A current trend is sites like Reddit and Twitter introducing or massively increasing prices for the use of their APIs. API is the acronym for Application Programming Interface which is a main way in which a bot would read information from another site. For Reddit the discussion was mostly about whether it was okay for another company to make a user interface for Reddit content, making money of that, while denying advertising revenue to Reddit; but it was then revealed that the protesters' Reddit blackout had made Google searches less good. Websites generally don't mind being "read" by Google search bots, because that tends to lead to people searching information getting a link back to the original website. But AI is obviously going to fundamentally change how search engines work, and the new way isn't necessarily working with links.

So, charging a bot money for reading a lot of information from your website via API also seems a rather logical step to prevent revenue loss from somebody training an artificial intelligence to use all of the information on your platform without giving anything back to you. It might prove more effective than trying to sue the AI company after them having downloaded 12 million images "without permission or compensation". The nature of generative AI is that is uses fragments of all the sources that were used for training, which makes a small fee per source used a lot more practical than copyright law.

The result of all this might actually turn the internet into a place that is less friendly towards bots, and thus increase the percentage of users that are actually human. The alternative is an internet where search bots and AI training bots take up an ever increasing part of the traffic, until advertising companies realize that having your ad "seen" by a thousand bots isn't doing anything for your sales, and stop paying for that. Or the few remaining humans on the internet develop some NI, natural intelligence, and refuse to watch boring derivative content created by AI, artificial intelligence.