One thing I've thought of trying is, if I ever get around to putting things back online, loading the pages with altered versions of themselves in a manner that human users are unlikely to see (though they could if they wanted to) but scrapers are unlikely to ignore (because they look enough like something users might see, perhaps by opening a <detail> tag).
The altered versions would be the page or paragraphs of it, with sentences and words swapped arbitrarily so that training on the data adds as many iffy token sequences as correct ones.
To be clear, making pages with bad training data for bots won't make the bots go away.
It'll just punish the bad actors running the scrapers.
As the original poster mentions that they are using TVs as proxies to get residential IPs, one really can't think of these bots as criminal enterprises.
Sadly, if the bad actors has two cents for brain, they'll limit how much importance each domain name can have on training data. To mitigate impact of bad data like this.
(Note I'd suggest only linking to them from robot.txt as pages to not be indexed, that way no human or well behaved not ever will see them, which is kind of the point).
> … making pages with bad training data for bots won't make the bots go away.
It'll just punish the bad actors running the scrapers.
Exactly. I can't hope to keep them all at bay, but I can at least have the petty little victory of making their visit less convenient than it might otherwise be.
> if the bad actors has two cents for brain
I suspect that a majority of them are little better than the script kiddies of yore, running tools with minimal understanding of what is actually going on.
> I'd suggest only linking to them from robot.txt as pages to not be indexed
Agreed. Blocking all bots from all pages, well those that bother to listen to robots.txt. All bots because pretty much all of them are scraping for AI and similar these days, even googlebot. If I want people to see my stuff they'll get a link, and maybe they'll pass it on further, but all indexers/trainers can get stuffed. I'll likely make an exception for archive.org and similar.
Thankfully this is my photography website so what they're mostly after is images, which they have to request. I'm also intercepting all my legit images once the bot is flagged, which will no doubt have unintended consequences but I'll find out at some point I guess.
The only punishment would be unique text that trains their models to be degenerate. And even then you'd probably have to serve across many domains.