They're mining the written output of technical talent discussing troubleshooting, bug finding, patches, inter-dependencies, etc. It's an AI trainer's wet dream.

Also: where exactly are AI companies incentivized to be anything but shitty 'neighbors'?

Spam, DDoS attacks and other network abuse used to cause your hosting company or provider to call you and tell you to knock it off or you'll get disconnected, if your provider was reputable. If your provider wasn't reputable, it was likely a matter of time before they would get a nasty call from their upstream provider.

Now it just gets you a thank-you from the sales team for all the bandwidth you bought.

Meanwhile, do any of the cloud providers have any incentive to do anything about this? Hell no. They're making money off you having to ramp up extra or bigger instances. They're making money off the bandwidth. They're making money off the people doing the crawling, too. They're incentivized to do the exact opposite of effectively help you with your AI bot problem.