons it wasn't okay didn't become apparent until later.
> The same people seem to have no problem with Facebook using their words for all things Facebook uses them for, however.
Many of those people will likely have a problem with it later, for reasons that are happening now but that they won't become fully aware of until later.
All you end up doing is participating in the enshittification of the web for the rest of us.
And you have a problem understanding that "freedom and openness" extend only to where the rights (e. g. the freedom) of another legal entity begins. When I don't want "AI" (not just the badly-behaved subset) rifling my website then I should be well within my rights to disallow just that, in the same way as it's your right to allow them access to your playground. It's not rocket science.