I've always called that "learning" but I guess it's called something else when a robot does it :)

Not really. At any time you can, and should, choose not to reply to traffic that is wasting your bandwidth - ban IPs, use DDOS mitigation services, etc. My position is simply that regulation doesn't belong in this space, and it's ok for the 'net to be a dog eat dog world. Kind of what keeps technology advancing and exciting.

I'd hope so, because that's what we're doing right now. Your browser is automatically speaking HTTP for you so that you don't have to.

Am I having a bit of a laugh? Maybe. But really, services should be user-agent agnostic. That's the whole "agent" part of User Agent and the founders of the Internet had incredible foresight to name it this way.

> Is it allowed to scrape data?

You mean, request data and receive what the other server voluntarily transmits?

> Are there any laws for this?

There was a court case that said the above is fine, thankfully, since that's how the internet works. There's probably other cases going on and I'm sure at least one of them will have some unfortunate tech-illiterate result that makes things worse for anyone who understands this stuff.

Now the goal is either "identify the meaningless interesting bits and swap them out with 0% loss in the direction of the original goal," or "perturb some small selection of the output towards my secondary secret goal of watermarking the text."

It would be quite impressive if they managed to identify with 100% accuracy the tokens that "don't matter" and are free to swap with whatever signalling tokens encode the AI scarlet letter, but most likely they are not 100% accurate, and that means the output is worse off than without the watermarking logic.

This is scripture homeopathy and it's irresponsible.

> Phillip Morris is fundamentally different as a product because it lacks network effects. I can start smoking, quit smoking, change brands, nothing outside of me really changes.

Missing out on the socialization of smoke breaks is a huge cultural pull. And remember all the 90's/00's campaigns highlighting the dangers of peer pressure. Not to mention the plumes of smoke being blown into the air for passerby to inhale - that is not a public nuisance?

It's going to take a lot more evidence to get me anywhere near consideration that this is a trade worth making. Again, we know that fast food can be attributed to hundreds of thousands of early deaths per anum, but we regulate that not at all. In fact it's sadly a staple of the average kids diet.

Passing laws out of fear is not how any competent legislature should operate.

We can all agree that yeah sure this social media stuff isn't great, but that's the whole point of freedom. Fast food isn't great either but lawmakers aren't pushing for a junk food attestation framework to make sure you don't consume it more than twice a week. In other words, your best interest is not interesting to them at all. They are happy that you think it is somehow self evident that we should subject ourselves to undue surveillance through!

So, wonder why they're pushing for this so hard. I'll take the brainrot if it means criticism and ideas can spread without permanently being associated with a trackable, unchanging identity.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't do it.