I've argued in the past that humans do have a right to automate[0]. And I've commented plenty of times on HN that the games industry responds to cheating in the wrong ways and that botting in games is symptomatic of design flaws more than it is a technical problem that should be handled with invasive anticheat.

But I also recognize that both of those positions are extreme minority opinions.

There are lots of things we do that could be handled differently, but unfortunately the current structures we've built in society don't handle them differently. Automation is one of those areas. We don't really have a good way of handling automated attacks without targeting automation, even though there arguably are ways we could do so. And for the average person on the street and for the average person on HN, efficiency is an extremely good argument for regulating access.

And while I lean in the opposite direction, I also understand and sympathize with the practical realities that lead people to that opinion. It's all well and good for me to tell people to get rid of captchas, but I don't have a similarly simple system to hand them today that will help prevent automated attacks.

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I'll add onto that point that when we talk about efficiency of botting, scraping, scalping, etc... nobody says, "tough luck, get with the times." The arguments against captchas and human tests and invasive software argue that we can address the problems without that invasive stuff. Nobody argues that the problems don't exist.

So that's another difference I see with concerns around AI training on copyrighted material. Nobody responds to public ladders in a video game being swarmed with bots by shrugging, they try to offer solutions. In contrast, people do respond to concerns about AI flooding public galleries and overwhelming moderators or cloning existing artists by shrugging and saying it's not a problem. That feels a little inconsistent to me.

[0]: https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com/#right-to-delegate