here's my analogy, it's like you own a museum and you require entrance by "secret" password (your user agent filtering or what not). the problem is the password is the same for everyone so would you be surprised when someone figures it out or gets it from a friend and they visit your museum? Either require a fee (processing power, captcha etc) or make a private password (auth)

It is inherently a cat and mouse game that you CHOOSE to play. Either implement throttling for clients that consume too much resources for your server / require auth / captcha / javascript / whatever whenever the client is using too much resources. if the client still chooses to go through the hoops you implemented then I don't see any issue. If u still have an issue then implement more hoops until you're satisfied.

> Either require a fee (processing power, captcha etc) or make a private password (auth)

Well, I shouldn't have to work or make things worse for everybody because the LLM bros decided to screw us.

> It is inherently a cat and mouse game that you CHOOSE to play

No, let's not reverse the roles and blame the victims here. We sysadmins and authors are willing to share our work publicly to the world but never asked for it to be abused.

That's like saying you shouldn't have to sanitize your database inputs because you never asked for people to SQL inject your database. This stance is truly mind boggling to me

Would you take the defense of attackers using SQL injections? Because it feels like people here, including you, are defending the llm scrapers against sysadmins and authors who dare share their work publicly.

Ensuring basic security and robustness of a piece of software is simply not remotely comparable to countering the abuse these llm companies carry on.

But it's not even the point. And preventing SQL injections (through healthy programming practices) doesn't make things worse for any legitimate user neither.

It’s both. You should sanitize your inputs because there are bad actors, but you also categorize attempts to sql inject as abuse and there is legal recourse.