The basic social contract of the web was to keep things accessible, including to bots. No one has the storage capacity to rip the entire web like all these jokers are pretending - even google merely indexes it except for the most popular pages.

The thing ruining the social contract of the web is the profit motive of all these companies trying to convince people that they should be able to sell data that is otherwise publically accessible, for the purposes of allowing bots to look at it - they can't memorize it.

Of course ChatGPT and the other AI companies ARE partially to blame: it seems they've poisoned the pot by giving their AIs continual access to the training sets and/or even the broader internet on the backend without making this clear to users, allowing Journalists to claim that these AIs have somehow memorized Pettabytes of data into a few Gigabytes. That is an ABSURD, basically impossible, compression ratio for anyone with even the slightest comprehension with the topic.

No, your random article you tricked ChatGPT into spitting out is not worth memorizing, not even to the lie and hallucination prone AI chatbots we have available to prod for free or otherwise. Oh, you paid for it, and your complaint is that its spitting accurate information? YOU'RE PAYING FOR THEM TO HOST THE CHATBOT FOR YOU AND PROVIDE IT ACCESS TO INFORMATION IT WOULD OTHERWISE NOT HAVE ACCESS TO ON THE BACK-END.

By all means, sue the companies into paying for their data, and force them to divulge the data-sets they keep on-hand so that they can be charged for information in them, but stop pretending the AIs themselves contain copies of it, or that its impossible to make them pay ex-post-facto (as opposed to the ENTIRETY of the rest of our legal system and enforcement) ...

AND PEOPLE, stop letting all these companies trick you into thinking that this is a valid excuse to further lock-down the web, or that you must poison your fanart with methods that WILL be bypassed. Its just another potential expense and technical burden these companies want you to believe you must bear rather than sticking to the things you enjoy and/or that put food on your table.