[epc]

Do the AI training bots provide free access to the distillation of the content they drain from my site repeatedly? Don't they want a free and open web?

I don’t feel a particular need to subsidize multi–billion even trillion dollar corporations with my content, bandwidth, and server costs since their genius vibe coded bots apparently don’t know how to use modified-GETs or caching, let alone parse and respect robots.txt.

[wvenable]

Is the problem they exist or the problem they are badly accessing your site? Because there are two conflating issues here. If humans or robots are causing you issues, as both can do, that's bad. But that has nothing to do with AI in particular.

[epc]

Problem one is they do not honor the conventions of the web and abuse the sites. Problem two is they are taking content for free, distilling it into a product, and limiting access to that product.