(I do work at Mozilla but not on any of this.)
As Reddit's API used to.
Don't want to? Tough, they'll do it the hard way and put more load on your servers and your countermeasures will drive away more humans than bots.
Of course our current bot plague doesn't understand this and seems to be optimizing for maximum server load, which is still bad.
I just found something via LLMs and bought it from a website that I would have never found with traditional search engines (because I didn't).
The situation you describe is certainly legitimate and useful, but is not the norm. Separating legitimate bots from the rest is currently not possible reliably.
Why?
This, may, however be to the detrimental of discussion platforms, but if that drives people to self hosted discussion platforms instead of relying on reddit, then it is a net positive.
Discourse's most recent blog delves into this and is an interesting read, I will submit that I think.
Wait, how do you reduce server load by allowing traffic from bots?
> More and more people are using AI, (...)
That's specious reasoning. Sites provide data for their users to consume, and in some cases their business model relies on real people consuming their content.
If you replace "bots" with "scrapers", which is a specific kind of bot, what conclusions do you draw?
> I'm afraid that if you don't at least start to consider how we might accommodate the bots, (...)
Wait, you think this problem is new? What do you think companies do with crawlers and scrapers?
No, not really. Is your opinion too hard to defend?
Guess which option the bots pick.
This feedback isn't directed at any one person but that proposal impressively suffers from the simultaneous problems of Being Way Too Fucking Complicated and Proposing to Make the Web Better but Actually Making it Way Worse (for Everyone Except Entrenched Megacorps). It's the exact same problem that Google's "anonymous ad attribution" attestation swarms suffered, and luckily that never came to pass.
From looking at the pictures in that article, it seems like in order for me to be able to browse "protected" sites (aka, most of the corporate-owned web, once they are aware that this exists and turn it on because "bots bad") my browser is going to have to negotiate for some scant amount of "allowed access" tokens or other such thing, through some complicated protocol that halts any chance of us realizing a future for the web that looks any much different from "locked down approved browsers visiting approved sites in an approved way."
The further we allow the Web to stray from cURL http://example.com Just Working, the worse off we all are. So to reiterate, this proposal looks insane and not at all aligned with Mozilla's mission...
The problem is we don't hold bad actors accountable. That's how we ended up losing open SMTP decades ago.
But keep in mind that not doing anything isn't going to stop the rise of CAPTCHAs. If you've got specific alternative approaches in mind, especially ones that keep in mind the trade-offs mentioned in that blog post, then I'm sure it's possible to reach out to the author.