The thing is that rhinoceroses aren't well-behaved. Even if some small fraction of them in theory might be well-behaved, the effort of trying to account for that is too small to bother. If 99% of rhinoceroses aren't well-behaved, the simple and correct response is to ban them all, and then maybe the nice ones can ask for a special permit. You switch from allow-by-default to block-by-default.
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.
A rhino can't not be huge and destructive and humans can't not be shitty and selfish. Badly behaved scrapers are simply an inevitable fact of the universe and there's no point trying to do anything because it's an immutable law of reality and can never be changed, so don't bother to try
ISPs are supposed to disconnect abusive customers. The correct thing to do is probably contact the ISP. Don't complain about scraping, complain about the DDOS (which is the actual problem and I'm increasingly beginning to believe the intent.)
Great! How do I get, say, Google's ISP to disconnect them?
Every ISP has an abuse email contact you can look up.
Sure, let me just contact that one ISP located in Russia or India, I am sure they will care a lot about my self-hosted blog
Hence the need for Cloudflare?
I am not comfortable with a private company being the only solution, especially when they have a history of deplatforming sites.
Except that's exactly what you should do. And if they refuse to cooperate you contact the network operators between them and yourself.
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.
The internet is not a mirror of the real world.