But if they aren't paywalls, won't the user agents just be taught how to create accounts?
And here's a secondary question: if firms are willing to pay an awful lot per token to run these things, and have massive amounts of money to run data centres to train AIs, why would they not just pay for a subscription for every site for a month just to scrape them?
The future is paying for something as a user and having limits on how many things you can get for your money, because an AI firm will abuse that too.
Given the scale of operations of these firms, there is nothing you can sell to a human for a small fee that the AI firms will not pay for and exploit to the maximum.
Even if you verify people are real, there's a good chance the AI firms will find a way to exploit that. After all, when nobody has a job, would you turn down $50K to sell your likeness to an AI firm so their products can pass human verification?
Require per visit biometric authentication via your device and the bot can’t sign in unless it compromises the device.
This does set up quite an interesting sort of tipping point I guess?
Everyone here, more or less, is against the idea of proving who we are to websites for, more or less, any reason.
But what if that ends up being the only way to keep the web balanced in favour of human readers?