

“No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense,” Cloudflare explains. “Any visitor that does is very likely to be a bot, so this gives us a brand-new tool to identify and fingerprint bad bots.”
It sounds like there may be a plan to block known bots once they have used this tool to identify them. Over time this would reduce the amount of AI slop they need to generate for the AI trap, since bots already fingerprinted would not be served it. Since AI generators are expensive to run, it would be in Cloudflare’s interests to do this. So while your concern is well placed, in this particular case there may be a surge of energy and water usage at first that tails off once more bots are fingerprinted.
I don’t deny that China has made, and continues to makd, many impressive advances that have really helped its people. I acknowledge that it achieves many things capitalist countries don’t even try to achieve. But its government is also harsh towards its critics, and that can be expected to have an effect on surveys.